有如大江 · As the Great River
天光未到岸
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有如大江 · As the Great River
It is the hour before sunrise, and the boat is out in the middle of the great river, far enough from either bank that neither can be seen. Aboard are a hundred-odd households of 祖逖's own retainers, three thousand bolts of cloth, and not one piece of armour and not one weapon. The court that had just told him to go north and take the Central Plain back gave him grain for a thousand men and cloth, and nothing else — no armour, no weapons, only leave to raise an army on the road.
Then he struck the oar. The 楫 is the long sweep oar of a river boat, and 祖逖 knocked it against the gunwale so that the sound went out over the water, and swore an oath. 《晉書》 keeps the sentence 1:
中流擊楫而誓曰：「祖逖不能清中原而復濟者，有如大江！」辭色壯烈，眾皆慨歎。
Midstream he struck the oar and swore: if 祖逖 cannot clear the Central Plain and crosses this river again, let him be as the great river. His voice was fierce, and everyone aboard sighed. That is the moment this song stands in, and that is the sentence its chorus keeps returning to.
有如大江 is the phrase the whole song turns on. It is a formula for swearing by something, and its plain sense is "may I be as this river is." A man who swears that way names a thing and asks that it be done to him as the river does it. The river 祖逖 chose for his witness has exactly one habit: it runs one way and never comes back up. So the oath amounts to a promise never to return, and the standard he fixed for himself was the one thing in sight with no home that it was failing to see again. His own home was 范陽, north of the Yellow River, and he had not seen it since he left it as a young man.
The second verse remembers the earlier scene that the same biography keeps, from the years when 祖逖 and 劉琨 were young clerks together in 司州 and slept under one quilt:
中夜聞荒雞鳴，蹴琨覺曰：「此非惡聲也。」因起舞。
A 荒雞 is a cock calling in the middle of the night, and people read it as an ill omen. 祖逖 kicked 劉琨 awake and said: this is not an evil sound. Then the two of them got up and practised with their swords. The song borrows the habit. At the river he does to the water what he once did to a bad omen: he hears it, he calls it not evil, and he gets up.
What followed went further and ended worse than the oath allowed for. 黃河以南盡爲晉土 — the land south of the Yellow River came back under Jin — and 石勒, the general on the other side, stopped moving troops against him and had 祖逖's mother's grave repaired. 王敦, who rebelled later, waited while 祖逖 lived; the history says he did not dare move until the man was dead, and 《世說新語》 keeps a scene of 祖逖 with his eyes wide and his voice raised, sending an envoy back to 王敦 with a threat and three thousand men standing behind it 2. Then the court sent a southerner to sit above him as his commander, and the push north stopped where it stood. 祖逖 died north of the river at 雍丘 at fifty-six, and the people of 豫州 mourned him as they would a parent. The oath was kept to the letter: he never crossed back.
The friend he had woken that night wrote in the same key. 劉琨, holding 并州 in the north, said of him: I sleep on my spear until dawn, meaning to take the rebels' heads, and my only fear is that 祖生 reaches the whip before I do. He was strangled in 318 by the man he had allied himself with, and the poem he wrote in that captivity, to his aide 盧諶, closes on the line this song is shadowed by 3:
何意百煉剛，化為繞指柔。
Who would have thought that iron tempered a hundred times should come out soft enough to wind round a finger?
Leading this song is the 巴烏, the small free-reed pipe of the Yi and Hani country in the south-west: a bamboo tube blown sideways through a hole in its side, with a pointed copper reed set inside it, so that the metal itself buzzes under the breath 4. The instrument has a small voice by nature, and that is why it is here. An oath shouted across a wide river is a boast; an oath spoken quietly, with the oars still and the far bank invisible, is a decision. Sparse guqin sits under the verses, a low xiao answers in the bridge, faint pipa harmonics stand for the light on the water, and no drum enters anywhere. The first chorus stays close to the water, the last one opens out, and the outro thins to a single pipe over the mist.
Play it before the light, while the day in front of you is still unanswered.
References
- 1晉書 · 卷六十二 · 祖逖傳 · 維基文庫
zh.wikisource.org
- 2世說新語 · 豪爽 · 維基文庫
zh.wikisource.org
- 3重贈盧諶 · 劉琨 · 維基文庫
zh.wikisource.org
- 4巴烏 · 維基百科
zh.wikipedia.org
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