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84
夜 掩 朝 开 多 异 香
何 不 生 彼 中 国 兮 生 西 方
At night it closes, in the morning it opens; it has many
different scents,
Why does it not grow in central lands but grows
in the west?
移 根 在 庭
媚 我 公 堂
耻 于 众 草 之 为 伍
何 亭 亭 而 独 芳
I transplanted it to the courtyard,
It beautifies my office.
Ashamed to be partners with all kinds of grasses,
How tall and straight it stands uniquely fragrant!
何 不 为 人 之 所 赏 兮
深 山 穷 谷 委 严 霜
吾 窃 悲 阳 关 道 路 长
178
曾 不 得 献 于 君 王
How is it not appreciated by people,
In deep mountains and inaccessible valleys it is unfairly
treated under intense frost.
I am secretly sad that the road to Yang Pass 177 is long,
and that I have not yet been able to present the flower
to my lord.
Unlike previous examples in which inclusion of nouns absent from the frontier functioned as a means
of describing the frontier (such as the cicada of “Seventh Month at Luntai”, the flowers of Li Bai's
“Below the Frontier”, and the silk on willow trees in Zhang Jingzhong's “Frontier Song”), the first
negative particle in “Song of the Youboluo Flower” does not expel the flower from the northwest but
rather transfers existential negation of the floral entity to central China (zhongguo 中 国 ). The
consequences of such a deflection, one in which the territory of the familiar, central China, is now
immediately associated with negation, allows the frontier's geographic identity to retain a sense of
wholeness often enervated by negative particles reinforcing the non-presence of flora native to China's
interior. Although the paradigm for describing the frontier through negation is retained in “Song of the
Youboluo Flower”, the absent-present dichotomy has shifted in direction with presence now resting on
177
Name of an ancient pass south-west of Dunhuang county 敦 煌 县 in Gansu 甘 肃 province.
178
CSJJZ, p. 180.