Tartar
prisoners
in chains!
Waley - 170 Chinese Poems
Since the days the Tartars took me alive forty years have passed:
They put me into a coat of skins tied with a belt of rope.
Only on the first of the first month might I wear my Chinese dress.
As I put on my coat and arranged my cap, how fast the tears flowed!
I made in my heart a secret vow I would find a way home:
I hid my plan from my Tartar wife and the children she had borne me
in the land.
I thought to myself, 'It is well for me that my limbs are still
strong,'
And yet, being old, in my heart I feared I should never live to
return.
The Tartar chieftains shoot so well that the birds are afraid to fly:
From the risk of their arrows I escaped alive and fled swiftly home.
Hiding all day and walking all night, I crossed the Great Desert:[58]
Where clouds are dark and the moon black and the sands eddy in the
wind.
Frightened, I sheltered at the Green Grave,[59] where the frozen
grasses are few:
Stealthily I crossed the Yellow River, at night, on the thin ice,
Suddenly I heard Han[60] drums and the sound of soldiers coming:
I went to meet them at the road-side, bowing to them as they came.
But the moving horsemen did not hear that I spoke the Han tongue:
Their Captain took me for a Tartar born and had me bound in chains.
They are sending me away to the south-east, to a low and swampy
land:
No one now will take pity on me: resistance is all in vain.
Thinking of this, my voice chokes and I ask of Heaven above,
Was I spared from death only to spend the rest of my years in
sorrow?
My native village of Liang-yuan I shall not see again:
My wife and children in the Tartars' land I have fruitlessly
deserted.
When I fell among Tartars and was taken prisoner, I pined for the
land of Han:
Now that I am back in the land of Han, they have turned me into
a Tartar.
Had I but known what my fate would be, I would not have started
home!
For the two lands, so wide apart, are alike in the sorrow they
bring.
Tartar prisoners in chains!
Of all the sorrows of all the prisoners mine is the hardest to bear!
Never in the world has so great a wrong befallen the lot of man,--
A Han heart and a Han tongue set in the body of a Turk. "
[55] In Turkestan.
[56] North of Ch'ang-an.
[57] The period Ta-li, A. D. 766-780.
[58] The Gobi Desert.
[59] The grave of Chao-chun, a Chinese girl who in 33 B. C. was "bestowed
upon the Khan of the Hsiung-nu as a mark of Imperial regard" (Giles).
Hers was the only grave in this desolate district on which grass would
grow.
[60] _I. e. _, Chinese.
