Poetry battles (a thread about thread)

Not too long ago, I was trying to translate two poems that make up a poetry battle between two sixth-century noblewomen, over their shared husband. Pulling on the thread of the story led me to a tale that just got more amazing the more I unraveled it.

The story of the poetry battle comes from the Luoyang qielan ji 洛陽伽藍記 (卷三) account of the (mis)adventures of the Southern court official Wang Su 王肅, who was exiled to the Northern Wei and moved up to Luoyang in 493. He was received into the Northern court, granted official and noble titles, and honored with the hand of an imperial princess in marriage. So far, so good, but here’s where things get hairy: Wang Su was already married. This didn’t have to be a problem in a polygynous society, but there was a catch. The first wife, one Lady Xie 謝氏, would normally have enjoyed the highest status; however, she was the daughter of a high-ranking Southern court official, but not a member of any kind of imperial nobility. The difference in status is glaringly obvious when you notice the two different verbs used to describe Wang Su’s two marriages.

The text reads 肅在江南之日，聘謝氏女為妻，及至京師，復尚公主 “While Wang Su was in the South, he took a daughter of the Xie clan to wife; after his arrival in Luoyang, he was subsequently honored with the hand of a princess in marriage.” The first, active verb 聘…為妻 “to take as a wife” contrasts with the passive verb 尚 “to be honored with marriage to.” It seems clear that the princess could not possibly have been made subordinate to Lady Xie in the same household, as a second wife ordinarily would be. Other texts suggest that Wang Su left Lady Xie and her children in the South and set up his new household with the princess. Lady Xie came North with their children in 500 to find herself abandoned, so she wrote her husband an admonitory five-character verse 五言詩:

本為箔上蠶，
今作機上絲。
得絡逐勝去，
頗憶纏綿時。
Once I was a silkworm in a bamboo tray,
But now I am floss on the loom.
Reeled out as thread, I must follow the warp-beam,
But I still recall the time when I was snugly entwined.

It’s a wonderful use of textile metaphors to contrast Lady Xie’s time safely cocooned in her household in the South to her experience of being drawn out, unrolled, pulled along by the movement of the warp-beam, which seems clearly to represent her husband, who was responsible for the uprooting of the family and then for Lady Xie being left longing for the loving security of her old life. But before Wang Su could reply, the princess replied on his behalf:

針是貫線物，
目中恒任絲。
得帛縫新去，
何能納故時。
The needle, which is made to be strung,
Must always bear the floss in its eye.
Gaining a piece of woven silk, it sews a new seam;
How can it patch the old work of former times?

This is a searingly dismissive rejoinder to Lady Xie’s poem, but it is an elegant response as well. It parallels the form of the first poem, using the same rhyming characters (at the end of lines 2 and 4) (line 3 is also parallel), and framing itself in textile metaphors. Here, their shared husband Wang Su is not a warp-beam on a loom, but a needle (ahem); and where Lady Xie is a silkworm cocoon spun into thread and stretched on the loom, the princess is a fully woven piece of silk. The word I’ve rendered as “patch” is also an insult: it means to repair something with closely spaced stitches something like sashiko work, and is used especially to describe sewing layers of cloth together to make shoe soles. It’s a workmanlike and unbeautiful technique, and you don’t use it on silk.

Just to show how shot through with the language of textiles both poems are, I marked the relevant characters in red. It’s worth recalling that sericulture was broadly understood as women’s work from a very early time.

Both these women were evidently literate enough, and erudite enough, to express their rivalry in elegant poetry with a throughline of textile metaphor. It seems to have succeeded in calling Wang Su to account on some level: the text ends by saying 肅甚有愧謝之色，遂造正覺寺以憩之 “Wang Su was shamefaced before Lady Xie, and subsequently built the Zhengjue Convent as a place for her to reside.” Which, all things considered, seems like the least he could do.

This is a sufficiently amazing story for a single post, but it gets much more interesting once you dig into the lives of Wang Su’s two wives. Stay tuned for a future post in which we recount the completely bonkers history of the princess, her multiple marriages, and her famous escape from the palace to escape a forced marriage to the empress’ brother.