Seeing Off Ling Che, Liu Changqing (Tang Shi #237)

[lnhammer]

Dark green, the bamboo forest temple;
Somber, a bell toll in the dusk.
You wear your broad-brim hat at sunset,
Returning alone to far green hills.

送灵澈
苍苍竹林寺，
杳杳钟声晚。
荷笠带斜阳，
青山独归远。

Context suggests that Ling Che is on a Buddhist pilgrimage, thus “you” as the implied pronoun. There’s a lot of semantic play in the original, little of which comes through in my version. Liu Changqing has 11 poems in this collection.

---L.

Comments

[thawrecka]

I definitely got a strong sense of Buddhist pilgrimage from the poem, even before I read your explanation. Which probably just means I've read a lot more poems and short stories about people going on Buddhist pilgrimages than I realised.

[lnhammer]

FWIW, the word for “temple” is specifically a Buddhist temple. He said, belatedly realizing the shorthand of temple for Buddhist and shrine for shinto/anything else does not hold heard. Darn those Japanese reflexes!