In Our Time - Tang Era Poetry

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss two of China’s greatest poets, Li Bai and Du Fu, who wrote in the 8th century in the Tang Era. Li Bai (701-762AD) is known for personal poems, many of them about drinking wine, and for finding the enjoyment in life. Du Fu (712-770AD), a few years younger, is more of an everyman, writing in the upheaval of the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763AD). Together they have been a central part of Chinese culture for over a millennium, reflecting the balance between the individual and the public life, and one sign of their enduring appeal is that there is rarely agreement on which of them is the greater.The image above is intended to depict Du Fu.With Tim Barrett Professor Emeritus of East Asian History at SOAS, University of LondonTian Yuan Tan Shaw Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at University CollegeAndFrances Wood Former Curator of the Chinese Collections at the British LibraryProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, two of China's greatest poets date from the 8th century in the Tang era, and their Li Bai and Du Fu. Li Bai is known for personal poems,

many of them are drinking wine and finding the enjoyment in life. Dufu, a few years younger, is more of an every man, writing in the upheaval of the Anlushan rebellion. They have formed two intertwining strands of Chinese culture for over a millennium, the public life and the individual. And a sign of their enduring appeal is that there's no agreement on which of them is the greater. Women to discuss Levi, Dufu, and Tang-era poetry are

Tim Barrett, Professor Emeritus of East Asian History at Soas, University of London, Chan Huan Tan, Shaw Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford and professorial fellow at University of College and Francis Wood, former curator of the Chinese collection at the British Library. Francis, Francis Wood, what do we need to know about the Tang era? The Tang is viewed, I think, by many Chinese still as being one of the great eras of the past,

but it's very different really from the picture that we have of kind of traditional China. I think much of what we think about China is really formed by the Ming and Qing. The tongue was really quite a kind of different time. It was a time when the capital city, Chang'an, today's Xi'an, was probably the greatest city in the world, had a population of nearly a million. And one of the things that people always stress about the tongue is that it was a very kind of cosmopolitan and outward-looking era. Chang'an was kind of formed at the end of the Silk Road. So Silk Road trade was fantastically important. Luxuries were imported along the Silk Road, Exotica was imported along the Silk Road.

What data are we handling here? 600 to 900 AD, 618 to 907 AD. So it's a period when China's united, when the country has been brought together, and it is enjoying really the fruits of fantastic international trade along the Silk Roads. Central Asia was very important. Relationships with the different peoples of Central Asia was important. And one of the great things about Chang'an was its kind of cultural diversity. We tend to think of China as China and really rather isolated from the outside world.

But during the Tang, there was an incredibly cosmopolitan population. I mean, if you take the city, we know that there were many, many Sogdian traders who'd come all the way from Samakand. And there were six temples devoted to Zoroastrianism for them. There was a Christian church. There were probably 300 or more Buddhist temples in the city and probably an equivalent number of Taoist temples. So it's a city that reflects an extraordinary.

diversity of belief amongst the population. And there was a tremendous fashion for all things Central Asian in the early tongue. And the tongue itself, I suppose, it flourishes really until the middle of the 8th century, until 755, when there's a rebellion launched by a man who was from Sogdian and Turkic descent, An Lushan, who led a rebellion from the north down capturing the capital city. and that really broke the tongue, as it were. It recovered, but it staggered on. It was never the same.

The glory of the tongue is very much the first half of the 8th century. Can we just talk a bit more about the glory before we started about the breakup? Yes, I think China was really glorious at the time. The reach of China's sort of governance, as it were, stretched right out along the Silk Road. China in the, I suppose, the first half of the tongue is very much directed towards Central Asia. and you get the fashions for all things Central Asia. I mean, there were dances all came from Central Asia, and all the dancers were described as whirling and swirling and twirling.

And there are descriptions in many of the tongue poets of male dancers, in particular, dancing with great green pantaloons and red deerskin boots, dancing and twirling. Fashions for women changed as Central Asian fashions came into China, replacing a very different look. It's a time when ideas obviously also were fairly freely allowed with all these different places of worship. And it seemed to be so grand

it was almost self-sufficient in its fantastic Lajurians. It was fairly self-sufficient. I mean, it wasn't dependent on foodstuffs from outside. It was really luxury goods that were mainly transported brought in. Because it was a time of great riches, people could afford luxury goods from, you know, jewels that came from a thought, far away as Burma and Sri Lanka, Jade still being imported from Kotan. It was a time of considerable luxury, if you were lucky enough to be rich enough to enjoy it.

And it was a time, too, when East Asia was very much looking to China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam all looked towards China as the kind of real cultural center of the universe. And many aspects, for example, of Japanese society today, and to some extent Korea and Vietnam, all derive from what. they learned from China at the time. It was the leading cultural universe, really, of the period. You mentioned Andy and Lushan rebellion. So how did that change China for the purposes of this program? It broke the reigning dynasty. The emperor was forced to flee the capital. The emperor's son eventually took over, but the Tang never really recovered the same position of glory,

if you like, as they had before. I mean, there was a massive movement of, of people from the north of China towards the south. So the whole economic centre of China shifted away from the traditional northern area. And the Tang just gradually lost control. I mean, emperors, they prescribed Buddhism, they prescribed all sorts of things, they tried all sorts of things. But eventually China fell into a state of really collapse and was then invaded by northern tribes and the Tang dynasty was no more.

Thank you very much. Chan Juan, we have Li Bai the older and Dufu the younger. What do we know of Li Bai's life, first of all? There are some uncertainties about Dubai's birthplace and his early life, but we do know that by the age of five, he grew up in Shu. That's modern Sichuan province in southwest China. His father was a merchant, which may explain his somewhat unconventional career compared to some of his other town poets who came from families of.

of aristocratic clans such as Wang Wei, or for example, those that were descendants of scholarly families like Dufu, for instance. So he came from a merchant family and took an alternative path. We do know that he did not take the standard path of sitting for examination. Instead, he traveled widely, starting from his mid-20s, in various parts of China, seeking personal patronage and also social, in order to gain public recognition. So eventually it was his poetic talents that gained him a position in the town court.

It lasted no more than three years. Apparently either his temperament was not suited for the court or he lost favour and he was sent away from the court and thereafter he resumed his wanderings in various parts of China. Can you give us a taste of one of his most celebrated poems to bring the wine? Certainly. I think there will be a good example to showcase the personal style

of Dubai, very carefully, flamboyant, and spontaneous. So if you look at the poem, Chang Jingjou, bringing the wine, just from the title itself, we know that this is a reworking

of an old Fuxong title from the Han Dynasty, a kind of Carpe Diem poem, which starts with this line, Jun Bucin, Huang He Shui, have you not seen how the waters of the yellow river they just came down from heaven

once they flow into the sea they no longer return just like our youthful days they are just like surging waters that will never return once again this is again followed by another powerful line Jun Bukhian, Gao Tang, Ming Jin, Bebigh Faye, Zhao Chichu. So this is rather hyperbolic analogy of our whitened hair. At dawn, they might be just like black silk, but at dusk they turn into snow. And this kind of hyperbolic use of language is rather representative of Li Bai, and we see that

in some of his poems as well. For instance, that's his famous line describing his long sorrows, that's as long as 3,000 yards of white hair, by far, San Ching Zhang. I think those are lines, I think Dubai are most favorite. of the Remend but bye. Thank you. Tim Barrett, what do we know

of the life of Dufu? About Dufu, we don't know too much about his childhood. He was born in 712. He's a slightly younger than Li Bai. But he came from a much more established background.

His grandfather had been a poet and scholar towards the end of the 7th century whose name is well known. He wasn't a major personality, but recognized and his father, not so much, but Dufu clearly was a clever child. And in his early 20s, they put him in for the civil service examinations.

Now, in those days, the civil service examinations had a slightly different function from the later Chinese civil service where they were very widely used to recruit people. In the Tang period, which was basically a rather aristocratic society, the point of the exams was to identify the high flyers to make sure that even if most of the country was run by vacuous aristocrats, at least some intelligent aristocrats could be put into the key positions, and Dufu failed. I mean, people have asked themselves about this.

This is China's greatest poet, and poetry is part of the examination test, and yet he fails. And I think what it is is that he wasn't flashy enough. In an exam like that, you've got one chance to impress the examiner. But Dufu really comes across best when you've got one and a half thousand of his poems in front of you. And you can see the big picture of what he's about. Eventually he gets a very minor position in government. And then, of course, the rebellion breaks out.

And everything goes to pieces. He's captured by the rebels at one point. eventually he gets a chance to meet up with his family again. He finds them in a village, which is safe, but it's a village that consists only of women, children and old men. He establishes himself again in various minor positions, but he just gets fed up with the paperwork. And in the end, he finds a patron,

he's got enough money to have a little cottage. We get a lot of poetry about domestic life, you know, how he mends this. Dufu is the sort of poet who, if he was around today, would tell you about how he spent the morning constructing a table out of a flat pack. Can you give us a taste of one of his poems? One of his favorites is Spring View.

Okay. This is interesting because it comes from a period when the rebellion had broken out, but it was a kind of phony war. He begins the poem, States Fall, while Hill and Stream abide. Towns bloom and plants and trees all thrive. The season's surge moistens the flowers with tears, as sad to leave the bird's unsettled hearts.

No respite from three months of signal fires, as news from home comes at a soaring price. Tugging at my greying, lessening locks, no way enough to fix my headpiece on. So it starts with the cosmic and gradually comes down to, worrying about hair loss in any stressful situation. And that's kind of typical of Dufu, is that he is the poet, both of national worries and personal worries at the same time. Thank you very much. Francis, can you give us a sense of why they were writing at all and how their work is being

shared in this very turbulent time when they're moving across China, backwards and forwards, no fixed-a-boat and so and so forth? They're very much communicating with each other. I mean, it's between poet to poet. And I think you can think of quite a lot of the poems as almost sort of they're valedictory, they're written on occasions, seeing off so-and-so on his trip to hear,

welcoming so-and-so on his trip back. You have to think of, I mean, even before, and Lushan, when people were appointed to posts in the government, they're probably often sent far away, and there's an awful lot of travel going off to your position in distant Sichuan or Shandong or whatever it was. I mean, the poets are kind of linked by a culture of poetry writing.

They write to each other. I mean, Dufu writes poems about Li Bai, and there's quite a funny little one written by Li Bai to Dufu. They acknowledge each other's movements in poetry. But of course, all this is very much the age of manuscript. I mean, printing is just beginning in China, this period. I mean, there must be an amazingly variable postal

system. One of the complaints you get frequently in both poets is the difficulty of hearing from home and the reference to geese, a goose in Chinese often means a reference to letters from home. So if you see a goose in a poem, you think ah, he's missing a letter from his brother

or he's thinking of home. There are poems written by poets for other poets. We hear of Li By's following an ancient style and Dufu a new style. What does that mean? By the time of the town dynasty, we are talking about broadly speaking two different categories of poetry. On the one hand, the term ancient style poetry refers to all the earlier forms of unregulated poetry that already existed before the tongue. And that means there were no uniform lines per poem and also no fixed number of characters or words per line as well. So for instance, the example that we discussed earlier,

Liby's Spring the Wine would be a good example of an ancient style poem. On the other hand, there's the recent style or so-called new style poetry in the Tang Dynasty that refers to a heavily regulated form of poetry that became fully established during the Tang Dynasty, one that observes very strict conventions and rules in terms of structural, tonal and also syntes, patterns as well. If you think about recent style poetry, it can be subdivided into two different forms. The

Quotrain's Jueue, that contains four lines, and Lviches, regulate the verse of eight lines, and both can be written in both Penta-Syllabic and Heptosyllabic forms. So I understand it, the poetry you'll be talking about, and the poetry

we're going to talk about, is still very much in the curriculum, on the lips of, taught in the school, today? Yes, certainly. I think many of pieces by Libyan Dufu, they will be the standard works that are enthologised in scholarly editions, but also in textbooks for students from primary school to high school to universities and they are still very popular. Tim Barrett, Leibis associated with Taoism. Let's talk about what that means in a moment, but what effect are these poets having in this time of turbulence in this vast empire so much?

else going on. They've, as it were, nested and percolated through for 1,200 years, amazingly. But what at the time were they having an effect for people, following them, changing their minds because of what they said, that sort of thing. That's an interesting question, because as well as the kind of social poetry that Francis was explaining just now, it does also have an impact in that it gets picked up by the entertainment industry in some cases. So a good poet will find that people are setting his words to music. And so a certain amount of poetry is being circulated by such media as there were in those days. Libyan and Dufu actually seem to have had much less impact on their contemporaries. And they did on later ages.

There are some anthologies that come from the middle of the 8th century, and they don't have Levi and Orfu in them. It has been suggested that, again, the reason for this might be connected with the exams, that these anthologies were aimed at examination candidates to memorize, and so they tended to pick up the flashier poetry of the time and teach you how to impress your examiner. Can't come and go back to Taoism, Levi and Daoism.

Yeah, if I can, I'll give you, one of the four-line poems that Tian Yuan gave us the shortest type, which has always been thought of as having hints of Taoism in it. And it starts off with, you ask what keeps me in these azure hills, which, you know, you'd think the answer is, well, you know, I like wandering lonely as a cloud and, you know, walking in the hills is very good for your health. But in fact, the next line is, I smile but don't reply. I'm feeling good.

In other words, there's something mysterious going on. The third line gives a strong hint. Peach blossoms swirling downstream and away. Now, this is a reference to a legend that you can find at the beginning of the 5th century about a fisherman who sees a lot of peach blossoms on the stream and follows them upstream till he gets to forests of peach blossom and eventually the stream is emerging from a kind of tunnel, and he goes up the tunnel, and he finds himself in a completely different environment.

The nearest to English language analogy would be somewhere like the Dune Valley that's kind of separate from anywhere else. It turns out to be that there's an alternative society up there. They're refugees. They've been up there since the collapse of the First Emperor's Empire, and they're living an idyllic life that nobody knows about because nobody's managed to get up the stream. So, of course, the fisherman enjoys his time there,

goes back down, tells everybody about it, but nobody could ever find it again. But the fourth line complicates matters. After saying peach blossoms swirling downstream and away, it ends up an earth and sky unknown to mortal man. There was another Taoist story where the man goes follows the stream upwards. And it's much more radical because Daoists imagined mountains as possibly being like Dr. Hu's Tardis or something. They're much bigger on the inside than they appear on the

outside. So if you go up the stream and if you go down up the passage and you're in another world, it literally is another world. There's another heaven and earth and it's inhabited by Taoist immortals. this is a very important idea for Li Bai because he was rumoured to be a banished immortal. In Taoist belief, if you're in these sort of paradises somewhere, you could be kicked out for misbehaviour. You could be sent down to earth. And this idea was established, well established before the tongue,

a very useful idea for some outsiders who wanted to hint mysteriously that maybe they're, their true home was somewhere else. And this is exactly what Li Bai is doing. He's saying, I may be much more important than you think I am. Francis Wood, how do these very controlled poems relate to the Chinese paintings of that era, especially in the mountain paintings?

You're quite right, I think, to pick up on mountains. Because it's during the Tang that we begin to see the development of Chinese landscape painting, which was to flourish through succeeding. centuries. If you think of the typical Chinese painting, a great sort of brush stroke, a kind of monochrome brush painting, usually dominated by a towering mountain, which, as Tim Serb, you know, conceals all sorts of wonders around it with maybe a cascading waterfall and little paths leading up. I mean, the poems of Libyan Dufu are exactly, as it were, the sound equivalent of a painting. There's always the towering mountain, the crags, the clas, the clas, the clas. and then as far as you've got bamboo and forests, old pine trees. And there's almost invariably, in every painting, if you look carefully, there's a winding path which leads up to a little shack where an immortal is sitting waiting or a friend of yours, someone who's retired into the countryside,

a scholastic recluse who's there with wine waiting for you. And at the very bottom of the painting in the bottom register, in the bottom register, there's a little figure who's making his way. up the stony path to the mountains. So I think it's very true to say that the sound equivalent, the verse equivalent of Chinese painting at the time was poetry.

It's interesting, isn't it, that this idea of a retreat continues. We have it in different cultures before this, but in this particular one, it's physical. You leave, you go up on a mountain, you find a hut, and so on. Yes, I think it's terribly characteristic.

I mean, what everyone says about China, people used to say that you were Confucian in office, which meant that you served the bureaucracy, Taoist in retirement and Buddhist as death approached. So you made use of all these belief systems. Taoist in retirement, as does create the image of retiring ideally into the countryside, to attune yourself with nature, to become at one with nature, to watch birds and plants and study the lee of the bamboo and so on. It's an ideal which comes through in poetry and in painting.

Chan Juan, Du Fu wrote poems about, I think, about dreaming of Li Bai. So can you tell us about these and what they reveal and what it says about the relationship between the two men? Right. I think as Tim and Francis mentioned earlier, they are good friends. So in Li Bai and Du Fu, we not only have the two greatest poets of China, but we also have one of the most celebrated literary friendships in the town dynasty. Both wrote poems to each other, and among those perhaps the most famous ones,

were a pair of poems that Dufu wrote about dreaming of Dubai. And this was written in the year, I think, 7.59 after the outbreak of the Annofjan rebellion that Francis introduced earlier. At this point, Dubai was arrested because of treason in the south and was exiled in the south, whereas Dufu was in the north and not knowing the whereabouts of his old friend. And so this is a poem that we can read on different levels. On one level, this is a very intimate poem about their friendship. The title says dreaming of Dubai.

But the poem itself doesn't directly say that Dufu dreams of Dubai. Instead, he says that his old friend enters his dream. This old friend that is Dubai enters the dream of Dufu, knowing how much Dufu misses him. So I think that's a very clever way of saying that the sort of intimate. friendship between them. On another level, we could also read this poem as a kind of psychological poem because it has lots of twists and turns. It's a rather fine capture of the mix between dreamscape and reality. We say constantly Dufu was doubtful of the person he saw in the dreams. Was this Liby that he knew in person or was it the by that has suffered or

might have been dead at this point and was travelling afar to meet him in his dreams. And so there was this constant see-sawing of emotions of joy and despair. So I think that was perhaps the other reason why this friendship poem became famous. Tim Barrett, what can we glean of society from the poems of the Tang era? Francis has already touched on a very important aspect, which is that people are always writing poems to each other. So if you're more interested in history than literature, even if you don't understand all the illusions in the poem, you know who's writing to who. So you can do things like trace friendship circles, you find out who is seeking whose patronage and where they are, etc.

It's a very good source of historical information, but it's also a source of social comment. Right the way back, even before Confucius, it was felt that Phocon could be a way of, the feelings of the masses. You know, it's like a focus group or something. You know, the problems that people are suffering, even if they're very far from influential circles, could be gathered by collecting poetry. And this tradition means that poets are very happy

to tell you if the people are suffering. Even Li Bai, who's not got an overdeveloped social conscience, will still write about the problems of conscripts facing enduring hardship and not getting to go home, because people have been writing about that for hundreds of years. Another theme is the abandoned wife. You know, the husband has gone off on a business trip, and that's another one that Leibai handles quite well. He possibly abandoned quite a few women in his time himself.

But he can write in the persona of an abandoned wife. But when you get to Dufu, the social commentary is becoming quite explicit. There is quite trenchant commentary on the sorrows of the conscript and how awful it is to be sent off into the middle of Central Asia or to the fever swamps of the southwest on the emperor's business and how many are going to return and so on and so forth. Well, Francis will come on to a poem that talks about this, I hope, in a minute. Can we turn to Francis then and ask her about the new Fu poem, 500 words about my journey?

It's quite funny to talk about 500 words, because the first time I encountered this poem in any sort of detail was at Peking University during the Cultural Revolution, when we had some lessons in Chinese poetics from a very sweet teacher there. But we discovered that one of the problems during the country, Cultural Revolution, 1966 to 76, a time when China was culturally in utter turmoil, rejecting everything that had gone in the past, getting rid of the four old habits, old customs, old ideas, etc. There were some people who still clung, I mean, even Mao Zedong, I think, still clung a little bit to Chinese literature of the past. But the trouble they found was that it was very difficult to kind of find bits of literature of the past that illustrated good

proletarian ideals. And there, the trouble they found was that it was very difficult to kind of find bits of literature of the past that illustrated, and there's out of the 500 lines of Dufu's poems, we were allowed to study precisely two. We were given two lines which are very important, which go, Choumen, Joroch, Lu, Yo, Dongsugu. This is behind the, inside the vermillion gates, wine and meat are left to rot.

On the road are the bones of those who have frozen to death. And this shows that Dufu at one moment in his life, was conscious of the horrible difference between the rich and the poor, the rich inside, feasting and letting the wine go sour, and outside the poor dying of starvation and cold. I mean, we also learned things like that we studied the Dream of the Red Chamber, a massive 18th century novel, which is of great significance in China still, but there was only one chapter out of about 80,

which was considered politically correct, chapter 4, which tells you about how rich the families were and how they delighted in their wealth. So, I mean, the interesting thing is Du Fu actually survived the cultural revolution as being a good poet, but on the strength, really, I'm prayed only of two out of 500 lines. John Fuentan, what happened to the poems once they're translated?

I think there are several challenges in translating Chinese poems. If we take the example of Dubai and Tu Fu, they present, again, quite different changes as well. In Dubai, how do we capture that sort of very idiosyncratic, very individual, spontaneous voice of Dubai? He was also known to really prize on producing lines that are natural without embarrassment.

And so it might appear deceptively simple. And in the wrong hands of a translator, such lines might become flat as a result. We also know that, for instance, even contemporaries of Li Bai would describe his language, his poetic language, as strange and shocking to his friends and

contemporaries. And if we think about such an example and the difficult road to Shul would be a good example if we want to look at this kind of shocking language that Levi would introduce in his poems, especially

the beginning lines. I think the first three words of that poem in in fact started with exclamations and these are exclamations that are written in Sichuan dialect as well. So for any listeners who are interested in translation,

I would recommend looking at the various English translations of this particular poem and to compare how different translators might try to translate this into English. On the other hand, in Dufu, we have a rather different case because Tufu was known to be an

erudite poet and his poems especially in its later days, I think Tim mentioned that earlier were particularly complex and dance. Already in the Song Dynasty, we see multiple editions of annotated, editions of Tufu, meaning that you need notes and annotations to understand Tufu's lines.

There was also this famous quote from 11th century critic saying that every character, every word from Tufu's poem, came from a certain source. So there is a source that's an illusion behind every single source. line. And so it means that in order to understand two-full,

you need an apparatus to understand his lines fully. And for a translator, that's very difficult. How do you provide copious footnotes which might be distracting for a general reader, or how do you try to build that into a translation? I think those are some of the

difficulties and challenges one could think of. Tim Barrett, when did these poets start to gain such a strong reputation and why? Yeah, that's interesting. Tianyon has in a sense already given you the one-word answer is the song period but actually I've already said that

in their own lifetimes they tend to be overlooked not get in the anthologies etc but in the early 9th century people I think looked at them and realised that they were they had a stature that was above that of their contemporaries you know that

Libai is larger than life and Dufu life is larger than Dufu but most of it is in his poetry So that too becomes something exceptional. And so you find poets beginning to talk of the two of them together. You know, people have a copy of the poems of Li and Du. And they are not imitating them closely, but they're trying to do the same thing.

They're trying to establish themselves as different, which means there are some poets in the early 9th century who go beyond what Tianyuan was saying about Li Bai's being a bit shocking to be downright weird. And there's one poet who, for example, if you look at word frequency counts, mostly you will find that Mountain, as we've implied, is one of the most popular nouns in a tongue poem,

comes right up in the top ten. But then there's one of the poets of the period, up there in the top ten, is the word war, I, myself. And that is extraordinary, because generally speaking, Chinese poets, the poet himself or herself, is rather in the background. But you get this poetry of assertion in the early 9th century, which is in a sense building on the success of Li Bai and Dufu. But in the long run, it's really only in the 11th century when there's a kind

of cultural renaissance that Dufu in particular is seen as having this deep, long-term historical resonance that really embodies some of the best of Chinese culture. And in particular, recalling the fact that most of Dufu's poetry was written in a time of political collapse, the implication is that Chinese culture is often a lot better than Chinese politics, if I can put it that way. Chang Kuan, which poems by Li Bai and Dufu have most resonant in China now? In many ways, I think Libyan and Dufu provide not only different poetic models, but in a broader sense, different ways of living life. I think Dubai seems to constantly seek a kind of transcendence in life.

And personally, I find a more personal, a more private poet in some ways. And so reading for leisure, one might find Leiby more satisfying and liberating in a sense. Whereas Dufu, on the other hand, and would invite one to consider one's place in the society almost. In terms of popularity, I mean, there are many of their poems that continue to resonate with the modern days. I will also say, just to go back to Francis was saying, it's different times, but we might still think of poems as fragments. So there are poems that perhaps continue to be popular today, not as in its entirety, but in fragments,

meaning there are carpent. There are certain carpenters from Dubai or Du Fu that continue to be so popular that sometimes people weren't aware that it came from a certain poem. I think we do get quite a number of examples like that. One of my favorites of Dubai's lines, and this is also one that is very popular to the present day,

is taken from occasional poem that he wrote to his friend. It goes like this. Chou-d-d-dun-shue-geng-lil, So the first line means something like drawing salt, cutting into water, water again flow. And so this is a sense about how sorrows can be stopped. So the next line really explained, jubei, shall chow, chow, chow, right?

To raise the cup, to draw your sorrows, the sorrow is still there. And in fact, I think Asropang tried to do this in a literal manner, which I think really work, His rendition is like this. Drawing sword, cut into water, water again flow. Rae's cup quench sorrow. Sorrow again sorry.

As for one poem that's really popular, maybe the quiet night thoughts and by Dubai, this is a very short poem, a quatrain of four lines of five characters per line, just a poem of just 20 characters. Yes, and I mean, If one was to say in translation, I mean, it's in front of my bed, the bright moon shines. So he's got moonlight beside his bed.

So it's nighttime. There's the moon. And then he says, I think it is, it looks to me as if it's hoar frost on the floor. So it looks as if the frost has come into the cold room at night. Then he says, the last two lines, I raise my head and look at the bright moon. I lower my head and I think of my home. my, ain't my old home. And to me that poem actually,

it's wonderful because it encapsulates kind of practically all you need to know about Tang poetry, the moon, the coldness, and the longing for home. And those are, longing for home is kind of perhaps the most frequent sort of underlying theme. A thing that's also important about it to me is that it actually still preserves an awful lot of the rhyme.

I think three out of the four lines all rhyme. You've got shuan, Xiang, Xiang, and so on, which if we're talking about translation, I mean, even today, when Chinese people repeat the poems, especially if they're doing them in Putung Huai, the language of the north, the rhymes have all

gone. The rhythm remains, and of course if we're translating into English, we lose the rhythm as well, but that little poem does retain the rhythm, the rhyme and the essential content. I think in many ways this is popular because of the universal theme.

right? The homesickness seems to be such a popular subject, not only the town dynasty, but also being so significant and relevant to the modern day as well. It's also interesting that we spoke so much about this sort of strange and shocking language of Dubai, but this poem was very simple. Very plain. Very plain, very simple. And this is one that our first-year classical Chinese students in the UK could read in their first-year classical, really. And yet, if you simply translate it, it's going to look too plain. It doesn't have the impact in English that it would have in Chinese. Right.

Finally then, and briefly, if we could Tim, to finish the programme, what impact have the poems had outside China? Do they have a wider legacy? Well, they certainly had a legacy in East Asia, where classical Chinese, the language in which they were written, was the language of culture outside China in the Korean Peninsula, in Vietnam when that became independent.

And in Japan, in Japan, you find already in 819, a Buddhist monk who'd visited China comes back and writes a kind of teach yourself how to do Chinese literature book, which explains exactly how you can write a Chinese poem and what faults to avoid, how you can get parallelism wrong. And he says in his preface something to the effect that, Look, you're not going to get enlightened from reading this book, but if you don't get this right, people will laugh at you, you know.

So the idea of writing Chinese poetry in Japan is established already in the early 9th century. Li and Du are not the most popular at this point. It's probably simpler poets who are the big hits in Japan for a couple of centuries at least. But eventually, Dufu comes in, say, in the 13th century, especially with Zen masters who have seen. studied in China themselves. They've gone to learn about Zen, but they've picked up a lot of secular culture too. And the Chinese poets remain a big influence, even on haiku poetry, which is entirely different

in terms of the poetics of it. There's no rhyme schemes and so on and so forth. It's keyed to the Japanese language, and yet the imagery, some of the illusions, quite often you can trace them to Chinese literature, and often, to someone like Dufu. Even in the 19th century when Japanese poets or literary men are beginning to write novels

in the Western fashion, in their leisure hours, they are also writing Chinese poetry. So that's how persistent it is. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Tim Barrett and Francis Wood and Chan Yongtan and our studio engineer Emma Haath.

Next week, it's a Czech philosopher celebrated as the father of modern education. That's Jan Kamenski, better known as Komenius. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. There was something that Tim mentioned about the Dubai being referred to as the banished immortal. I think that was really a very loaded word that we could perhaps say more about that because I was thinking on the one hand, of course, of course it refers to the philosophical sense of references to Taoism, immortality,

but also I think that's that sense that the transcendent quality in Dubai's poetry because I was thinking about one of this contemporary admirer of Dubai in the court, and he refers to Dubai also as the banished immortal. I think that's this sense that Dubai is out of this world, right? And you can't, it's almost unattainable, that quality. But wasn't that man himself interested in that? Taoism, I don't recall. But yes, a lot of Taoism was in the air in the mid-eighth century at the court, of course.

But yes, it does make Li Bai something special. But that is part of his self-creation, is it not? Exactly. I was also thinking about this early biographies of Levi saying that, I think in his teenage years he was already reading apart from the classics, but also Taoist text. I wonder how much of that, to a certain degree, there must be construction by later biographers as well.

I would quite like to have talked a bit more about the difficulty of translation, but I think it might be a bit unfair, actually, on listeners, because, I mean, in a sense, I feel that Chinese poetry is practically untranslatable. Things were mentioned about the fact that, you know, you've got to have so much in the way of glossary. You can't just say, I heard a cuckoo. You have to know that what the cuckoo says is, nothing is as good as going home, brother.

Buru Guaychukha and geese and so on, anything that's mentioned has always got to be glossed, plus, you know, the loss of rhyme and plus when we translate into English the loss of rhythm. So I would say it's almost impossible to translate, but as I say, if we mention it,

it's going to put people off even further. I'm sorry we didn't get into the history of translation because the Victorians really couldn't handle Chinese poetry. I mean, Herbert Giles, his best, but even at his best, because it's, you know, if you think about the Victorians, what they went for is, you know, half a league, half a league,

half a lead onwards and all that kind of thumping stuff. So, even at his best, Herbert Jowell sounds a bit like A.A. Milne. But Ezra Pound comes in and with a background very much with approaching Chinese verse

through Japanese and being aware of the kind of literary value of the haiku and things like that, He makes much more of a success of getting the spirit of it and the image, which of course was... And the rhythm. He's brilliant on rhythm. Yeah, yeah. And Arthur Whaley then tries to steer it into an academically more respectable form of translation.

And that paves the way for the 1950s and 60s translators like David Hawks, A.C. Graham and so on and so forth. But this is sad to say, but true, that... But in Britain, we don't have any translators like that anymore. They're all in America. And that's regrettable. 300 people a year graduate in Chinese studies. How many of them could translate a tongue poem? Obviously your students, Tian Yuan, you know.

But what does that add up to nationally? Maybe about 30 out of the 300? I don't know. Well, on that cheering note, I think we'll move on. So thank you all very much indeed. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello fellow fans of In Our Time. I'm Dr Michael Mosley and in my podcast just one thing,

I'm investigating some quick, simple and surprising ways to improve your health and life. From eating some dark chocolate. That was really good. To improve your heart. To playing video games to enhance your brain power. Oh, dear. A big slaughter, aren't I?

Or singing your favourite song. to bolster your immune system. So to benefit your brain and body in ways you might not expect, here's just one thing you can do right now. Subscribe to the podcast on BBC Sounds.