笔记 高居翰 隔江山色
Hills Beyond a River
Chinese Painting of the Yuan Dynasty，1279-1368
by James Cahill
词汇、句子及观点的摘抄
in overambitiousness 富有抱负
intend to 试图
address oneself to 论述 致力于
archaism 古体 古语
symposium 讨论会 座谈会
fukuism 复古主义
neoclassicism 新古典主义
primitivism (宗教、艺术或生活方式上的)原始主义,尚古主义,原始的风格
Confucian literati
scholar-official
all but adv.几乎, 差一点
literati 文人 artisan 画匠
hereditary aristocracy 世袭贵族
antiquarianism 古物研究
illustrious predecessor 先贤
Intellectual and social issues tended to be formulated, discussed, and even solved in terms of the classics and commentaries.
give lodging to one's mind 构筑心灵家园
saw the man in his painting 画如其人
plebeian n. 平民, 庶民 adj. 平民的, 卑俗的
connoisseur n. (艺术品的)鉴赏家, 鉴定家, 内行
The disciplines required of the artist were not those normally included in "studing painting"; they comprised such matters as sharpening one's sense of style and becoming familiar with old styles through the study of antique paintings; perfecting one's brushwork, partly through the practice of the companion art of calligraphy; and refining one's perceptions and taste through constant, dedicated immersion both in nature and in the literati culture.
Stigma n. 污名, (植物)柱头, [动物] 气门, 耻辱
Avoid the stigma of commercialism 避免商业主义的污名
Khubilai Khan 忽必烈
Formidable adj. 强大的, 令人敬畏的, 可怕的, 艰难的
Formidable barriers
Prostitute 妓女 pauper 乞丐
Geomancy 风水 feng-shui
Couch v.(用语言)表达
insofar adv.在...的范围 insofar as …
innocuous=insipid 平淡
two clumps of orchid leaves
dilute ink 淡墨
unobtrusive 不显眼的
cryptic adj. 秘密的, 含义模糊的, 神秘的, 隐藏的
cryptic poem
nostril n. 鼻孔
high-principled adj. 节操高尚的
connotation n. 含蓄, 储蓄的东西(词、语等), 内涵
withdrawn adj. 性格内向的,偏僻的, 孤独的
recluse adj. 隐遁的, 寂寞的 n. 隐遁者, 寂寞者
a talented and learned man
an age of economic decline, physical hardship, and spiritual anguish
As always, factors within the artistic tradition interacted with others ouside it to determine the new direction.
In a historical vacuum
Done by men of a different social class with different backgrounds, ideals, and motivations, produced under different conditions for a different audience, painting could not help but change in fundamental and far-reaching ways.
They compiled the histories, expounded and transmitted the classics, wrote the poetry and other literature(including most of what is now considered popular literature—stories, novels, dramas), composed and performed the music, all but monopolized the art of calligraphy, and after the Sung, made up most of the major movements in painting. Their medium of communication for information and articulate thought was always, of course, prose writing. But poetry and calligraphy, along with music, had also from very early times come to be thought of as vehicles for a subtler kind of communication, as expressive arts through which the finest colorations of feeling and thought, shifting moods, the very quality of one’s mind, could be embodied and conveyed to the minds of others.
At length 最后
Freely rendered
In the great space and expanse before my eyes, there’s only the pure breeze of the present and the past.
Connotation 内涵
Demon-queller Chung-K’uei
High-strung animal 高度紧张的动物
Gaunt and bony 瘦骨嶙峋
Colophon 书籍末页
Mounted 裱好的
Live a wretched, impoverished, and unsettled life
Compose poems and make paintings
The difference is as plain as that between jade and worthless stones
Sobriquet 号
So as to 如此……以至于
Expand the style’s expressive range and repertory of subjects
Tonal contrast 色调对比
Undulating line 波浪线
From mass to surface to line
The finest of his extant figure painting
We should note that our use of the term “archaism” is intended to embrace a number of modes in which the early styles were revived—or evoked, imitated, alluded to, played upon—by later artists; all of these have in common a conscious assigning of special value to the style because of it antiquity.
Concubine 妃妾
Handscrolls are always read from right to left
Plump favorite corpulent beauty 肥美
Be enamored of 倾心于
Album leaf 册页
Pavilion 亭
Schematic pattern 示意形式
Retreat 退隐
It is easy enough to reply that true quality will always reveal itself to the discerning eye, whatever the style; in practice, however, it is nor nearly so simple, and works of art that are excellent on their own aesthetic terms have often been dismissed as insignificant or bad by otherwise sensitive critics who were judging them by wrong criteria. The problem is common in, but scarcely peculiar to, later Chinese painting.
Bear admiring colophon
Crystallization 结晶
Wang’s innovation may have been—and on works survive to tell us—it was followed in the tenth century by the emergence of landscape styles in which small, densely repeated brushstrokes, particularly of the varieties known as ts’un (texture strokes) and tien (dots), replaced the old color washes as fillings for landscape form, giving them richly tactile surfaces and a sense of earthy reality.
Undertake those explorations of space and atmosphere, monumental mountain structures or romantic mist-filled panoramas, that are the supreme achievements of Sung painting.
By Max Loehr: “The Sung painter, using his style as a tool, tackles the problem of how to depict mountain and water; the Yuan painter, using mountain and water as his media, tackles the problem of creating a style.”
Occupied himself with literary composition and painting
Mongol dignitary 蒙古权贵
Spurious signature 伪款
Or perhaps the high praise his horses were given leads us to expect too much and to disbelieve examples that are really from his hand.
Paper’s slight roughness of surface and greater absorbency allowed varieties of brushwork, essential to the scholar-painters’ styles, that were difficult or impossible on silk.
The brush is more heavily loaded with slightly dilute ink, so that the strokes are not distinct but run together into puddly, mottled areas.
Inkstone
Ch’i-yun is “spirit resonance,” a quality which, since the original appearance of the term in the first of the famous Six Laws of the late-fifth-century critic Hsieh Ho, had been the prime desideratum in painting. In later centuries it served as an ill-defined but regularly invoked criterion of excellence. In literati-painting theory it is the personal quality of the artist as an individual that is manifested as ch’i-yun in his works; one cannot get it by practice or effort.
Nymph of the Lo River 洛神
Couplet 对联 quatrain 四行诗
Chao’s painting, like Ch’ien’s, is severe, even bleak in mood; no softening atmosphere, no naturalistic detail, relieves the dry, schematic, intellectually oriented rendering of the scene.
Overlap and interweave thick, dry-bursh strokes
Massif 山丘
Ravine 溪谷
Tripartite division in depth(foreground land mass with tall trees, middle ground with house, distant mountains)
Purported 谣传的 传说的
Seals are all spurious
Exquisite work 精致细腻的作品
Brushwork of the utmost refinement
Undulating contours and deep crevices
The delicacy of touch and lightness of tone relieve the masses of any sense of ponderousness, so that the crowding of the composition is not oppressive.
We can characterize that direction as both antidecorative and antirealistic. In the centuries before Sung, painting had drawn on a pre-pictorial and ornamental tradition for many of its motives and had made unabashed use of decorative effects. Under the Sung, decorative values, while still presents, were subordinated to profoundly realistic aims; paintings were objectifications of penetrating perceptions of the natural world. But such painting now seemed no longer possible; attempts by minor masters such as Meng Yu-chien and Sun Chun-tse to continue conservative Sung traditions failed to add much that was new, and in most cases failed as well to rise much above the level of mechanical performances in what had become an essentially decorative idiom. Meanwhile, the more progressive artists moved in the direction of what Max Loehr has termed a “supra-representational art.” Turning away from these earlier concerns, they concentrated on the creation of styles that were personal, expressive, recognizably but unobtrusively involved with the past, intellectually conditioned. Painting became, for the Yuan intellectual, a means of self-cultivation and communication; it became, in Loehr’s famous phrase, a humanistic discipline.
Inebriated 醉酒的
Weathered rock 风化的岩石
Unclouded mind
Mountains and trees had been so dissolved in mist as to seem evanescent
Restore to landscape painting an antique majesty and sternness
Silhouette 侧面轮廓
Expurngate the bad habits of Sung
The hilltops, simplified though they are into mere crescents of graded wash, loom as domed masses above the fog
Students should give exhaustive attention to the distinction
Wield one’s brush 挥笔
He injects elements that induce visual restlessness: the eye is kept constantly moving by the curling of the texture strokes, the S-curve winding of the mountain ridge, the broken light-dark patterning.
Follow antique models in removing all the scenery some distance from the viewer, who seems to gaze on it from an elevated and remote vantage point.
The theme of the cultivated and sensitive man enjoying some seasonal aspect of nature, which the painter conveys so skillfully as to excite in the viewer some corresponding, recollected response, was a favorite of the Sung Academy masters and their later imitators.
As one traverses the rocky bank in the foreground to reach this middle area, a theme of agitation is introduced in the nervous contour drawing—the restlessly wavering texture strokes that move over the surfaces, the staccato clusters of black tien, the rocky ground itself—a theme that is continued above the house and carried upward and back along the winding ridge nearly to the top of the painting. Sources for this distinctively animated mountain form and the dynamic quality of the whole are to be found in the Li-Kuo tradition.
Desolate stillness 荒冷孤清
Diviner 算卦的
Crotchety and unsociable 孤僻
Betray some awkwardness
The drifting “breath” of the landscape
In its broad and relaxed brushwork and tranquilizing repetition of simple forms, it exemplifies perfectly the “plainness and blandness” (p’ing-tan) which was among the qualities most pursued and praised in literati painting.
Brush’s tip remaining always within the stroke(“centering the tip”) so that no sharply pointed or hooked ends protrude.
It offers more than it may at first seem to, however, and not the same things to all.
The special values of Yuan painting are to be glimpsed here: the interest of the painting does not depend on its presentation of any beautiful or extraordinary scenery, nor does the artist subject nature to any striking distortions. He only makes it conform to a special vocabulary of motifs and shapes and brush movements that is his own. We may say, with the Chinese, that the painting reveals the man, or arrive at the same point by a roundabout route: the painting functions less as an image of nature than as an object embodying style, and that style is a revelation of the man in whose mind and hand it inhered. The values are in any case abstract ones, somewhat divorced from the value of the painting as a picture; and as an abstract structure it is in as precise, as controlled, as personal a language as a sonata by Mozart.
Villa 小屋 verandah 阳台 走廊
Lute 琵琶
Sough 嗖嗖声
Heedless of west or east 不辨东西
His song goes forth to ripple of waves, wind in the tassels of reeds.
Brew tea 泡茶
Pagoda 宝塔
An abbreviated manner of rendering is used throughout.
Play upon 利用
Aristocratic recluse has retreated from the city to escape the dust and heat of summer
Ma Yuan’s “large axe-cut” texture strokes
Close off the space 隔离空间
Ink tone
Shaol 沙洲 shore 河岸
The elegantly angular forms of the foreground, delineated in continuous, unhesitating outlines, and their arrangement into a lucid spatial scheme, exhibit a crystalline clarity and technical perfection which were just the features that the scholar-painters and their imitators were in full flight from.
The impression of sunlight on melting snow, of trees newly fused with life in early spring, of travelers hurrying toward lodgings before the sun sets, is incisively captured.
Spurious 伪造的
Recalcitrant mule 倔驴
Magistrate 地方官 文职官员
Literary sources say that
Hillock 小丘 bluff 悬崖 massif 山丘
Mannerism （言语、写作中的）特殊习惯 怪癖
Eery, queasy, inhospitable 怪诞不安、不稳定、荒凉
Detritus 碎石
Oeuvre 全部作品
Bon vivant 喜锦衣玉食者
Sense of extravagant caprice
Loess erosion 黄土侵蚀
Wild grandeur of the great early originals
It solves no major problems but only evades them
Flat washes of dilute ink on water and sky emphasize the whiteness of the snow-covered land areas and enhance the feeling of cold.
Kiosk 凉亭
Bandit 强盗
Hemp-fiber ts’un (texture strokes) 披麻皴
Alum rocks 矾头
Lever distance 平远 removed distance 阔远 high distance 高远
The method of using the brush in landscape painting is called the “continuity of sinew and bone.” 山水中用笔法，谓之筋骨相连。
In spring the myriad things of nature are bursting with life. In summer the trees are luxuriant and variegate. In autumn the myriad forms are awesome in their decline. In winter the mists and fogs are somber and thin, the sky looks blurred and dim. 春则万物发生，夏则树木繁冗，秋则万象肃杀，冬则烟云暗淡。
Magnum opus 巨作
The Ch’ien-lung emperor (reigned 1736-96), a voracious collector apparently driven more by sheer possessiveness than by purer aesthetic sentiments, desired it obsessively, and finally acquired it.
Huang’s painting seems to have come into being as the product of a succession of creative impulses, involving momentary decisions, changes of plan, even caprice, along with the patient building up of hills and rocks, bushes and trees.
On first acquaintance
Inkstone 砚
Courtesan 名妓
Dreams of Mount Wu ( the Chinese literary euphemism) 巫山云雨
Red Turban 红巾军
Revealing excerpts 有启发性的摘录
Sit talking by lamplight 秉烛夜谈
Outside, the north wind wailed with cold, and frosty moonlight overlay all the earth. The shadows of trees formed fragmentary patterns on the windows. The two of us, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, dozing and waking again—a thousand years of the great world, with its moments of glory and of shame, were only dimly recalled stories and did not defile our teeth and tongue.
Feeling of rootlessness 冒昧揣度
Calabash 葫芦
Cassia tree 桂树
Safely assume 保守估计
Separating “the jade from the stones,” the true works of his hand from among the thousands of paintings ascribed to him, is a difficult and unfinished task.
Retouch 润饰
Ni Tsan formula: a foreground bank with a few trees and a four-posted shelter; a broad expanse of water separating the two land masses; hills marking a high horizon.
Promontory 岬
Knoll 小山 hillock 小丘
Contemplative frame of mind
Ni Tsan’s vision and feeling are private, and yet are shared with anyone who looks seriously and sympathetically at his paintings.
The fabric of the forms, now entirely without washes, reaches the point of thinness, transparence, weightlessness, that is the quality Ni Tsan was forever working toward.
Remnants of mountains and residual waters 残山剩水
Plainness and blandness 平淡
They are “pure” or “chaste” in that they have been purged of all that is stimulating, all that invites sensory participation.
Done with a slanting brush lightly loaded with dilute ink 淡墨轻扫
Hermitage 偏僻的寺院
Firewood gatherer 山樵
Reign-name 年号
Aim at using his brush conceptions to embody his understanding of the wonders of natural phenomena
Inlet 小港 水湾
Fall short 缺乏 不足
The Forest Grotto at Chu-chu 具区林屋
Archaistic fish-net wave pattern
Cottage 村舍
Prose style as “verbose and scornfull of the rules”
Sanskrit 梵语 mendicant 乞丐
Expanding a single meaning, we exhaust a myriad meanings
The essay and painting complement each other nicely.
Potted 盆栽的 altar 祭坛
A sense of ideal sequestered life 理想中的隐逸生活之感
Zoom lens 变焦透视
Achieve an effect of towering height by piling ridge upon ridge, peak beyond peak
With the decisive and irreversible shift of emphasis to landscape painting around the tenth century, figure painting slipped into a secondary position.
Professional painters, meanwhile, went on supplying the demand for certain kinds of functional pictures: representations of auspicious themes for New Year’s display; pictures symbolic of longevity, or wealth and success, or a prodigious progeny, which were presented to people to wish them those blessings; religious paintings to be hung in temples.
Miscellany 杂记
Abbot 修道士
Bodhidharma 达摩 was the sixth-century Indian monk who is credited with bringing the Ch’an Buddhist doctrine to China and who became the first patriarch of the Ch’an sect there.
Beatific 祝福的 快乐的
A slight enigmatic smile
Personage 要人 名流
Maidservant 女佣
Man’s fate is fixed: from meetings and partings none can ever escape.
Afflatus 一阵风 灵感 神的启示
Drapery line 衣纹
Mencius 孟子
Suave，fine line
Give it a degree of monumentality
Webbed foot 蹼
Scaly skin
Like the plum and orchid, it symbolized human virtues, with its stalk supple but resilient, hollow-hearted( a Taoist and Ch’an ideal: one’s mind should not be clogged with desires), its leaves holding onto the stalk through the winter; it was modest in appearance but served many uses and grew simply and sturdily wherever one wanted it.
Oeuvre 全部作品
Painting is soundless poetry and poetry, painting with sound.
Moss and lichens 青苔
Although its syntax and vocabulary might be unfamiliar
Chinese Painting of the Yuan Dynasty，1279-1368
by James Cahill
词汇、句子及观点的摘抄
in overambitiousness 富有抱负
intend to 试图
address oneself to 论述 致力于
archaism 古体 古语
symposium 讨论会 座谈会
fukuism 复古主义
neoclassicism 新古典主义
primitivism (宗教、艺术或生活方式上的)原始主义,尚古主义,原始的风格
Confucian literati
scholar-official
all but adv.几乎, 差一点
literati 文人 artisan 画匠
hereditary aristocracy 世袭贵族
antiquarianism 古物研究
illustrious predecessor 先贤
Intellectual and social issues tended to be formulated, discussed, and even solved in terms of the classics and commentaries.
give lodging to one's mind 构筑心灵家园
saw the man in his painting 画如其人
plebeian n. 平民, 庶民 adj. 平民的, 卑俗的
connoisseur n. (艺术品的)鉴赏家, 鉴定家, 内行
The disciplines required of the artist were not those normally included in "studing painting"; they comprised such matters as sharpening one's sense of style and becoming familiar with old styles through the study of antique paintings; perfecting one's brushwork, partly through the practice of the companion art of calligraphy; and refining one's perceptions and taste through constant, dedicated immersion both in nature and in the literati culture.
Stigma n. 污名, (植物)柱头, [动物] 气门, 耻辱
Avoid the stigma of commercialism 避免商业主义的污名
Khubilai Khan 忽必烈
Formidable adj. 强大的, 令人敬畏的, 可怕的, 艰难的
Formidable barriers
Prostitute 妓女 pauper 乞丐
Geomancy 风水 feng-shui
Couch v.(用语言)表达
insofar adv.在...的范围 insofar as …
innocuous=insipid 平淡
two clumps of orchid leaves
dilute ink 淡墨
unobtrusive 不显眼的
cryptic adj. 秘密的, 含义模糊的, 神秘的, 隐藏的
cryptic poem
nostril n. 鼻孔
high-principled adj. 节操高尚的
connotation n. 含蓄, 储蓄的东西(词、语等), 内涵
withdrawn adj. 性格内向的,偏僻的, 孤独的
recluse adj. 隐遁的, 寂寞的 n. 隐遁者, 寂寞者
a talented and learned man
an age of economic decline, physical hardship, and spiritual anguish
As always, factors within the artistic tradition interacted with others ouside it to determine the new direction.
In a historical vacuum
Done by men of a different social class with different backgrounds, ideals, and motivations, produced under different conditions for a different audience, painting could not help but change in fundamental and far-reaching ways.
They compiled the histories, expounded and transmitted the classics, wrote the poetry and other literature(including most of what is now considered popular literature—stories, novels, dramas), composed and performed the music, all but monopolized the art of calligraphy, and after the Sung, made up most of the major movements in painting. Their medium of communication for information and articulate thought was always, of course, prose writing. But poetry and calligraphy, along with music, had also from very early times come to be thought of as vehicles for a subtler kind of communication, as expressive arts through which the finest colorations of feeling and thought, shifting moods, the very quality of one’s mind, could be embodied and conveyed to the minds of others.
At length 最后
Freely rendered
In the great space and expanse before my eyes, there’s only the pure breeze of the present and the past.
Connotation 内涵
Demon-queller Chung-K’uei
High-strung animal 高度紧张的动物
Gaunt and bony 瘦骨嶙峋
Colophon 书籍末页
Mounted 裱好的
Live a wretched, impoverished, and unsettled life
Compose poems and make paintings
The difference is as plain as that between jade and worthless stones
Sobriquet 号
So as to 如此……以至于
Expand the style’s expressive range and repertory of subjects
Tonal contrast 色调对比
Undulating line 波浪线
From mass to surface to line
The finest of his extant figure painting
We should note that our use of the term “archaism” is intended to embrace a number of modes in which the early styles were revived—or evoked, imitated, alluded to, played upon—by later artists; all of these have in common a conscious assigning of special value to the style because of it antiquity.
Concubine 妃妾
Handscrolls are always read from right to left
Plump favorite corpulent beauty 肥美
Be enamored of 倾心于
Album leaf 册页
Pavilion 亭
Schematic pattern 示意形式
Retreat 退隐
It is easy enough to reply that true quality will always reveal itself to the discerning eye, whatever the style; in practice, however, it is nor nearly so simple, and works of art that are excellent on their own aesthetic terms have often been dismissed as insignificant or bad by otherwise sensitive critics who were judging them by wrong criteria. The problem is common in, but scarcely peculiar to, later Chinese painting.
Bear admiring colophon
Crystallization 结晶
Wang’s innovation may have been—and on works survive to tell us—it was followed in the tenth century by the emergence of landscape styles in which small, densely repeated brushstrokes, particularly of the varieties known as ts’un (texture strokes) and tien (dots), replaced the old color washes as fillings for landscape form, giving them richly tactile surfaces and a sense of earthy reality.
Undertake those explorations of space and atmosphere, monumental mountain structures or romantic mist-filled panoramas, that are the supreme achievements of Sung painting.
By Max Loehr: “The Sung painter, using his style as a tool, tackles the problem of how to depict mountain and water; the Yuan painter, using mountain and water as his media, tackles the problem of creating a style.”
Occupied himself with literary composition and painting
Mongol dignitary 蒙古权贵
Spurious signature 伪款
Or perhaps the high praise his horses were given leads us to expect too much and to disbelieve examples that are really from his hand.
Paper’s slight roughness of surface and greater absorbency allowed varieties of brushwork, essential to the scholar-painters’ styles, that were difficult or impossible on silk.
The brush is more heavily loaded with slightly dilute ink, so that the strokes are not distinct but run together into puddly, mottled areas.
Inkstone
Ch’i-yun is “spirit resonance,” a quality which, since the original appearance of the term in the first of the famous Six Laws of the late-fifth-century critic Hsieh Ho, had been the prime desideratum in painting. In later centuries it served as an ill-defined but regularly invoked criterion of excellence. In literati-painting theory it is the personal quality of the artist as an individual that is manifested as ch’i-yun in his works; one cannot get it by practice or effort.
Nymph of the Lo River 洛神
Couplet 对联 quatrain 四行诗
Chao’s painting, like Ch’ien’s, is severe, even bleak in mood; no softening atmosphere, no naturalistic detail, relieves the dry, schematic, intellectually oriented rendering of the scene.
Overlap and interweave thick, dry-bursh strokes
Massif 山丘
Ravine 溪谷
Tripartite division in depth(foreground land mass with tall trees, middle ground with house, distant mountains)
Purported 谣传的 传说的
Seals are all spurious
Exquisite work 精致细腻的作品
Brushwork of the utmost refinement
Undulating contours and deep crevices
The delicacy of touch and lightness of tone relieve the masses of any sense of ponderousness, so that the crowding of the composition is not oppressive.
We can characterize that direction as both antidecorative and antirealistic. In the centuries before Sung, painting had drawn on a pre-pictorial and ornamental tradition for many of its motives and had made unabashed use of decorative effects. Under the Sung, decorative values, while still presents, were subordinated to profoundly realistic aims; paintings were objectifications of penetrating perceptions of the natural world. But such painting now seemed no longer possible; attempts by minor masters such as Meng Yu-chien and Sun Chun-tse to continue conservative Sung traditions failed to add much that was new, and in most cases failed as well to rise much above the level of mechanical performances in what had become an essentially decorative idiom. Meanwhile, the more progressive artists moved in the direction of what Max Loehr has termed a “supra-representational art.” Turning away from these earlier concerns, they concentrated on the creation of styles that were personal, expressive, recognizably but unobtrusively involved with the past, intellectually conditioned. Painting became, for the Yuan intellectual, a means of self-cultivation and communication; it became, in Loehr’s famous phrase, a humanistic discipline.
Inebriated 醉酒的
Weathered rock 风化的岩石
Unclouded mind
Mountains and trees had been so dissolved in mist as to seem evanescent
Restore to landscape painting an antique majesty and sternness
Silhouette 侧面轮廓
Expurngate the bad habits of Sung
The hilltops, simplified though they are into mere crescents of graded wash, loom as domed masses above the fog
Students should give exhaustive attention to the distinction
Wield one’s brush 挥笔
He injects elements that induce visual restlessness: the eye is kept constantly moving by the curling of the texture strokes, the S-curve winding of the mountain ridge, the broken light-dark patterning.
Follow antique models in removing all the scenery some distance from the viewer, who seems to gaze on it from an elevated and remote vantage point.
The theme of the cultivated and sensitive man enjoying some seasonal aspect of nature, which the painter conveys so skillfully as to excite in the viewer some corresponding, recollected response, was a favorite of the Sung Academy masters and their later imitators.
As one traverses the rocky bank in the foreground to reach this middle area, a theme of agitation is introduced in the nervous contour drawing—the restlessly wavering texture strokes that move over the surfaces, the staccato clusters of black tien, the rocky ground itself—a theme that is continued above the house and carried upward and back along the winding ridge nearly to the top of the painting. Sources for this distinctively animated mountain form and the dynamic quality of the whole are to be found in the Li-Kuo tradition.
Desolate stillness 荒冷孤清
Diviner 算卦的
Crotchety and unsociable 孤僻
Betray some awkwardness
The drifting “breath” of the landscape
In its broad and relaxed brushwork and tranquilizing repetition of simple forms, it exemplifies perfectly the “plainness and blandness” (p’ing-tan) which was among the qualities most pursued and praised in literati painting.
Brush’s tip remaining always within the stroke(“centering the tip”) so that no sharply pointed or hooked ends protrude.
It offers more than it may at first seem to, however, and not the same things to all.
The special values of Yuan painting are to be glimpsed here: the interest of the painting does not depend on its presentation of any beautiful or extraordinary scenery, nor does the artist subject nature to any striking distortions. He only makes it conform to a special vocabulary of motifs and shapes and brush movements that is his own. We may say, with the Chinese, that the painting reveals the man, or arrive at the same point by a roundabout route: the painting functions less as an image of nature than as an object embodying style, and that style is a revelation of the man in whose mind and hand it inhered. The values are in any case abstract ones, somewhat divorced from the value of the painting as a picture; and as an abstract structure it is in as precise, as controlled, as personal a language as a sonata by Mozart.
Villa 小屋 verandah 阳台 走廊
Lute 琵琶
Sough 嗖嗖声
Heedless of west or east 不辨东西
His song goes forth to ripple of waves, wind in the tassels of reeds.
Brew tea 泡茶
Pagoda 宝塔
An abbreviated manner of rendering is used throughout.
Play upon 利用
Aristocratic recluse has retreated from the city to escape the dust and heat of summer
Ma Yuan’s “large axe-cut” texture strokes
Close off the space 隔离空间
Ink tone
Shaol 沙洲 shore 河岸
The elegantly angular forms of the foreground, delineated in continuous, unhesitating outlines, and their arrangement into a lucid spatial scheme, exhibit a crystalline clarity and technical perfection which were just the features that the scholar-painters and their imitators were in full flight from.
The impression of sunlight on melting snow, of trees newly fused with life in early spring, of travelers hurrying toward lodgings before the sun sets, is incisively captured.
Spurious 伪造的
Recalcitrant mule 倔驴
Magistrate 地方官 文职官员
Literary sources say that
Hillock 小丘 bluff 悬崖 massif 山丘
Mannerism （言语、写作中的）特殊习惯 怪癖
Eery, queasy, inhospitable 怪诞不安、不稳定、荒凉
Detritus 碎石
Oeuvre 全部作品
Bon vivant 喜锦衣玉食者
Sense of extravagant caprice
Loess erosion 黄土侵蚀
Wild grandeur of the great early originals
It solves no major problems but only evades them
Flat washes of dilute ink on water and sky emphasize the whiteness of the snow-covered land areas and enhance the feeling of cold.
Kiosk 凉亭
Bandit 强盗
Hemp-fiber ts’un (texture strokes) 披麻皴
Alum rocks 矾头
Lever distance 平远 removed distance 阔远 high distance 高远
The method of using the brush in landscape painting is called the “continuity of sinew and bone.” 山水中用笔法，谓之筋骨相连。
In spring the myriad things of nature are bursting with life. In summer the trees are luxuriant and variegate. In autumn the myriad forms are awesome in their decline. In winter the mists and fogs are somber and thin, the sky looks blurred and dim. 春则万物发生，夏则树木繁冗，秋则万象肃杀，冬则烟云暗淡。
Magnum opus 巨作
The Ch’ien-lung emperor (reigned 1736-96), a voracious collector apparently driven more by sheer possessiveness than by purer aesthetic sentiments, desired it obsessively, and finally acquired it.
Huang’s painting seems to have come into being as the product of a succession of creative impulses, involving momentary decisions, changes of plan, even caprice, along with the patient building up of hills and rocks, bushes and trees.
On first acquaintance
Inkstone 砚
Courtesan 名妓
Dreams of Mount Wu ( the Chinese literary euphemism) 巫山云雨
Red Turban 红巾军
Revealing excerpts 有启发性的摘录
Sit talking by lamplight 秉烛夜谈
Outside, the north wind wailed with cold, and frosty moonlight overlay all the earth. The shadows of trees formed fragmentary patterns on the windows. The two of us, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, dozing and waking again—a thousand years of the great world, with its moments of glory and of shame, were only dimly recalled stories and did not defile our teeth and tongue.
Feeling of rootlessness 冒昧揣度
Calabash 葫芦
Cassia tree 桂树
Safely assume 保守估计
Separating “the jade from the stones,” the true works of his hand from among the thousands of paintings ascribed to him, is a difficult and unfinished task.
Retouch 润饰
Ni Tsan formula: a foreground bank with a few trees and a four-posted shelter; a broad expanse of water separating the two land masses; hills marking a high horizon.
Promontory 岬
Knoll 小山 hillock 小丘
Contemplative frame of mind
Ni Tsan’s vision and feeling are private, and yet are shared with anyone who looks seriously and sympathetically at his paintings.
The fabric of the forms, now entirely without washes, reaches the point of thinness, transparence, weightlessness, that is the quality Ni Tsan was forever working toward.
Remnants of mountains and residual waters 残山剩水
Plainness and blandness 平淡
They are “pure” or “chaste” in that they have been purged of all that is stimulating, all that invites sensory participation.
Done with a slanting brush lightly loaded with dilute ink 淡墨轻扫
Hermitage 偏僻的寺院
Firewood gatherer 山樵
Reign-name 年号
Aim at using his brush conceptions to embody his understanding of the wonders of natural phenomena
Inlet 小港 水湾
Fall short 缺乏 不足
The Forest Grotto at Chu-chu 具区林屋
Archaistic fish-net wave pattern
Cottage 村舍
Prose style as “verbose and scornfull of the rules”
Sanskrit 梵语 mendicant 乞丐
Expanding a single meaning, we exhaust a myriad meanings
The essay and painting complement each other nicely.
Potted 盆栽的 altar 祭坛
A sense of ideal sequestered life 理想中的隐逸生活之感
Zoom lens 变焦透视
Achieve an effect of towering height by piling ridge upon ridge, peak beyond peak
With the decisive and irreversible shift of emphasis to landscape painting around the tenth century, figure painting slipped into a secondary position.
Professional painters, meanwhile, went on supplying the demand for certain kinds of functional pictures: representations of auspicious themes for New Year’s display; pictures symbolic of longevity, or wealth and success, or a prodigious progeny, which were presented to people to wish them those blessings; religious paintings to be hung in temples.
Miscellany 杂记
Abbot 修道士
Bodhidharma 达摩 was the sixth-century Indian monk who is credited with bringing the Ch’an Buddhist doctrine to China and who became the first patriarch of the Ch’an sect there.
Beatific 祝福的 快乐的
A slight enigmatic smile
Personage 要人 名流
Maidservant 女佣
Man’s fate is fixed: from meetings and partings none can ever escape.
Afflatus 一阵风 灵感 神的启示
Drapery line 衣纹
Mencius 孟子
Suave，fine line
Give it a degree of monumentality
Webbed foot 蹼
Scaly skin
Like the plum and orchid, it symbolized human virtues, with its stalk supple but resilient, hollow-hearted( a Taoist and Ch’an ideal: one’s mind should not be clogged with desires), its leaves holding onto the stalk through the winter; it was modest in appearance but served many uses and grew simply and sturdily wherever one wanted it.
Oeuvre 全部作品
Painting is soundless poetry and poetry, painting with sound.
Moss and lichens 青苔
Although its syntax and vocabulary might be unfamiliar
