Replying to Her Husband: Two Poems, née Zhang

Tang Xuan of Jinchang married a young woman of the Zhang family who had considerable good looks and virtue. In 730, when Xuan had gone to Luo(yang), his wife expired at Weinan Manor. After several years, he had to return there. He recalled his feelings about the events of the past and composed poems, which he sadly recited. [TN: read his first two poems] Suddenly his wife came forward, saying, “It is moving, your cherishing our memories, and the Netherworld officials have specially released this person to come here.” They paid their respects to each other with cordial words and let down the curtain to her quarters, then expressed their loving bonds just as they had all their lives. Xuan composed a poem for her [TN: read his third poem], so she took off her belt and also inscribed poems (on it) in reply. [TN: read the first two poems] When the sky brightened, she departed.

1.
I’m not content, that secret and seen are sundered—
But how’s enduring different, then and now?
We’re shadowed, sunlit—it follows that we’re parted.
Meeting, dispersing, both are hard on the heart.

2.
Upon the orchid stair, Moon Rabbit’s tilted,
The silver candle’s burnt out half its time.
I pity me, a long night’s visitor—
The Netherworld, I must treat as home.

Appendix
Tang Xuan’s Poems Mourning His Wife

1.
The bedroom: I sorrow at the long grass mat—
The women’s floor: I sob at the mirror stand.
A lonely grief as peaches and plums make merry.
We’re not together at night’s open mouth.
Ah, spirit—if you’ve any feelings at all
Come just like within the Buddha’s dream.

2.
The flowered hall is quiet all the time.
Talking and laughing pass the count of hours.
This distracted person worked and changed—
The silent one was sent to an unkempt mound.
A sunlit spring—I sing “The Dew on the Scallions.”
A shadowed gulch—I hate my “hidden boat.”
A clear night, moonlight on your makeup table:
A fantasy, you painting your brows, brings sorrow.

Poem Composed for His Wife
The wutong wood from Yi is halfway dead,
The sword from Yanping Ford is wholly submerged.
How within our place of former times
To bear in vain a hundred years in my heart?

答夫诗二首
作者：张氏
〈晋昌唐晅，娶姑女张氏，颇有令德。开元十八年，晅入洛，妻卒于卫南庄。后数岁，得归。追感陈迹，赋诗悲吟，忽见张氏前来，曰：“感君记念，冥司特放儿来。”因相拜款语，下帘帏，申缱绻，宛如平生。晅以诗赠张氏，氏亦裂带题诗以荅，天明别去。〉

[其一]
不分殊幽显，
那堪异古今。
阴阳徒自隔，
聚散两难心。

[其二]
兰阶兔月斜，
银烛半含花。
自怜长夜客，
泉路以为家。

〈附〉

唐晅悼妻诗

[其一]
寝室悲长簟，
妆楼泣镜台。
独悲桃李节，
不共夜泉开。
魂兮若有感，
仿佛梦中来。

[其二]
常时华堂静，
笑语度更筹。
恍惚人事改，
冥寞委荒丘。
阳原歌薤露，
阴壑惜藏舟。
清夜妆台月，
空想画眉愁。

赠妻诗
峄阳桐半死，
延津剑一沈。
如何宿昔内，
空负百年心。


Some texts give the author as Tang Xuan’s Wife née Zhang. Another example where the CPT editors prioritize the ghost’s poem rather than the chronological narrative of a ghost story. Jinchang is in central Gansu, on the Silk Road, while Luoyang is in central Henan, over a thousand kilometers away—a long journey and a long time away. (There are other Luo rivers, all even further off, but the eponym of the sometimes-capital of Luoyang seems the most likely.)

Notes on her poems: I knew I’d have to deal with yin and yang (阴阳) at some point—that important polysemous Daoist concept-pair. So, in his second poem, Xuan uses yang to mean sunlit and yin to mean shadowed, which she picks up on in her first poem, only using yang/sunlit to mean living and yin/shadowed to mean dead. (Note also her use of “the secret and seen” meaning “the dead and living,” the same as the Ghost of a Stone Wall in Huqiu.) The dark spot on the moon traditionally thought to resemble a rabbit tips over as the moon descends—IOW the night is growing later. Idiom: Netherworld is literally “the Road to the Springs,” which oddly is not actually a route to the Yellow Springs but another name for the place itself.

(Annnnnd, actually, I need to digress into a forward-looking TN: Loosely speaking, the underworld, the Netherworld, and the Yellow Springs are all the same, the “place” where spirits go after their body dies. (There’s actually several idioms involved, but so far they’ve all reduced to those three concepts.) More precisely, they refer to the afterlife in general, the realm of the dead (conceptually similar to Hades), and the entrance area to the Netherworld, respectively. Sometimes not much distinction is made between these three, sometimes a delineation is made. The Undiscovered Country is, despite these travelers returning from its bourn, a secret/shadowed/hidden place.)

(I can’t believe I actually quoted Hamlet, by all that’s holy … )

Notes on his poems: Idiom: women’s floor is literally “floor of adornment” —in multi-story homes (as opposed to spread out compounds), the women’s quarters were traditionally upstairs. Idiom: silent one is literally “the silent below” as in, in the underworld. “The Dew on the Scallions” was a folk-song of mourning, while the “hidden boat” is an allusion to a passage by Zhuangzi about bearing a heavy burden—I want to render that less literally, but haven’t come up with anything good. Wood of wutong/parasol trees from the south-facing slopes (which part got lost in translation) of the Yi Hills in Shandong were considered prime materials for making a qin, a type of zither, and I think we’re to understand that it’s the qin itself that’s half-dead (that is, hardly ever played), while Yanping Ford, Fujian, was noted for its excellent swordsmiths.

So is a female ghost writing her poems on a piece of her clothing an actual trope, or did I just happened to stumble across this twice in a row? We’ll see.

---L.