With many thanks to editor Steven Knepper, I am proud to say that three of my poetry translations from the Classical Chinese of the Song Dynasty poet and general Yue Fei appear in the inaugural issue of New Verse Review: “A Poem at Galloping Horse Hill,” “Red River,” and “A Song of Drums.” I have also published “Between the Hillocks” at Literary Matters. These poems are part of a twenty-two poem project I am currently finishing and hoping to publish that aims to uncover the poetry of Yue Fei—famous in China for his “Man Jiang Hong” / “Red River” but almost completely unknown to English-speaking readers—and to translate it into English, in most cases (as far as I can tell) for the first time.
I first became interested in Yue Fei’s story and poems after another “poet,” the great Chinese film director Zhang Yimou, released his 2023 film Full River Red, a blockbuster hit in China exploring the effects a great man and great poetry can have on strengthening the spirits of others as they face the same issues that he so fiercely and expressively confronted. Watching Full River Red inspired me to spend a good portion of my writing time in 2023 learning about Yue Fei’s life and translating into English any poems traditionally attributed to him that I could discover. I found there were not any English translations of Yue Fei’s poetry available that met my standards. After several nudges by my friends Eric McDonough and Matthew Buckley Smith, I turned this into a full-blown translation effort. It was an invigorating project.
Yue Fei: Warrior Poet
Chinese folk hero Yue Fei 岳飛 (AD 1103-1142) was a warrior poet of the highest order. He was a great military strategist, a master (and even a founder) of multiple martial arts, a dedicated Confucianist, a Taoist student, and, posthumously, an honorary deity. However, it is as a poet and as a poetic man of loyal virtue for which he is remembered in China today.
As an acclaimed and effective Song Dynasty general in the Jin-Song Wars, Yue Fei felt powerless because of, and began to experience great bouts of depression and rage after, the 1127 “Humiliation of Jingkang,” a turning point of the Jin-Song Wars in which Jurchen forces from the Jin Dynasty conquered the northern Song capital of Kaifeng, captured Song emperors Huizong and Qinzong, and isolated Emperor Gaozong to the south. A few years later, against Yue Fei’s admonitions, the partially defeated Song forces signed the Treaty of Shaoxing, renouncing all their lands north of the Huai River and paying tribute to the Jurchens.
Amidst these troubles, the thirty-year-old Yue Fei wrote some of the best and most memorable poems to come out of the Song Dynasty. The most famous of these—which is still beloved, taught, and memorized throughout contemporary China—is “Man Jiang Hong,” often translated as “Full River Red,” or, simply, “Red River.” Few poems are remembered throughout Chinese history so well. “Man Jiang Hong” expresses Yue Fei’s indignation at the Jingkang incident and his desire to win back the Song Dynasty’s northern lands, despite his rulers constantly thwarting his plans to do so, since many of his strategies were in violation of developing Jin-Song agreements and other Southern Song Dynasty political machinations.
Yue Fei fought a long and arduous campaign against the invading Jurchens, partially to defend the Southern Song territory as they rallied and rebuilt, but especially in an effort to retake northern Song territory. Just as he was positioned to recapture Kaifeng, Emperor Gaozong and Song Chancellor Qin Hui recalled Yue Fei to the new capital at Lin’an/Hangzhou to seek peace with the Jin Dynasty. The southern Emperor also sought to ensure Emperor Qinzong remained in captivity so that he would not threaten Gaozong’s claim to the new Song throne, and to prevent the potential civil war to which regained northern Song territory likely would have led between the northern and southern Song peoples. In the name of preventing this civil war and to avoid a woeful exile, Yue Fei returned to Lin’an, leaving the battlefield for the final time.
Yue Fei’s Cí and Shi
The kind of Chinese lyrical poetry—called “cí” 詞 or “chángduǎnjù” (“lines of irregular lengths”)—that Yue Fei is most famous for writing was based on various traditional models at the time and used a variety of meters with fixed rhyme, rhythm, tempo, and tone (poetically functioning similarly to accent in English) based in traditional musical tunes (the majority of which have been lost to history) and line lengths of specific but varying numbers of characters.
The arrangements of characters, tones, rhyme, etc. were based on one of approximately eight hundred different set patterns, which corresponded to tunes to which each poem could be sung. In many cases, the poems were named after those original songs rather than the content of the new lyric, much as contemporary poets might call a poem “After” another poem or poet. Cí poetry first appeared in the late Tang Dynasty but came into its own as a popular poetic form during the Song Dynasty.
A great example of Song Dynasty cí is this accomplished poem by Li Qingzhao:
“To the Tune ‘Sheng Sheng Man’ (‘Note After Note—a Long, Slow Song’)”
Searching. Searching.
Seeking. Seeking.
Quiet. Quiet.
Chilly. Chilly.
Mourning. Mourning.
Crying. Crying.
Downcast. Downcast.
Today, the air was warm, but soon the cold returns.
I feel that I may never rest.
Three cups—or more—diluted wine are warm,
Yet wine is insufficient to resist
Persistent evening winds.
The wild geese pass through—
They batter my heart too,
Even though I knew them well in the old days.
The foxglove blossoms pile in heaps around the garden—
So thin, all withered, worn.
No one desires to pick them now and bring them home.
Alone, I keep watch at the window,
Biding my time until the night I crave comes creeping.
Fine rain breaks up my watch and glazes wutong leaves
Until the dark arrives...
Drip... Drip...
Drip... Drip...
Sorrow—
Can I describe this world of pain
In any truth with only one dull word?
The following are Li Qingzhao’s traditional Chinese characters for comparison:
聲聲慢
尋尋覓覓 冷冷清清 悽悽慘慘戚戚
乍暖還寒時候 最難將息
三杯兩盞淡酒 怎敵他 晚來風力
雁過也 正傷心 卻是舊時相識
滿地黃花堆積
憔悴損 如今有誰忺摘
守著窗兒 獨自怎生得黑
梧桐更兼細雨 到黃昏 點點滴滴
這次第 怎一箇愁字了得
Yue Fei also wrote in a more traditional form of Chinese poetry called “shi” 詩, which was often modeled after the oldest Chinese poems, such as those collected in the most important collection of pre-modern Chinese poetry, Confucius’s The Classic of Poetry. Shi poetry is characterized by its rigid structural rules, which include such specifications as the number of lines per stanza (couplets and quatrains were common) and the number of characters per line (the most ancient shi were usually composed in four-character lines, but the popular Tang Dynasty poets such as Li Bai regularly composed in five- and seven-character lines).
Shi poetry encompasses a wide range of forms, but some of those most relevant to Yue Fei’s poetry are the “gushi” or “old poems,” a more form-flexible style from ancient China, and “jintishi” or “regulated verse,” developed by Tang Dynasty poets to follow stricter rules regarding such devices as parallelism and tonal patterns.
Here is a fantastic example of shi poetry by one of the greatest shi poets, from the Tang Dynasty, Li Bai, one of his many Yellow Crane Tower poems:
“A Goodbye from the Yellow Crane Tower”
Saying “So long!” to my old friend Meng Haoren, seeing him off for
Guangling, from the Yellow Crane Tower
Inside the fabled tower—“Fare well!” | to my oldest friend.
Under Spring blossoms, he sets sail, | but why? I have forgotten.
His lonely vessel fades in azure | skies, around the bend.
There’s nothing left. The Yangtze River | flows to the horizon.
And here are Li Bai’s traditional Chinese characters for comparison:
黃鶴樓送孟浩然之廣陵
故人西辭黃鶴樓
煙花三月下揚州
孤帆遠影碧空盡
唯見長江天際流
An example of Yue Fei’s shi poetry:
“The Cui Wei Pavilion at Chi Zhou”
Still uniformed for combat, covered by the mud of battlefields,
I turn my warhorse uphill toward Cui Wei Pavilion—jade.
Surrounded by deep hills and streams, the tower watches—staid…
But I’ve no time… urging my return come moonlit guards.
池州翠微亭
經年塵土滿征衣
特特尋芳上翠微
好水好山看不足
馬蹄催趁月明歸
Yue Fei took full advantage of both cí and shi poetry and the many individual forms and styles they afforded in order to communicate and express the complexity of his ideas and emotions, as they were conflicted between the pursuit of earthly and heavenly grandeur.
Bringing Yue Fei’s Poetry Westward
Even though Yue Fei and his poetry are revered in China, he and even more so his poetry are not well-known in English. Possibly because only a handful of poems attributed to Yue Fei have survived, and most of those are highly context-specific. Possibly because the Mao and post-Mao Chinese governments have gone back and forth on whether Yue Fei should officially be considered a national hero or suppressed, since he fought against a people whose descendants and lands are part of China today, and because his attitudes were not always in line with the regime’s ideal. Possibly because scholars are uncertain of the authorship of parts or wholes of poems traditionally attributed to Yue Fei. The poems’ survival and attribution have been beset by issues of historical turmoil, political intrigue, and literary canon-building disagreements.
The available English translations of Yue Fei’s poems that I have found are either amateur or (in some rare cases) academic—not literary. I aim to rectify this, as much as I can, with my literary translations of poems traditionally ascribed to Yue Fei.
I have translated the twenty-two poems in my overall project from the traditional Chinese characters into English using a sometimes loose but always purposeful verse in iambic meter, with the poetic feet corresponding directly to the original characters, similar to the translation method used by Aaron Poochigian in translating Tang Dynasty shi poetry.
I would have liked to have preserved more of Yue Fei’s rhyming, but Yue Fei’s rhymes—when we actually do know how his tones and rhymes would have sounded when he wrote them, since today’s Chinese languages are much different from and much less regional than Classical Chinese—are often placed in ways that would sound awkward or unnatural to English readers, or in ways that rhyming in the English translation would force the translation to veer toward too much unfaithfulness to the original text, due to the differences in how English and Chinese words can rhyme with each other.
This era of classical Chinese poetry is infamous for its resistance to translation into English. This speaks well for it, of course. After all, as the Robert Frost aphorism goes, poetry is what gets lost in translation. This is especially true among the most poetically prosperous poets of the Tang and Song dynasties—the Tang dynasty having the greater poets and the Song dynasty having the more advanced poems. These poets and their poems have such depths, which can be difficult to understand from a Western point of view and especially in translation, but those depths are a joy and are rewarding to plumb.
My translation method is mostly line-by-line, preferring literalness but with liberties taken where I felt this was necessary for context and detail and to make the emotions or arguments of the poems, at least as I feel and understand them in their original texts, intelligible to contemporary Western readers.
So are these poems translations or conversions? Sometimes the poems may indeed be at least as much conversion as translation. This is for a multitude of reasons, such as:
I am working with medieval Chinese poems with sometimes tenuous attribution, since attribution of poems to authors in that era of Chinese poetry (as with many similar eras in history) can be shaky and problematic
Yue Fei’s work was not part of the Song Dynasty literati and came not long before a particularly tumultuous time in Chinese history, after the biggest and most successful Mongolian invasion of China, which caused many valuable pieces of history to be lost or relegated to hearsay
there is very little scholarly work available on Yue Fei’s poetry
many of the governments since Yue Fei’s time wished to suppress at least some part of the Yue Fei legend
I have had to wade through so many differing and disparate histories of Yue Fei and, digging and laboring, have had to put together my own narrative of him to represent in my work
the language Yue Fei wrote, read, and spoke—Classical Chinese (the written language) and Middle Chinese (the spoken language)—is so different from contemporary Chinese languages that it might as well be considered similar to Latin for English, given the way contemporary Chinese (most prominently Mandarin) has evolved from it
Chinese poetry translations into English are relatively new, having started most prominently with Ezra Pound’s Cathay in 1915 and furthered and improved with Arthur Waley’s Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems in 1918
collaboration between Western and Chinese scholarship was for so long discouraged after China’s Cultural Revolution
However, any time you translate from one language to another—especially poetry, and especially from a language as different from English as ancient and medieval Chinese—the resultant work is essentially a collaboration between the original author and the translator author that has created a new work. So, in some cases, the poems in my Yue Fei project may be more akin to those in Pound’s Cathay than The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse, but that is all right with me. This collection is a literary and cultural work, not a scholarly and academic one, and, anyway, Pound’s Cathay is a major influence on this collection, along with Ryan Wilson’s Proteus Bound.
A General’s Death, a Poet’s Rebirth
“I would like to be my own posterity, to witness what a poet would have me think, feel, and say.” – Napoleon Bonaparte, as quoted by Abel Gance in the epigraph to his 1927 film, Napoléon
When Yue Fei arrived in southern Lin’an, hoping to regain support for his northern campaign, Emperor Gaozong imprisoned him in compliance with Treaty of Shaoxing requirements and eventually executed him, on January 28, AD 1142, upon false charges drummed up in a plot led by Song Chancellor Qin Hui. Yue Fei was thirty-nine years old.
As Qian Cai wrote in his Yue Fei biographical novel:
“The Death of Yue Fei”
Yue Fei strode in long, strong steps
To the Winds and Waves Pavilion.
Two wardens on both sides grabbed ropes
And—kicking—strangled him to death.
As Yue Fei started his return
To Heaven, a fierce wind arose,
Extinguishing the fires and lamps
Nearby. Black mist filled up the sky.
Both sand and pebbles twisted through
The air—as if from The Tao
Te Ching: a vision of apocalypse.
As Lao Tzu says in chapter thirty-nine of The Tao Te Ching:
When men disregard the standard Against which all things are judged, The Tao, By violating the fundamental truths Of nature and the natural order, The sky turns dark and the light fades, The earth cracks and quits yielding fruit, The spiritual equilibrium is agitated, The rivers become bone-dry, And kings and princes grow feeble too soon, Their kingdoms decaying.
Yue Fei may have died young and unjustly, but his poetry and his perceived patriotic loyalty made him immortal in the Chinese imagination. Nine hundred years after his death, the Chinese people still revere him.
Only a few years after his death, Yue Fei’s legend elevated him to the status of a mythic hero. He became a symbol of fidelity and resistance, a defender of honor and an avenger of disgrace. He was the subject of many popular poems, operas, histories, novels, and biographies. For the Chinese people, he has often been seen as an ideal model, and he has even been sometimes seen as a god—in the folk religions as a Menshen, a divine guardian of doors and gates, and among some Chinese Buddhists as the Dapeng Jinchi Mingwang guardian god born into human form.
In my Yue Fei translations, I aim to be accessible, moving, and poetic, and to show readers in English what I have found in these poems in their original Classical Chinese. Above all, however, I aim to bring Yue Fei’s legend and deathless work to the English-speaking world in a way it has not seen before.
Ethan McGuire is a writer and a healthcare cybersecurity professional whose essays, fiction, poetry, reviews, song lyrics, and translations have appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Blue Unicorn, The Dispatch, Emerald Coast Review, Literary Matters, The New Verse News, The University Bookman, and VoegelinView, among other publications, and he is the author of an art and poetry chapbook, Songs for Christmas. Ethan lives with his wife and their two children in Fort Wayne, Indiana.