Xue Neng peruses the landscape of the soul
And finds it hard going
A Hard Road to Walk Xue Neng What badlands will drain every drop of your strength? There’s no peril like roaming the hearts of men. Impassable ranges too broad to survey, Dark waters that seethe with primordial waves, Visceral labyrinths twist seven coils— Face to face little better than a thousand miles. You complete the ascent of a Wu north face, And the Yanmen defile rears in its place. A landscape for tears from the north to the south, It has heights you won’t reach, and depths you won’t touch. There’s no course of action so good or so pure That your wagon may navigate safe and secure. 行路难 薛能 何处力堪殚，人心险万端。 藏山难测度，暗水自波澜。 对面如千里，回肠似七盘。 已经吴坂困，欲向雁门难。 南北诚须泣，高深不可干。 无因善行止，车辙得平安。
I hope you’re not getting bored of these Hard Road to Walk poems because… I am absolutely fascinated by them, and likely to remain so for the next few weeks. This is an amazing version by Xue Neng, a ninth century poet. He is expressing the same idea as Qiji, that man is the most dangerous thing in the world. But he creates this whole-poem metaphor to do it, in which men’s hearts are a perilous landscape. This seems amazingly modern to me! My son is doing his English GCSEs right now (a British public exam taken at age 16), so I’ve been helping him with the Ted Hughes poems, and this Xue Neng reminds me of the Thought Fox. They both present the metaphor with little explanation, and just expect the reader to go with it. And we do!
Wu north face: The Wuban was a mountain range in Wu (the lower Yangtze region) that was notoriously difficult to climb.
Yanmen defile: The pass at Yanmen was one of the key chokepoints on the roads heading north. Again, it was a notoriously difficult climb. These two lines together are saying that the mountains in men’s hearts are neverending.
Here, for comparison, is the Ted Hughes poem, written in 1957. Note how the first lines in both poems let us in on what’s going on: some feat of imagination is ahead. The rest of the poem is then devoted to working out this theme.
The Thought Fox Ted Hughes I imagine this midnight moment's forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock's loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move. Through the window I see no star: Something more near Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness: Cold, delicately as the dark snow A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now Sets neat prints into the snow Between trees, and warily a lame Shadow lags by stump and in hollow Of a body that is bold to come Across clearings, an eye, A widening deepening greenness, Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own business Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.