Forget the poetry, feel the cosplay
Luo Binwang writes the romantic standard against which Tang poetry rebelled
A Hard Road to Walk
Luo Binwang
When dust flies over Yu Pass and darkens the border wards,
When our northern wall’s invaded by the swarming Tongdi hordes,
The Son of Heaven lifts his sword and calls courageous men;
The general takes his sacrifice and boldly marches them.
Command tents signal martial virtues with a dragon dance;
The alligator drum and gongs ring out where they advance.
The curdled fog on dark Yinshan conceals high palisades;
Under the lone Yarkhoto moon, battalions are displayed.
Our cohorts march from Chang’an, seeming endless lines unfurled,
To bear our feathered standards past the edges of the world…
Arrays of clouds have massed to plunge Tianshan into night;
The cold sands in the evening rise to hide Kashgar from sight.
Along the shaken waters, endless dragon scales march by;
In front of Horsehead Mountain, vultures jolt into the sky.
Our thousand-mile march strikes fear in the mountains of Qilian;
With a wave of flags, a triumph comes from martial discipline—
See Raven’s Caw fire bolts that split the distant willow trees,
And lotus cut by seven feet of dragon-graven steel.
But springs and autumns blow the ashy weather pipes, and we,
Cut off from fine apartments, shaded streets, society,
Must pray for letters that never come, high on Yanmen Pass,
While matching robes and wedding bedspreads lie and dream of us.
It’s a hard road to walk.
We swear that in the fog of war we’ll pacify Gaolan,
If we can earn some noble brows, a title and some land,
The nights should not feel cold and drear for ladies left behind.
骆宾王 行路难·其二
君不见
玉关尘色暗边亭，铜鞮杂虏寇长城。
天子按剑征馀勇，将军受脤事横行。
七德龙韬开玉帐，千里鼍鼓叠金钲。
阴山苦雾埋高垒，交河孤月照连营。
连营去去无穷极，拥旆遥遥过绝国。
阵云朝结晦天山，寒沙夕涨迷疏勒。
龙鳞水上开鱼贯，马首山前振雕翼。
长驱万里詟祁连，分麾三命武功宣。
百发乌号遥碎柳，七尺龙文迥照莲。
春来秋去移灰琯，兰闺柳市芳尘断。
雁门迢递尺书稀，鸳被相思双带缓。
行路难。誓令氛祲静皋兰。
但使封侯龙额贵，讵随中妇凤楼寒。If truth be told, this is not a brilliant poem. Stephen Owen (a minor deity to whom all readers of Chinese poetry must make regular sacrifices) has this to say about Luo: “Unfortunately what Luo Binwang gained in seriousness of topic, he lost in poetry. Luo seems incapable of direct or moving statement...” (Poetry of the Early Tang, spellings modernised).
For example: Luo jumps confusingly between scenes on the borders (invading barbarians) and scenes at home (military preparations). I ended up just using physical positioning on the page to clarify these two different settings, with the middle position representing the meeting - in battle - of the two.
But translating the poem was a joy, nonetheless, because forget the poetry, look at the cosplay! This poem loves the costumes and the exotic places and the manga-style details. Check out this fabulous central couplet:
百发乌号遥碎柳，七尺龙文迥照莲。
It contains legendary weaponry. The bow has a name, because of course it does. One of the bows used by the Yellow Emperor, culture hero and founder of the Chinese people, was the dread Raven’s Caw, so that’s the name he gives to the bows being wielded by our bold Tang soldiers. The line starts with 百发 - a hundred shots fired from this Raven’s Caw… and we know what comes next, right? A hundred shots fired, a hundred enemy dead. That’s so obvious that we’ve all already filled it in in our minds, and so Luo doesn’t even need to say it. He can say something else: split distant willow trees. He places the battle in a classically beautiful setting, where these arrows, having passed through the bodies of our enemies, fly on into graceful willow trees.
In the next line, we see a sword, huge, powerful, and dragon-carved. Dragon-carved actually means that it has writing carved on it, because Chinese characters are written with brush-strokes that are long and lithe and living, just like dragons. But dragon-carved sounds a lot cooler. This sword again is once again placed in a beautiful setting, flashing over fields of lotus flowers. Thus a battle between us and them is lifted onto a higher plane, making it an aesthetic experience for the reader. The emperor’s conquest is not just right, it is beauty.
There are a lot of notes for this one. Usually, I don’t like notes - I want my readers to be able to get what they need to know from the text of the poem itself. But in this case I don’t mind it. Luo is deliberately throwing in these geographical references to lots of scary places that his readers had never been to. It was all supposed to sound scary and exotic and make you ask, where’s that?! If you find the notes exhausting, just give up and let the poem work without them. You don’t need to know this stuff.
Yu Pass/Jade Pass: One of the key passes between the inside and outside. The Chang’an plain lay on the inside; on the outside was the great northwest, nominally belonging to the empire, but with much less direct control. It’s located at the northwestern end of Gansu, close to Dunhuang.
Tongdi: A place in the north of Shanxi. This would be the northeastern border of the Chang’an plain, so together with Yu Pass, this represents the whole range of northern enemies that pressed in on Chinese civilisation in general, and on the Tang Empire in particular.
Takes his sacrifice: This wasn’t a sacrifice to the general, it was a sacrifice to the gods that the emperor would then hand to the general, signifying his commission. By the Tang Dynasty, the phrase was mostly just a historical relic, meaning that the general received his commission from the emperor.
Dragon dance: A ceremony held outside the command tent of the general at the start of the campaign.
Alligator drum: A drum made using the skin of a Yangtze alligator.
Yinshan: The name means “dark mountains.” Located in what is now Inner Mongolia, on the northern bank of the Yellow River, directly north of the Chang’an plain.
Yarkhoto: Known now as the Jiaohe ruins, an ancient city in Xinjiang. This is the northwestern direction again, even farther out than Yu Pass.
Feathered standards: By the Tang Dynasty, usually not feathered, but back in the depths of history real feathers were used on standards, and the wording stuck.
Tianshan: The Tian Shan mountains are the northernmost outcrop of the Himalayas, on the edge of Xinjiang.
Kashgar: The source text actually says Shule, the name of a kingdom on the western edge of the Xinjiang desert. Its capital was Kashgar, which is still a major town today.
Dragon scales: Ripples on the water. The image here is of battles shaking the earth, creating ripples on the surface of the Yellow River that travel up and down its length.
Horsehead Mountain: In modern Ningxia.
Qilian: The Qilian Mountains are the northeastern edge of the Qinghai (Tibetan) plateau, running along the border between Gansu and Qinghai.
Raven’s Caw: A legendary bow wielded by the Yellow Emperor, founder of the Chinese people.
Dragon-graven steel: A sword with characters engraved on it. The “dragon” refers to the long, living nature of the brushstroke in Chinese writing.
Ashy weather pipes: A kind of weather instrument, used to monitor the changing of the seasons. (In reality, since it couldn’t possibly have worked as advertised, it must have been a ceremony used to mark the seasons.) A special kind of ash was packed inside panpipes made out of jade, on the theory that as the wind changed with the different seasons, it would excite the different pitches of pipe, which would then release their ash into the air. In this poem, it’s just a fancy way of saying the seasons came and went.
Yanmen Pass: In the northeast of the Chang’an plain.
Matching robes and wedding bedspreads: They stand for the wives and secure married life back home.
Gaolan: In modern Gansu, to the northwest of Chang’an.
Noble brows: The Tang believed in nobility being apparent in the faces of great men. So those who proved themselves in battle, and won themselves nobility in the form of land, would also necessarily come away with more aristocratic features.
As you can see, this whole poem is packed with names and references. The naming of things, and their piling up in great abundance, is part of what became known as the “court style.” This was a style of poetry written by courtiers during the interregnum between the Han and Tang Dynasties, and during the early Tang (Luo was writing in about the 670s). It allowed poets to show off their knowledge, but it lacked a personal element. The great Tang poetry that is best known today - by writers like Li Bai, Wang Wei, and Du Fu - was created in reaction against this style. The writers of the mid-Tang made their writing simpler and more personal, and managed to hit a sweet spot of direct emotional communication that has lasted down the centuries.
But it’s still interesting to go back and look at the court style. Here, Luo mentions a dozen different places as a literary device. The later poets would take what Luo was doing, and say, yes, but what would it actually feel like to be on one of those campaigns?