寒山詩：蹭蹬諸貧士
Monday 11 March
蹭蹬諸貧士
飢寒成至極
閑居好作詩
札札用心力
賤他言孰采
勸君休歎息
題安餬餅上
乞狗也不喫
My attempt at a translation of the 寒山 poem that starts with the line 蹭蹬諸貧士 (in many collections nr. 99).
Unlucky poor perpetual students,
far beyond hunger and cold
unemployed dilettantes in poetry,
with all your might, you rack your brains
yet no one appreciates your bungling,
so my advice is: stop sighing
even if you wrote your verses on pastry,
not even the dogs would want them.
The poem deals most likely with students that failed to pass the civil service exams or to gain an appointment. Poetry was a major part of testing. Paul Rouzer writes:
Our starving poets are clinging to the cultural capital of their education by writing poems, in the hope either of attracting patronage, or simply of achieving some fame among their peers. But because they have no particular social status, no one is interested in what they have to write. The satirist offers them a sarcastic consolation: disabuse yourself of any hope of winning an audience, for even dogs won’t eat your unsolicited poems; they’re too indigestible. In light of the self-consciousness of the collection as a body of “useful” poems, as we saw in chapter 2, this verse has a double edge. It can be seen as the poet’s response to the critic in HS 187: it is in fact secular regulated verse that proves to be profoundly useless, while Hanshan’s poems, though misunderstood and scorned, provide true wisdom and advantage to the “elite,” understanding readership.[14]
In the Tang era, it was still fairly common to treat examination candidates with sympathy; the unhappiness and trauma caused by failure was a powerful theme in Tang literature. Consequently, the degree of contempt expressed in these poems is somewhat surprising, and suggests a poet who saw himself as outside literati circles. He is not necessarily dismissive of education, as HS 129 might suggest to some; rather, he detests the connection Tang literati made between education and worldly ambition.
[ note 14: Hanshan also makes this point in HS 288, when a scholar accuses him of being unable to write in the fashionable “regulated verse” form. The poet replies: “I laugh when you try to write poetry / Like a blind man praising the sun” (288, lines 7–8). Again, his laughter targets a lack of understanding on the part of the benighted. ]
[On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems, Paul Rouzer, 2016]
Illustration by arimoshinai.
