164 t He tang Dy na s t y
The conspicuous absence of personal pronouns is another noteworthy feature
apparent in the word-for-word translation. Contrary to the assertions by some
scholars, the absence of personal pronouns is not characteristic of all Chinese
poetic genres. For instance, the pronoun “I” (for example, wo, wu) appears pro-
fusely in many Han–Wei yuefu and gushi poems. Only in the Tang regulated verse
do we observe an almost uniform exclusion of personal pronouns, especially that
of the lyrical “I.” The hiding of the lyrical “I” produces a further liberating effect on
the reader. Thanks to the absence in Chinese of the inflectional marking of time
and space, Chinese readers enjoy much more freedom than readers of inflected
languages in situating the depicted poetic experience. Moreover, with the lyrical
“I” hidden, Chinese readers can easily enter the role of the poet and vicariously
reenact his process of poetic creation. In consequence, the dynamics of reading
is drastically changed from passive reception to active re-creation, as we shall see
shortly.Rules of Syntax
For readers familiar with Western modernist poetry, it is not hard to see that
the three features just noted—lexical economy, maximization of imagistic appeal,
and minimal use of nonimagistic words—are practically the same aesthetic ideals
pursued by Imagist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Indeed,
the word-for-word translation of “Spring Scene” may seem at first glance to re-
semble an Imagist poem marked by a jumble of disjointed images. However, al-
though the two traditions seem to share similar aesthetic ideals, they definitely
follow opposite strategies to achieve them. While Imagist poets tend to maximize
the impact of words and images by breaking up their syntactic connections, Chi-
nese lüshi poets seek to produce the same impact by exploiting two covert nexuses
of syntactic linkage inherent in the lüshi form.
The first is the nexus of words within a line. Taking another look at the word-
for-word translation, we can clearly see that each line consists of a disyllabic and a
trisyllabic segment, separated by a caesura (as indicated by the dotted line). Each
trisyllabic unit has a one-character word and a binome, separated by a very slight
pause (as indicated by ◦). So, instead of being a cacophony of disjointed words,
each line creates a pleasurable 2 + 3 semantic rhythm, or, more accurately, a 2 +
(1 + 2)/2 + (2 + 1) rhythm (thematic table of contents 3.3). This semantic rhythm,
first firmly established in Han pentasyllabic yuefu and gushi poetry during the third
century, is faithfully observed in pentasyllabic lüshi and jueju. It is also adopted
intact in heptasyllabic lüshi and jueju.
The second is the nexus of words between the two lines of a parallel couplet.
In a lüshi poem, the two middle couplets are strictly required to be parallel in
thematic categories as well as in parts of speech. “Spring Scene” provides a well-
wrought parallelism of this kind. In the second couplet, we note a neat pairing of
“feel” with “hate” (emotive verbs), “time” with “separation” (nouns of time and
space), “flower” with “bird” (nouns of natural life), “shed [tears]” with “startle”