Mystery "Chinese" Poem in Fowles' "The Magus"

As part of my Chinese-Ravaged English Recovery Program, I have been reading John Fowles' The Magus. According to the sequence of books on my original program schedule, George Eliot's Middlemarch was supposed to have followed Moby Dick, but my best friend D recommended I read The Magus, it sounded more intriguing, and so here I find myself.


I'm not going to write a review of the novel, I'm not sure I'm even partially qualified to do so, but I would like to say that after one hundred pages or so, and with the deepening interaction with Mr. Conchis, I am fully rapt. From my vantage point, the story seems to be about a well-to-do young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, with the typical artist's penchant for depression going off to a small island in Greece to teach English as a second language, where he encounters a mysterious man, Mr. Conchis, who may or may not have mystical powers. In many respects, not in the least the fact that the story takes place on an island in Greece and involves an outsider (Nicholas) and an enlightened (?) mentor (Mr. Conchis), The Magus (1965) reminds me of Nikos Kazantzakis' 1946 Zorba the Greek, one of my favorite novels. In the latter, a young intellectual engages in a series of adventures and dialogues with the earthy yet enigmatic Zorba. Real Fiction, a blog by Ron Pavellas, also makes a connection between the two novels, with a bit of a spoiler for The Magus.

What inspired me to write a blog on The Magus was the sudden surprising quotation of an apparent Tang Dynasty (618-907) poem in Chapter 13:

He looked out to sea. '"There is a poem of the T'ang dynasty." He sounded the precious little glottal stop. 'Here at the frontier, there are falling leaves. Although my neighbors are all barbarians, and you, you are a thousand miles away, there are always two cups on my table.'"

As can be imagined, this was quite exciting for me. Since I wasn't sure from which poem it had been translated, or if it had been translated from a poem at all, I did a quick Google search to see what I could find out. The result was that I found out very little. The most interesting thing is that the poem is included in many places as "a Chinese poem" with no attribution of author, or simply an "unknown" written below the poem. One blog actually rants about Fowles' ignorance of Chinese (Wade-Giles) pronunciation with his mistaken "precious little glottal stop" phrase. Aside from this, no one seems to know anything about this poem, whether it was made up by Fowles or is the translation of an actual Tang Dynasty poem.

I seemed to have stumbled onto a Chinese poetry mystery! Sleuth-like, I started to do more in-depth research. Fowles apparently had done some translations of Chinese poetry, so it was conceivable that this particular poem indeed originally was a Tang Dynasty poem. The content of the poem itself strongly correlates to a genre of Tang Dynasty poetry known as 边塞诗 (bian1sai4 shi1 = frontier poetry), which includes poems written about China's western frontier and the lives and sentiments of the soldiers there fighting Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other enemies, or the longing distress of women back on the home front, wondering when their men will return home.

With this in mind, I decided to start searching for poems which included the elements in the Fowles poem, searching for anything with 边疆 (bian1jiang1 = frontier), 边塞 (bian1sai4 = frontier outpost), 千里 (qian1li3 = a thousand li, a Chinese unit of distance which varied in different periods of time, often translated as "miles"), and/or 杯 (bei1 = cup), etc. I came up with a lot of 边塞诗, but nothing really approximated the Fowles poem.

My next step was to go poem-by-poem through my own collection of Tang Dynasty poems, 唐诗三百首 (Tang2shi1 san1bai3shou3 = Three Hundred Tang Poems), a compilation of Tang-era poems by Heng Tang Tui Shi (蘅塘退士 = Heng2tang2 Tui4shi4), a Qing Dynasty scholar tasked by the Qianlong Emperor (乾隆 = Qian1 Long2) with collecting the most famous Tang Dynasty poems. My personal copy is a bit worn, as can be seen to the right here (yes, that is tie-dye duct tape).

After going through the entire Three Hundred Tang Poems, I didn't find a single poem that indisputably could be said to be the source of the Fowles poem. One poem, however, could be a candidate:

《送人东游》温庭筠

荒戍落黄叶，浩然离故关。
高风汉阳渡，初日郢门山。
江上几人在，天涯孤棹还。
何当重相见，樽杯慰离颜。

"Farewell East Along the Waters" Wen Tingyun
Trans. Aaron Gilkison

Yellow leaf-strewn dust-blown border fortress;
broad back now turned to that erstwhile hometown.
Winds will take you to the Yangtze crossing;
Dawn will greet you on eastern mountain crown.
How many on riverbanks are straining,
to spot your lonely Argo flowing down.
Oh, when will we see each other once more,
and raise our cups to drink away our frowns.

《送人东游》温庭筠；书法：黑土地
"Farewell East Along the Waters" Wen Tingyun
Calligraphy: Hei Tu Di

Here is the Fowles poem in verse form, for comparison:

Here at the frontier, there are falling leaves.
Although my neighbors are all barbarians,
and you, you are a thousand miles away,
there are always two cups on my table.

Comparing this to my translation, you can see where there are similarities: 1) Frontier and falling leaves; 2) You are far away; 3) Cups for drinking. Granted, the similarities are primarily thematic, but I still think "Farewell East Along the Waters" could have provided at least part of the inspiration for Fowles' version. The line about "barbarians" is interesting, as descriptions of the non-Han peoples on the periphery of Chinese civilization appear frequently in 边塞诗. Below are a few examples, taken out of context:

匈奴草黄马正肥，金山西见烟尘飞...
Hun horses fat on golden grain, dust clouds prove hooves swarm western plains

山上望胡兵，胡马驰骤速。
Hun troops spied below, their horses ne'er slow

中军置酒饮归客，胡琴琵琶与羌笛。
General's tent wine-wet goodbyes, Hun lutes pipas Tibet fifes.

It is possible that Fowles just "made up" a "Tang poem" based on other translations and his own translation experiments, piecing together elements of 边塞诗 that would better reflect the sense that Mr. Conchis intended for Nicholas. Indeed, the content of the poem reflects all too closely Mr. Conchis' strange isolation at the Bourani villa: Far from civilization, at the end of the world; all of the villagers seem to despise and fear him and see him as an outsider; his guests come from far away; and he always has a table ready with two cups on it.

Of course all of this is speculative. To do a really good job of solving this mystery with any bit of certainty would probably require getting access to Fowles' papers and his notes from writing The Magus, if he had any. Even then the investigation might not be conclusive. Maybe it will remain a mystery forever, much as I imagine Mr. Conchis will remain a mystery to Nicholas, despite the young man's best efforts to understand.