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narrator's homesickness:
东 望 望 长 安
正 直 日 初 出
长 安 不 可 见
但 见 长 安 日
Eastward gazing, gazing towards Chang'an,
Directly facing where the sun first rises.
Chang'an cannot be seen;
I only see the Chang'an sun.
(“Tune: Remembering Chang'an”, first of two verses)
燕 支 山 西 酒 泉 道
北 风 吹 沙 卷 白 草
长 安 遥 在 日 光 边
72
忆 君 不 见 令 人 老
West of Yanzhi mountain there is the road to Jiuquan,
The north wind blows sand and rolls up the white frontier
grasses.
Chang'an is far away by the shining rays of the sun,
Remembering you and not being able to meet makes
one old
(“Passing Yanzhi Mountain: Sent to Du Wei ”)
家 在 日 出 处
朝 来 起 东 风
My home is where the sun rises,
Morning arrives and stirs the eastern wind.
(“At the Anxi Guesthouse and Thinking of Chang'an”, lines 1-2)
But sometimes letters, dreams, acts of perception, images and rhetorical questions fail, and only
the thaumaturgic skills of an ancient Daoist can be relied upon to both express, and perhaps even
assuage, the angst of being far from home:
乡 路 眇 天 外
The road home stretches beyond the sky,
归 期 如 梦 中
The date of return seems like a dream.
遥 凭 长 房 术 So far away I have to rely on Zhangfang's magic 73
72
CSJJZ, p. 75.
73
An allusion to Fei Zhangfang 费 长 房 , a Daoist trainee of Hu Gong 壶 公 , whose story can be found in Ge Hong's 葛 洪
(283-343) Shenxianzhuan 神 仙 传 , “a collection of biographies of eighty-four Daoist immortals. The text has
traditionally been ascribed to Ge Hong [though] most of the biographies are extracted from earlier works, so Ge Hong is
really much more an editor than an author of the Shengxianzhuan”. See Stephen Durrant's entry in William H.
Nienhauser, Jr., ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, p. 677. The Taiping guangji 太 平 广 记
notes that “Feizhang Fang possessed the magic of the gods, and could contract a land's geography. A thousand li would
seem to exist right before one's eyes and then disappear as the land expanded back to as it was before”. 费 长 房 有 神 术 ,
能 缩 地 脉 , 千 里 存 在 目 前 宛 然 , 放 之 复 舒 如 旧 也 . See Taiping guangji 太 平 广 记 12.4 in SKQS. In his pre-frontier
poem “Inscribed on Daoist Adept Li's Dwelling in Shuangxi, Jingxing county” (“Ti Jingxing Shuangxi Li Daoshi suoju”