Qu is my language of love
The first collection of my poetry is called A New Song of Old Desperation. Why? It's because of my admiration of Qu Yuan.
I only changed a little bit of the title of his long poem Lisao. What I wanted to write then was some kind of New Lisao. As I understand the Chinese title of his famous poem as The Song of Desperation, I called my poetry book in German A New Song of Old Desperation. Did I want to become a German Qu Yuan? No. What then, is all this talk about him?
As a student of sinology in the early 1970s, I specialized in classical Chinese literature under the tutelage of Alfred Hoffmann, who studied Chinese poetry during the 1940s in Peking (Beijing) and Nanking (Nanjing). He was especially fond of The Songs of the South (Chuci). One of his favorite readings was Lisao. Although I did not understand much of the original work at that time, I was nevertheless struck by the beauty of its language. Qu Yuan is pure language, and that is what literature should be, even now.
I myself was never very much interested in the question of whether or not he really committed suicide. Nor was I interested in the conventional view of him as a patriot. "Patriotism" is a very late-coming word in human history. It did not get its modern connotation of 'loving one's own motherland' before French Revolution.
Besides, I do not think that Qu Yuan drowned himself at all. What he might mean by his wish of drowning himself seems to me to be nothing else then a shamanist ritual of getting deeper insight into true human existence.
Except for the beautiful language that made me a life-long reader and admirer of The Songs of the South, it is also the inherent bifurcation of the world view that struck me very much: There are two kinds of worlds - one is "this" world, and one is "that" world.
What the speaker in the Lisao wants is beauty. Beauty has no home in "this" world. It is, however, personified: It is called "beautiful being" (meiren). I do not understand this meiren as another word for a certain king of a certain time. Instead, I understand it as "goddess".
The Nine Songs (Jiuge) describe the longing of a human - in this case, a male - longing for an encounter with a goddess who does not show up in the end.
As said above, there are two different worlds in The Songs of the South: the world of man on earth and the world of the gods above. But whereas people long for the arrival of a higher being from heaven, the gods do not seem to care much about humans.
What Qu Yuan - perhaps for the first time in Chinese literature, and perhaps in world literature, too - dares to face and to describe is the basic loneliness of man in this world. Man is yearning not just for beauty or for purity but for something even holier. But any sacred being has disappeared and left man alone on earth. This is why The Songs of the South are so full of expressions of melancholy. And it's why the speaker in the Songs is always on the "road" in search of a "spiritual partner".
It is this kind of melancholy that has kept me fascinated for the last 40 years. In this respect, Qu Yuan is my master. Without his poetry, my life as a scholar, translator and poet would be very poor, indeed.
The author is a renowned sinologist of Bonn University, Germany
(China Daily 06/19/2007 page19)
