Translator's Note
In the history of classical Chinese literature, a long-lasting dynasty often had its most representative literary form. The cí poetic form flourished during the Song Dynasty (960–1279), the political power which defeated all small kingdoms in China founded since the fall of the Tang Dynasty (618–907), including Southern Tang ruled by LI Yu.
The cí form had three characteristics that distinguished them from previous Chinese poetic forms: 1) fixed cí melodies existed at the time (unfortunately lost to us since), and cí poets were supposed to compose verses to those melodies; 2) line lengths of cí poems varied, forming diverse musical rhythms; 3) a cí might contain one stanza or two (in extremely rare cases, three or four) of identical or nearly identical line-length patterns, similar to the different verses of a modern-day song sung to the same melody.
Another trait of the cí form is one that is omnipresent in other classical Chinese literary forms, mostly poetic, and occasionally prosaic: tone patterns. The concept of metrical feet as understood in discussions of classical European poetry does not exist in classical Chinese poetry, since the monosyllabic characters in a poem will have identical vowel lengths, and will all be stressed. Instead, because Chinese is a tonal language, the tones of characters in classical Chinese poetry play an essential part in the construction of its musicality. Tones of Chinese characters are generally placed into two categories (although the categorisation of many characters would be different in Middle Chinese and in contemporary Mandarin, whereas some contemporary Southern Chinese dialects as well as contemporary languages like Korean and Vietnamese—with respect to Sino-Xenic vocabularies—may share more phonetic similarities with Middle Chinese): level (píng) and oblique (zè), which I would liken to, respectively, a harmonious chord and a disharmonious one in music. A level tone gives a sense of stability and resolution; an oblique tone, that of instability and irresolution. A succession of patterned píng and zè tones is not unlike a chord progression in classical European music.
Cí, like most other classical Chinese poetic forms, requires rhyming. However, unlike lǜshī—an eight-lined poetic form most popular during the Tang Dynasty—which demands that all of the four or five rhyming characters be of the same rhyme, some cí forms employ a single rhyme throughout the poem, whereas others utilise different rhymes within the same poem.
An individual fixed cí form—complete with its requirements for the numbers of stanzas and lines in the poem, the number of characters in each line, the tone pattern of each character, the position of each rhyme, and in bygone times the melody to which the poem was supposed to be sung—is called a cípái, habitually translated into English as tune. A cí poet will indicate the tune to which he or she is composing his or her poem, but there will usually be no relation between the cípái and the content of the poem. For example, Li Yu’s ‘Tune: “Joy at Meeting”’ which I have presented here is on the theme of parting sorrow, the opposite of what the tune title suggests.
A cípái may have a standard form and several variations. Li Yu’s ‘Tune: “Joy at Meeting”’, for instance, conforms to the standard version of the ‘Joy at Meeting’ form (as described in Qīndìng Cí Pŭ, or Authorised Cí Anthology, 1715, rev. 1781):
【Note:
L: level tone required
L: level tone preferred; oblique tone allowed
Lra: level-tone Rhyme a
O: oblique tone required
O: oblique tone preferred; level tone allowed
Orb: oblique-tone Rhyme b】
(Stanza One)
LLOOLLra
OLLra
OOLLLO OLLra
(Stanza Two)
OLOrb LLOrb
OLLra
OOLLLO OLLra
As we can see, the standard form of ‘Joy at Meeting’ has two stanzas with almost identical patterns, a principle rhyme (Rhyme a) which is repeated five times throughout the poem, a subsidiary rhyme (Rhyme b) which appears in the short couplet at the beginning of Stanza Two, and a caesura between Character Six and Character Seven in the last line of either stanza.
In presenting four of Li Yu’s cí poems here and in translating them into English, I have made the following linguistic and stylistic choices after due reflection:
1) Unpunctuated texts. Although modern published texts of classical Chinese poetry are almost always punctuated, the originals were neither written nor published with punctuation. I have quoted Li Yu’s cí texts unpunctuated, and have left out punctuation in my own translations to emulate the succinctness of the original poems, which is also a major stylistic trait of classical Chinese poetry in general. All is not said; the language is clear but not dictatorial; ample space is left for the readers’ imagination.
2) Emphasis on readability over literality. I could have worked rhymes into my translational texts, and might have assumed a mock-Victorian style (being utterly incapable of reproducing 10th-century English), but I did not see the point of doing so, as my readers and I are contemporaries of the 21st century, and as Li Yu’s texts are written in 10th-century Chinese. I have decided therefore to omit rhyming, employ contemporary language, and modify some of the words and the line breaks in order to convey more effectively the emotions expressed in these poems to the readers.
3) Poetic stylisation. It would be equally pointless, however, if I simply rephrased Li Yu’s short poetic narratives in dull prose, without metre, without rhetoric. Even though my translations of Li Yu’s poems are in free verse, I have made certain endeavours to render them poetic, such as eliminating accidental rhymes, employing alliteration, and repeating a line (e.g. ‘Last night again’ in ‘Tune: “The Beautiful Lady Yu”’) to improve the rhythm of a particular cluster of lines.
Cí is an indispensable constituent of classical Chinese poetry, and Li Yu, as one of its early advocates, made significant contributions to the development and enrichment of the form. It is my hope that my Translator’s Note may lead the readers to a better understanding of the form as well as deeper enjoyment of these cí gems by Li Yu.
Marie Orise