Thammasat University students interested in China, literature, poetry, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 30 May Zoom webinar on Ritualized Homeland or Dangerous Frontier? A Study of Nalan Xingde’s Poems Written in Manchuria.
The event, on Thursday, 30 May 2024 at 1pm Bangkok time, is organized by the Australian Centre on China in the World, The Australian National University.
The TU Library collection includes many books about different aspects of Chinese poetry.
Students are invited to register at this link:
The event webpage explains:
Nalan Xingde or Nara Singde (1655-1685) is regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1912). In 1682, Xingde embarked on two separate journeys to Manchuria, first accompanying the Kangxi Emperor to make sacrifices at the tombs of the dynasty’s founding fathers; then, on a secret cartographic mission to survey Russian strategic points and roads leading to the city of Nerchinsk.
The focus of this presentation is on the poems Xingde wrote during his two trips to Manchuria with a particular emphasis on the concept of the “frontier”. As a member of the first generation of Manchus raised in Beijing, Manchuria is on the one hand, the land of Xingde’s ancestors, a region anointed by the Kangxi Emperor as the “mnemonic site of Manchu identity”. On the other hand, it is a vast and distant land with borders that Xingde was tasked with mapping. This paper investigates the depiction of Manchuria in Xingde’s poetry. It looks at how the poet draws from the well-established tradition of “frontier poetry” while infusing his unique identity as a Manchu as well as his poetic sensibility into these poems written in Manchuria, and how this in turn, enriches our understanding of the “frontier”.
About the Speaker
Dr. Annie Luman Ren is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World.
Here is an example of poetry by Nalan Xingde as posted online:
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O! The Most Pitiful Thing In The Sky Is The Poor Moon
O! The most pitiful thing in the sky is the poor Moon –
Once a month, she is full and bright like a piece of jade round.
But all other nights, to be waning or waxing she’s found.
Like the clear dear Moon, you were all chaste and loving indeed.
I would freeze myself to drive away your feverish heat.
Alas, what mere mortals can do against their Destiny?
O! It was so easy for our secular union to cease!
The swallows still come, landing on the curtain hooks with ease.
Bird-songs o’er your grave: Autumn gone, but not my sorrows at this hour;
I would identify our Two Butterflies in the Spring flow’rs.
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Here is another translation of the poet, as posted online:
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Mulan Hua : An Elegy
Imprinted at first sight,
What plight would alter life?
Idlers would change mind,
Fickleness was truly blind.
At Lishan, love promised in the night,
Tears rained the bells with blame and spite.
My man in silk, how flimsy and callous!
Liked holding on a helpless twig in solace.
*
In 2020, Professor Wang Shiyu of Ludong University of Liberal Arts, Yantai, Shandong, China published an article on Affect, Chou, and Nalan’s Ci.
Here is the article’s abstract:
Nalan Xingde is an important figure in the Chinese literary history. Claimed as one of the three most renowned writers of the Ci (song lyric) genre in the 17th century China, Nalan established his name with Drinking Water Poem. His Ci has a peculiar quality featuring a profusion of emotions and feelings, expressive of the structures of feelings of his time. Recent decades have saw an “affect turn” in humanities and social sciences, and studies of emotion and its history have provided a new framework to approach Nalan’s Ci and himself as an extraordinary historical figure. Taking Chou, the most prominent feelings as the focus, this paper first charts Nalan’s traumatic private and public life to show the mechanism causing his Chou. It argues that repressed, negative feelings of Chou shaped Nalan’s individualistic way of expressing emotions and his visions for unique literary creation. And in return, his investment in poetic creation of affective world helps him to resist and eventually live with negative feelings.
The Introduction begins:
Nalan Xingde (1655-85), courtesy name Rongruo, a Manchu poet in the early Qing dynasty, is an essential figure in the Chinese literary history. Nalan has been claimed as one of the three most renowned writers (the other two are Zhu Yizun and Chen Weisong) of the Ci (song lyric) genre in the 17th century China. He established his name with Drinking Water Poem, a collection of 342 Ci poems. It has been considered as the first Ci collection in the Manchu ruled Qing period and many poems of it have been widely circulated among ordinary households. His Ci has a peculiar quality featuring a profusion of emotions and feelings, expressive of the structures of feelings of the 17th century in which personal sentiments, emotions and their unique ways of expression gained new interest in the literary world, according to many scholars.
The most prominent feeling in Nalan’s Ci, however, is the melancholy-like “Chou,” negative feelings of pensive sadness, distress, anxiety and even despair because of the loss of some important things such as freedom, friends, and relatives. The word Chou appears almost 100 times in his poems. Considering the social, class privileges Nalan enjoyed as son to the then Grand Secretary Nalan Mingzhu (1635-1708), and as close associate of the Kangxi Emperor, the looming Chou in his lyric poems is strikingly provoking. Although some studies have approached emotional patterns in Nalan’s poetry, scant attention has been paid to Chou and its roles in shaping, and also being shaped by, Nalan’s autobiographical, ethical, and aesthetic traces and visions. In Western humanity and social science, an affective turn has shifted critical attention to inquiry of emotions and their histories. This paper will draw on affect studies and the history of emotions to examine negative feelings which boils down to Chou in Nalan’s poetry. It argues that repressed, negative feelings of Chou shapes Nalan’s individualistic way of expressing emotions in his Ci. And in return, his poetic creation of affective world in his Ci helps him to resist and eventually live with negativefeelings. In doing so, it brings a new perspective to interpret Nalan’s Ci and sheds new light on Nalan as an extraordinary historic figure. Furthermore, it will enrich and even challenge current studies of history of emotions that predominantly focus on Western historical and literary sources.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)