How to Love Like a Mountain
EARLY IN 2021, my friend Professor Huang Shaozheng (“Hunter”) asked if I would help him finesse a new translation he was making of the folk songs of Liu Sanjie. Liu Sanjie is widely celebrated in China, in particular in her native Guilin. With her it is hard and pointless, to separate the life from the legend. Her songs, a thousand years old, belong to the tradition of the mountain songs of her people, the Zhuang of the Karst mountains of China’s south. It is said this third daughter of a peasant family was of unrivalled beauty and wit, and her singing voice rivalled the birds. She is said to have caught the eye of a local landlord, to have rejected him, to have bested the music scholars he imported from the city to shame her, and to have fled his tyranny to live obscurely in the mountains with her lover—or to have been turned by the gods, with him, into a songbird, to escape a penalty of death. Confucian scholars named her a prodigy and married her off above her station to a noble. Mao’s regime recruited her as a working class heroine. Later she was made over into an embodiment of Shuang culture and used to support Guangzi’s claim to special administrative status.
I knew nothing of her, though a film of her legend made her world famous in the sixties. Hunter, who has been my translator on many visits to China, felt that a new English translation of her songs was needed because existing attempts had failed to catch the humanity, the earthiness, the pluck, the feminity, and the eros of her songs. It struck him, as it strikes me, that Liu Sanjie could almost be—in her outsider status, in her independence of mind, in her femininity and her refusal to join anyone’s party or share anyone’s bed but her own or her lover’s—a poster child for out times. My role in Hunter’s project, once I got to know Liu Sanjie, was to help Hunter with the idiom of his translations, to edit his wonderful introduction, and to write a preface to the book, just out in China, in which this bold new translation appears.
The book, Liu Sanjie: Her Free & Undying Mountain Songs, was launched last weekend in Beijing. I made this short clip, which summarises my preface, “How to Love Like a Mountain.” My essay ends with these words:
“Here, then, is Liu Sanjie, freed from others’ orthodoxies, walking in the integrity of her own ideas, in the music of her own heart, in the weather of her own culture, in the idiom of her own mountain realm. Liberated by this humane rendering of her profoundly human life and works, in which each of us can find a self it’s still not too late yet to be…”
