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白 草 胡 沙 寒 飒 飒
翻 身 入 破 如 有 神
White grasses, Hu sands and cold soughing winds.
Turning as the melody becomes rapid, nimble as if
aided by some god,
前 见 后 见 回 回 新 Glancing forward, glancing back, every turn so new. 235
始 知 诸 曲 不 可 比 Only now I know that other songs can't compare,
“ 菜 莲 ”, “ 落 梅 ” 徒 聒 耳 “Plucking Lotus Flowers” and “Falling Plum Blossoms”
do nothing but grate the ears. 236
世 人 学 舞 只 是 舞 People learn to dance and it's just a dance
姿 态 岂 能 得 如 此 How could their movements ever be like this
(lines 7-20)
The preceding tour de force highlighted Cen Shen's multifaceted observations of frontier
interior decor, cuisine, music and dance. Though less sensually inspiring as an object of contemplation,
Cen Shen's poet-narrator , as noted earlier, also devoted attention to the local linguistic character of the
border region, further decoupling non-Chinese peoples from the frequently encountered “enemy”
association found throughout the subgenre. To convey the intricacies of how local languages were
presented in Cen Shen's frontier poetry, a brief return needs to be made to an excerpt from an already
oft-cited poem in this thesis, “Impromptu About Luntai” (“Luntai jishi” 轮 台 即 事 ):
蕃 书 文 字 别 Fan documents and characters are different,
胡 俗 语 音 殊 Hu customs and pronunciations are unfamiliar.
The poet-narrator of “Impromptu About Luntai” is only capable of addressing the local linguistic
environment as a matter of a clinical, binary relation in which “Chinese” is the node against which the
235
A noticeable intratextual action is underway between this line and the earlier “ 左 旋 右 旋 生 旋 风 ”where sequences of
locative words (left...right...front...back) are used to describe the dancer's movements.
236
The first of these titles is of “one poem among a group of poems in the Yuefushiji collected under the general
designation “South of the Yangtze Performances” (“Jiangnan nong” 江 南 弄 ). The earliest models for this poetry are
associated with southern areas, considered anonymous, and attributed to female singers...The “Plucking Lotus” title is
associated with a whole tradition of “plucking” poems with similar feminine and sexual implications” . See Joseph R.
Allen, In the Voices of Others, pp. 124, 126 and 129. The second title is also of Yuefu origin, and was still very popular
during the Tang. With some background awareness to these Yuefu works, a hypothesis can be made that the poetnarrator
has a preference for the violent sorrow and heroism (beizhuang 悲 壮 ) of the frontier (a conjecture securely
based on reference to the “ 出 塞 ”and “ 入 塞 ”cycles of the yuefu and the dancer's own dizzying, cyclonic routine where
she herself partially becomes the frontier much to the poet-narrator's delight) over the somewhat calm and effete south as
represented by the second Yuefu allusion.