Kennesaw Review--To the Tune of "Dreaming of the South Side of the River" translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping

Wen Tingyun

To the Tune of “Dreaming of the South Side of the River”

After combing and washing,
she leans alone on the River Gazing Tower.
A thousand boats sail by, but none are his.
Slant sunlight like lingering passion on the unhurried water.
An islet of white duckweed. She’s broken inside.

Note: In line 5, “islet of white duckweed” is a traditional Chinese coded phrase for the place of departure and separation.

Tony Barnstone is Associate Professor of creative writing at Whittier College. His first book of poetry, Impure, a finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize, the National Poetry Series Prize, and the White Pine Prize, appeared with the UP of Florida in June 1999. His chapbook of poems, Naked Magic, appeared in 2002 with Main Street Rag Press. Other books include Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1993), Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Selected Poems of Wang Wei (Hanover: UP of New England, 1991), The Art of Writing: Teachings of Chinese Masters (Boston: Shambhala, 1996), and a number of textbooks, most recently The Literatures of Asia and The Literatures of the Middle East (Prentice Hall). His poetry, translations, essays on poetics, and fiction have appeared in dozens of American literary journals, from APR to Agni. He has won an Artists Fellowship from the California Arts Council, as well as many national poetry awards. His forthcoming books are The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2003) and a number of textbooks for Prentice Hall, including The Pleasures of Poetry: An Introduction (2005), World Literature (two volumes, 2003), and Modern Poetry: An Anthology with Contexts (2004).

Chou Ping.

Wen Tingyun (812-870)

Wen Tingyun was a native of Taiyuan, in Shanxi province. He was a friend of the important late Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, and the two of them were innovators and the first important writers of poetry in the ci form, in which poetry is written to the meter of a popular song. Ci poetry has a variable number of words per lines and so is called long and short" poetry. it is rhymed, has a strict pattern of verse and tones, and thus requires a quick imagination and masterful skill in the writer for it to be used effectively. Like the sonnet in the European tradition, the poems were exhilaratingly complex and difficult, and originally set to music. Although ci poems were originally written to music that came from Western China, or from beyond, the scores have now been lost.

In contrast to the pure and deceptively simple poetry of the high Tang, Wen Tingyun's poetry is ornate, allusive, and typically concerned with love, loss, and sensuality. He is know for his "frivolous" nature, for consorting with courtesans, and his work is often set in the boudoir of a lady, in the entertainment world, or in the glamor of court. His work, like that of other important early ci poets, anticipated the overwhelming importance of this form in the Song dynasty.

Last Updated:
Thursday, April 1, 2004 11:07 PM
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kr@kennesaw.edu