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102
去 年 中 国 养 子 孙
今 著 毡 裘 学 胡 语
谁 能 更 使 李 轻 车
248
收 取 凉 州 入 汉 家
In the past, the central region raised children and
grandchildren,
Now they wear fur coats and learn the language of the Hu.
Who can once again dispatch General Li Guang of the
Swift Armoured Cavalry,
And take back Liangzhou, return it to the House of Han?
The aforementioned brilliance of “Heptasyllabic Old Style Poem For Dugu Jian on Our Parting”
becomes blinding when the second half of the parallel couplet “ The general of Huamen excels at
singing Hu songs/The Fan king of Yehe can speak the language of the Han” is considered within the
framework of a frontier poem whose thematic base is comprised of descriptions of local people and
customs. In reading Cen Shen's poem against Zhang Ji's “Ballad of Longtou”, the disposal of the
friend-foe framework in presenting non-Chinese peoples and their language is not merely seen to be
superseded, the dyadic nature of the structural system through which non-Chinese of the frontier are
presented, a binary where such peoples are the “Other” opposite the “Chinese/Han”, is itself also made
to collapse. This particular dismantling is located in the Hu 249 -Han linguistic cross-pollination
germinating in the mouth of the Fan king. After an initial exchange from “Hu” (song) to “Han”
(singer), a process which familiarized, while humanizing, a non-Chinese feature of the frontier, the
Fan king in the poem is shown to familiarize that which from the perspective of the “other” would
appear alien and unusual: the language of the Han. The Fan king's Han (Chinese) language abilities
obliterates a core principle of the portrayal of local frontier people and customs: they are not at all like
us; they are different. Whether it be Gao Shi's descriptions of superhuman feats in “Song of Yingzhou”
or Wang Wei's highlighting of local religious festivities in “Deity Worship at Liangzhou” , the
proportionally few frontier poems with either a complete or partial emphasis on borderland peoples and
their customs, including a number written by Cen Shen, have throughout relied heavily on maintaining
a conceptual framework in which subjects are engaged in activities that the poet-narrator cannot
248
YFSJ 21.311.
249
Here used in the generic sense of “non-Chinese of the frontier”.