View/Open - University of Victoria

114
迢 迢 征 路 火 山 东
山 上 孤 云 随 马 去
27
The journey's road leads far away to the east of
Fire Mountain,
Above the mountain a single cloud follows the departing
horse.
Both Yu Zhengsong's comment on the involvement of “curiosity” (haoqi 好 奇 ) in the rendering
of Cen Shen's frontier landscape and Marie Chan's observation of how the poet-narrator's feelings of
“wonderment” (jingqi 惊 奇 ) 28 in perceiving the radiant rocks and sultry steam surrounding the environs
of Hot Lake superseded the poem's titular concern for parting 29 dovetail smoothly with a popular
approach to reading Cen Shen's northwestern terrain, a mode of criticism which surveys how lexical
30
relatives of 奇 (qi), as in “striking” (qite 奇 特 ), “novel” (xinqi 新 奇 ) and “strange” (qiyi 奇 异 ),
characterize the perceptualization of Cen Shen's northwestern terrain. While subjective in its ascription,
and dubious in what it is able to reveal beyond reaffirmations of the peculiar uniqueness of many of
Cen Shen's frontier settings, numerous articles continue to persist in reiterating, though rarely
magnifying or expanding, this hallmark of Cen Shen's borderland verse.
The genesis of the affiliation between Cen Shen's frontier poetry and qi 奇 ironically began
without reference to his frontier poetry. A comment on Cen Shen's poetic craft by the anthologist Yin
Fan 殷 璠 in his Collected Works of the Outstanding Spirits of Rivers and Mountains (Heyueyinglingji
27 CSJJZ, p. 171.
28 Though the text is in English, I've translated “wonderment” into Chinese to show how with its “ 奇 ”(qi) component the
term has an affinity with other relatives of “ 奇 ”, a predominant attribute in critical writings on Cen Shen's frontier
landscape.
29 See also Qian Yechun 钱 叶 春 “Jingwushi haishi songbieshi: Cen Shen 'Baixuege, song Wu pangyuan guijing' tanxi 景
物 诗 还 是 送 别 诗 : 岑 参 ' 白 雪 歌 , 送 武 判 官 归 京 ' 探 悉 ”Xiandaiyuwen 现 代 语 文 No. 5 (2010): 31-33. Qian argues
that Cen Shen's “Song of White Snow, Sending Off Administrative Officer Wu On His Return to the Capital” epitomizes
the poet's curiosity for the peculiar and beautiful even at the expense of an elaborated leave taking. With attention in the
poem only brushing feelings of departure, it is the transmission of a wondrous and strange hibernal landscape which
drives the act of literary creation; the “sending off” component of the poem, amidst such perceptual splendour, is but a
perfunctory, even forgettable, feature.
30 奇 (qi) in classical Chinese usualy refers to four basic definitions: “special; rare” (teshu 特 殊 ; hanjian 罕 见 );
“shocking, astonishing” (jingyi 惊 异 ); “surprising; change unpredictably” (churenyiwai 出 人 意 外 ; bianhuanmoce 变 幻
莫 测 ); “unusual, abnormal” (yichang 异 常 ). See Cihai 辞 海 , p. 1198.