Pepper Grove
Thursday, 17 October 2019 13:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammerCassia wine to greet a god’s child,
Boneset bestowed upon a beauty,
Pepper offered on a jade mat:
May you descend, O Lord of Clouds!
Cinnabar thorns hang from his clothes—
Incense detains a passing guest,
Good fortune suited to using a cauldron:
May you, my lord, descend and take these.
椒园
桂尊迎帝子，
杜若赠佳人。
椒浆奠瑶席，
欲下云中君。
丹刺罥人衣，
芳香留过客。
幸堪调鼎用，
愿君垂采摘。
This? —this poem of Wang’s is not a Buddhist poem, which just goes to show Wang Wei was not only a Buddhist. Specifically, his first three lines pastiche lines from the “Nine Songs” section of Songs of Chu, which are shamanistic rapsodies from 900 years before. The structure of approach, departure, and yearning from those songs echoes that of Wang’s relationship to both the natural world and his friend from earlier in the collection, and the historical reference makes it part of the same frame as his #1, 2 and 19. Pei, somewhat typically, elaborates on only the surface layer here (my hunch is his cryptic first line is also alluding to from “Nine Songs,” but I haven’t been able to confirm that, nor that I’m actually reading it correctly). FWIW, the pepper is the same peppery prickly-ash tree (Zanthoxylum ailanthoides) as Pei’s #7.
And that, he said, is the end of that collection. Whew!
---L.
Boneset bestowed upon a beauty,
Pepper offered on a jade mat:
May you descend, O Lord of Clouds!
Cinnabar thorns hang from his clothes—
Incense detains a passing guest,
Good fortune suited to using a cauldron:
May you, my lord, descend and take these.
椒园
桂尊迎帝子，
杜若赠佳人。
椒浆奠瑶席，
欲下云中君。
丹刺罥人衣，
芳香留过客。
幸堪调鼎用，
愿君垂采摘。
This? —this poem of Wang’s is not a Buddhist poem, which just goes to show Wang Wei was not only a Buddhist. Specifically, his first three lines pastiche lines from the “Nine Songs” section of Songs of Chu, which are shamanistic rapsodies from 900 years before. The structure of approach, departure, and yearning from those songs echoes that of Wang’s relationship to both the natural world and his friend from earlier in the collection, and the historical reference makes it part of the same frame as his #1, 2 and 19. Pei, somewhat typically, elaborates on only the surface layer here (my hunch is his cryptic first line is also alluding to from “Nine Songs,” but I haven’t been able to confirm that, nor that I’m actually reading it correctly). FWIW, the pepper is the same peppery prickly-ash tree (Zanthoxylum ailanthoides) as Pei’s #7.
And that, he said, is the end of that collection. Whew!
---L.
no subject
Date: 18 October 2019 00:02 (UTC)