On “Song of the Boatman from Yueh”

The call to “Make It Old” reached me at about the same time as a bundle of articles about the Spielberg remake of West Side Story, itself a remake of Romeo and Juliet, which had been a remake of some Italian story Shakespeare read. What the critics, evidently animated by the faith that moves mountains, wanted from the latest remake was authenticity. Concerned to arrest the decay of lying, I have reached back to a remake from early imperial China, the rendition by Liu Xiang (77-6 BCE) of an anecdote from the sixth century BCE including a song in the lost language of Yue, and remade it to fit into Bernstein and Sondheim’s prosody, in case someone ever decides to stage a musical, Warring States Story, climaxing in a rumble between the Chus and the Yues. (When you’re from Chu, you’re a Chu through and through.) It boasts a few words sourced from the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, just as Liu Xiang’s version of the Yue boatman’s song is decorated with irrelevant allusions to the Book of Songs, the classic anthology of Northern Chinese verse that had become the foundation of imperial literary culture by Liu’s time.¹

Some contemporary Chinese editors, missing the point, make the Yue boatman female. They must have thought this story of homosociality and status was in need of a remake. Or (what is much the same thing) of being brought in line with current regulations.

Remaking to suit current styles is the typical case. But “making it old” means confronting what is not ourselves.

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1 “What night is this?” in the Chinese version of the Yue boatman’s song is made to echo Mao shi no. 118, “Chou mou” 綢繆: “Is it tonight or which night/That I see my Good Man?” (Arthur Waley, tr., The Book of Songs [New York: Grove, 1996], 93). The tree as analogy for the heart looks to Mao shi no. 197, “Xiao bian” 小弁: “Yet like that diseased tree,/Diseased and without limbs,/My heart is grieved indeed; / For no one understands me” (ibid., 178).