Thanking Wang Xuan, Xi Shi - PART A

[TN: “only” six poems, but I’m still serializing again.]

During the Great Harmony Era, Advanced Scholar Wang Xuan, who seldom made poems and was inclined to have a creative imagination, once traveled the Xijiang River. He moored his boat beneath Mt. Zhuluo and inscribed a poem upon a stone. Suddenly he saw a woman who called herself Xi Shi, shaking a fine jade pendant and supported by a stone bamboo-shoot. She thanked him with a poem, and they happily met together, then parted.

This one from the Wu Palace, or rather Land of Yue,
In white clothes for a thousand years, and no one knew.
Back then, my heart was just like metal or stone: unyielding.
Today, my lord, you must not be unyielding too.

Appendix [1]
Poem that Wang Xuan Inscribed on Xi Shi’s Stone
Upon the range a thousand summits grow,
Upon the river bank fine grasses flourish.
Just now I found a stone beside the Huansha
But don’t see anyone who’s washing silk.

谢王轩
作者：西施
〈太和中，进士王轩，少为诗，颇有才思，尝游西江，泊舟苧罗山下，题诗于石。俄见一女子自称西施，振琼珰，扶石笋，以诗酬谢，欢会而别。〉

妾自吴宫还越国，
素衣千载无人识。
当时心比金石坚，
今日为君坚不得。

〈附〉
王轩题西施石诗
岭上千峰秀，
江边细草春。
今逢浣纱石，
不见浣纱人。


(So the second poem goes first, but otherwise the rest will be in order.)

Xi Shi (“[Lady] Shi of the west”) was one of China’s Four Greatest Beauties Evah—so this guy’s story (and the headnote writer is clearly skeptical of it) claims he met the equivalent of Helen of Troy’s ghost, who then came on to him. (And just as you think, “meet together” can, when a man and a woman are involved, mean an intimate encounter.) Xi Shi was, historically, given by the ruler of the Warring State of Yue to the ruler of rival state Wu as a concubine to distract him from affairs of state—a sexpionage ploy that supposedly actually worked (during which she supposedly did her job without falling for the king—thus being “unyielding”). Mt. Zhuluo in Zhejiang is her reputed birthplace, and there still is a temple to her at its foot, on the banks of the Huansha River (a tributary of the Xijiang), roughly where she was supposedly discovered by a Yue minister as she washed silk clothing on a stone there.

Same ambiguous Great Harmony Era. If I read up better on the legends of Xi Shi I’d probably have an idea of what the pendant and stone bamboo shoot signified (though note the bamboo pole in the picture linked above).

---L.