P e n ta s y l l a biC Sh i P oe t ry : ne w t o P i C s 151turns out to be the raison d’être for the illusion and its preservation. Cause and
effect become hopelessly entangled.
Two general points need to be made about the reception and evaluation of Xiao
Gang’s achievements as a poet. First, modern critics tend to focus their attention
on Xiao Gang’s poems about palace ladies and boudoir life, but these poems take
up less than half of his extant oeuvre, and their preservation is due primarily to
their inclusion in the sixth-century poetic anthology Yutai xinyong (New Songs of
the Jade Terrace), which was intended for an upper-class female readership. This
is the only pre-Tang poetic anthology that has survived more or less intact to the
present day. But when these poems are taken to represent the entire corpus of
Xiao Gang’s largely lost writings, we are prevented from seeing that he has a much
wider range. Second, while the modern feminist critique of voyeurism may be
applied to some of Xiao Gang’s poems on women, it is worthwhile to remember
that in appreciating the poetry of a different age, we should take its historical and
cultural contexts into account. Xiao Gang lived in an intensely Buddhist era, and
the key to understanding the larger significance of his poems is to remember that
for Xiao Gang and his contemporaries, sensuous forms paradoxically bespoke the
illusory, ephemeral nature of the phenomenal world. One of Xiao Gang’s most
notorious poems on a beautiful woman taking a daytime nap is, as some Chinese
scholars have pointed out in recent years, clearly influenced by the long versified
account of Śākyamuni Buddha’s life (Acts of the Buddha), translated into Chinese
by the monk Bao Yun (376?–449) in the fifth century. In the account, sleeping
palace ladies remind Śākyamuni, who was then the crown prince just like Xiao
Gang, that alluring forms of the physical world are but an illusion, and his deter-
mination to forsake the secular life is subsequently strengthened.
If we look beyond the conventional criticism of Xiao Gang either as a decadent
prince indulging in sensuous pleasures or as a male chauvinist voyeur, we will
notice some wonderful love poems in his collection, such as the quatrain “Return-
ing to the South of the City from the Encampment.” This quatrain was written
when the young Xiao Gang was serving as the governor of Yongzhou (in modern
Hubei Province) between 523 and 530, during which period he carried on several
military campaigns against the Wei, the enemy dynasty in northern China.
C 7. 8
Returning to the South of the City from the Encampment 從頓還城 (cóng dùn huán chéng nán)During temporary separation, both became apprehensive; 暫別兩成疑 (zàn bié liăng chéng yí)
But when the curtain opens, old memories return. 開簾生舊憶 (kāi lián shēng jiù yì)
It is as if we were never in love before; 都如未有情 (dōu rú wèi yŏu qíng)
Indeed it is more like having just met. 更似新相識 (gèng sì xīn xiāng shí)
[XQHWJNBCS 3:1969]
Like many of his contemporary poets, Xiao Gang was skillful at producing a
vignette and sketching a dramatic situation. In this poem, the poet describes the
reunion with his beloved, and he chooses to focus on the moment when the lovers
first set eyes on each other after a temporary parting. During their separation, they