The dragon in the Chinese imagination is said to have its archetype in silkworms. It is likely that the Early Han Chinese depicted the silkworm as a colossal creature so that its size can be commensurate with its cultural significance in art and trade. In explaining the portmanteau, the “silk dragon,” in his anthology’s title—The Silk Dragon II—Arthur Sze cites the Warring States text Guanzi: “to appear small, the dragon transforms to a silkworm; to appear large, it hides in plain sight between heaven and earth.” Another reference is a poem by Li Shangyin: “A spring silkworm spins silk / up to the instant of death.” In the book’s preface, Sze explains that if this image of a silkworm is “a metaphor for how a poet works with language,” then the phrase “silk dragon” encapsulates his understanding of poetry. Since the anthology collects poems from Imperial China to China now, and it showcases language that spans nearly seventeen hundred years, when reading the book, I imagine a surrounding where many generations of Chinese verses and lyrics—in the form of silk—undulate in the air.
The poems present an arrangement of nonconsecutive history, through which Sze invites readers to experience how Chinese poets’ formal and thematic interests have evolved. Speaking to a landscape, Wang Wei’s “Deer Park,” which narrates sunlight’s movements across a mountain, contrasts with Xi Chuan’s ekphrastic meditation on a landscape scroll, which describes the poet’s inability to project himself into the painted scenery. Unlike Wang Wei’s account of a brief encounter, Xi Chuan’s poem treats another’s observation of mountains, and describes it as a “utopia” that one can be affected by, but fundamentally cannot resonate with. What intervenes between the two poems is also a change of attitude toward poetic forms. The lineation and caesuras in the compact and structurally precise jueju of Tang dynastyare disinherited by the effusive prose piece of recent decades. Across these landscape poems, the degree of mediation between nature and the observer increases. Sze offers it as an intellectual exercise to consider the fluctuating weight of the lyric subjectivity, whether it is embodied by the first-person “I” or an implied speaker in the poem.
Fascinating, too, is how The Silk Dragon II’s speakerssituate themselves across different axes. After describing an “old still temple” (“To the Tune of ‘Plum Blossoms in the Breeze’: Evening Bell at a Misty Temple”), the speaker of Ma Zhiyuan’s poem asks, “How can the old master / practice dhyana?” The inquiry indicates the speaker’s failure to practice or enter a fixed state of contemplation, in contrast to “the old master.” In this reflection, he positions himself outside the sight. Yet, the poet’s use of the phrase “west wind” in the poem as well as elsewhere grounds the speaker in a location relative to the cardinal direction. To specify the direction of winds is a classic trope. Li Qingzhao writes, “The bamboo blinds sway in the west wind” (“To the Tune of ‘Intoxicated in the Shadows of Flowers’ ”). Li Shangyin’s “Untitled (II)” includes the lines “And where out of the southwest / can the fine breeze blow?” The descriptors result to a lesser extent from a simple need to be specific than from a desire to be rooted in concrete space.
The speakers also connect with the landscape through articulating the shared moments in time between people and nature. Bada Shanren writes in “Bamboo”: “Just now, above the waters of the Xiang, / dragonflies, and rosy clouds.” The poem seizes the exact moment when the speaker looks up and sees a flight of dragonflies, against a background of rosy clouds, flying across Xiang River’s bamboo clusters. In a similar vein, Wang Yuyang’s “Smelting Spring” captures transitoriness:
The Red Bridge flies across the water—
in a single flow, the railing’s nine red curves.
Noon: a painted boat passes under the bridge:
the clothes’ fragrance, people’s shadows, fleeting, fleeting.
From the start, the poem activates the sensorium, evoking the bridge’s color, which harmonizes later with the boat’s paint. But it is the “clothes’ fragrance,” the olfactory stimulus, that I emphasize, because of its close association with the poem’s emotional tenor. The smell becomes ever more elusive not only due to the boat’s departure but because of the omnipresent and erratic winds, which have an increasing hold over the smell. The moment may not seem so fleeting if human sensory function is stronger than it is. The way a moment slips from the speaker’s grasp is expressed through a lament on his own lack. Sze’s translation faithfully renders the verb describing the Red Bridge and the absence of a verb for the clothes’ fragrance. The bridge, motionless, is said to fly. And while the fragrance flies by, the poet’s cataloging of it alongside “people’s shadows” anchors it like a fixed object to the scene. In a topsy-turvy manner, the syntax highlights the dynamism of some elements in the composition as well as the lack thereof in other elements.
By making landscape a thematic concern for the anthology, Sze suggests it is a concern for the Chinese poetry tradition at large. The same goes for drinking, with the book’s evocations of drinking for different occasions. In “Sending Off Mr. Yuan,” Wang Wei figures drinking as a way of honoring friendship, which is a view different from the one in Li Bai’s “Drinking Alone with the Moon,” where the drunk experiences solitude more acutely. And for Wang Han, drunkenness exemplifies escapism and functions as a euphemism for death.
I would like to drink
but the lute urges me to mount my horse.
Sir, if I am lying drunk on the battlefield,
please do not laugh.
In “Song of Liangzhou,” being inebriated comes to approximate being incapacitated by wounds. It is startling that the state in which the speaker wishes to be is used to figuratively represent a state that he wishes to avoid, albeit one that he will likely end up in. Thus, it is as if the speaker wills death on himself. The beseeching question posed in the poem’s conclusion alludes to the speaker’s fate: “Since ancient times, / how many soldiers ever returned?” To substitute the impact of spears for the influence of alcohol in his expression is Wang Han’s last attempt to escape from an untimely death. The request “please do not laugh” is fitting in the context of the metaphor, and more importantly, it signals to just how wars’ victors easily respond to the blood-stained battlefield with laughter. The poem hints at the callousness and complete disregard of emperors and warlords for their subjects.
With “The Chinese Drawer” by Yan Li, Sze seems to invite readers to muse on the nature of his anthology. In the poem, the speaker calls a set of drawers “the Chinese drawers” as though there is something ontologically “Chinese” about them. At other times, it is the content inside the drawers that defines them as Chinese:
two Red Guard bands,
one rusty 50 percent steel watch,
and a couple of photos from the April 5, 1976,
memorial in Tiananmen Square—
Likewise, is it the tag “Chinese poetry” that defines the poems in The Silk Dragon II as Chinese? Do the poems themselves provide a distinct definition of what Chinese poetry is? Sze leaves readers with these ultimate questions.
Weiji Wang 王唯冀 grew up in Guiyang, China and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she’s a PhD in Creative Writing candidate at University of Utah. She serves as The Nation’s assistant poetry editor, and her poems appear or are forthcoming in AAWW’s The Margins and Indiana Review.