The Lunar New Year’s Day
In crackers’ cracking noise the old year passed away;
The vernal breeze brings us warm wine and warm spring day.
On thousand doors the sun sheds brilliant light, behold!
New couplets hang on the doors to replace the old.
-Wang Anshi
The Pavilion Of Swallows
I
Upstairs the dying lamp flickers with morning frost;
The lonely widow rises from her nuptial bed.
Sleepless the whole night long, in mournful thoughts she’s lost;
The night seems endless as the boundless sky o’erhead.
II
The pines before his grave are shrouded in sad smoke;
In the Swallows’ Pavilion pensive she appears.
Her songs are hushed for buried are his sword and cloak;
Her dancing dress has lost its perfume for ten years.
III
She’s seen wild gees from her lord’s grave on backward way,
And now she sees the swallows come with spring again.
On flute and zither she is in no mood to play;
Buried in spider’s webs and dusty they remain.
-Zhang Zhongsu
Reply of A Chaste Wife
You know I love my husband best,
Yet two bright pearls are sent me still.
I hang them in my red silk vest,
So grateful I’m for your good will.
You see my house o’erlooks the garden and
My husband guards the palace, halberd in hand.
I know your heart as noble as the sun in the skies,
But I have sworn to serve my husband all my life.
With your twin pearls I send back two tears from my eyes.
Would we had met before I was a wife!
-Zhang Ji
Spring View
We don’t enjoy together blooming flowers,
Nor at their fall together shed our tears.
O why am I lovesick from hour to hour
To see flowers appear or disappear!
-Xue Tao
Success At The Civil Service Exam
Gone are all my past woes! What more have I to say?
My body and my mind enjoy their fill today.
Successful, faster runs my horse in vernal breeze;
I’ve seen within one day all flowers on Chang’ an trees.
-Meng Jiao
February 12, 2021, was the beginning of the Chinese Lunar New Year, recognized as the Year of the Ox. In China, the celebrations continue as the New Year is the largest and most popular festival among that nation’s people. Festivities picked up pace on New Year’s Eve (Friday, February 11). The revels, dinners and traditional rituals were followed by the public holidays during which Chinese were off work for 7 days from February 12 to 18. But even after that holiday period, the New Year’s season continues until February 26 when the Lantern Festival ends.
The Year of the Ox will last until February 1, 2022. The celebration is also a grand Spring Festival in many parts of China, which has ancient roots, several rituals and traditional observances. There are dinners, family gatherings and bright decorations with a main motif of the colour red. The first poem printed here is a classical Chinese poem written by Wang Anshi (1021 – 1086) who wrote during the Song Dynasty which lasted some 320 years from 960 until 1279. It was translated by Xu Yuanchong in 2003.
The poem makes reference to some traditions and practices in the New Year’s festival. There is considerable noise-making with the crackers to see off the old year. There is a preoccupation with newness in a theme of rebirth that is common in spring festivals, as mentioned in the poem, marked by the cleaning of houses, getting rid of old things and hanging up decorations and launching lanterns. New clothes and new things are emphasized on New Year’s Day to symbolise a new start. As the poem indicates, doors are decorated.
Chinese history is famed and sub-divided by its lengthy succession of several dynasties. Classical poetry has been a feature of them all dating back to the ancient Zhou Dynasty (1046 BC – 256 BC) from which poems have been found and preserved. These eras advanced until the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1911). The classical poetry ran through styles but were very strongly characterized by their brevity and use of rhyme. Subjects and themes varied, but tended to reflect provincial life and the upper classes to a large extent, although one continuing preoccupation is with the peasantry. In later years, the peasantry was tied to political ideology.
But the subjects of classical poetry stretched from landscape, a heavy focus on spring, war and service to country, where the personal tragedies brought about by war are included, as are references to heroism. Romance is common with many love poems, dedications to lovers, and poems about affairs. Some of them are legends linked to lords and emperors and ladies. Some of the poems in the selections printed here pursue those themes.
One extremely interesting factor is the prevalence of poets who were politicians, political leaders and holders of high political or civil office. Many of them were administrators serving the emperors and governments. Interestingly, this love of poetry by political and military men seemed to have continued into modern times. Chairman Mao Tse Tung, who took over Communist China in 1949, was a published poet. The civil service was often occupied by some of these brilliant men. It was held as a serious profession and the officers had to pass an extremely demanding examination to enter the service. See the poem “Successful At The Civil Service Exam” by Meng Jiao (751 – 814) from the Tang Dynasty.
Despite the overwhelming patriarchal dominance, women poets could be found, such as Xue Tao (770 – 832), a contemporary of Meng Jiao. She was among those interested in the spring season, in love, landscape and the symbolism of flowers and fauna in “Spring View”. She is described as the best known Tang woman poet of precocious talent, starting to write at the age of eight. Lady Panpan was probably another.
There are two famous poems with the same title “The Pavilion of Swallows” written by Zhang Zhongsu (769—819) and Bai Juyi (772 – 846) about a legendary lady. According to translator and editor Xu Yuanchong, “The Pavilion of Swallows in Pengcheng (present day Xuzhou) was where the fair lady Panpan, famous singer and dancer of the Tang Dynasty lived alone for ten long years, refusing to remarry after the death of her beloved lord”, who was a friend of both Zhang and Bai. “Other commentators say the three stanzas in the poem [printed above] were actually written by Lady Panpan herself, with whom Bai Juyi fell in love and wrote three stanzas in the same rhymes as hers”.
The poems reprinted above are presented on the occasion of the celebration of Chinese Lunar New Year, on behalf of the Confucius Institute at the University of Guyana. The Institute’s Chinese Director is Cao Fang, known to the Turkeyen Campus as Kevin Cao, who has been responsible for many public programmes in celebration of New Year in previous years. This year affected as it is by the restrictions and closure of the UG Campuses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Confucius Institute was able to select a few classical Chinese poems. The Institute is pleased to join with the University of Guyana in contributing to knowledge about Chinese culture, the history of Chinese Indentureship in British Guiana and matters relating to the Chinese population of the Guyanese nation.
