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A pure jade bracelet, uniform in color—
My jacket’s light, it seems my wrist’s exposed.
I raise my sleeve, wanting to block my shame:
I re-conceal it, and tidy my wild hair.
近代雜詩一首
玉釧色未分，
衫輕似露腕。
舉袖欲障羞，
回持理發亂。
"Modern" in this case seems to mean composed within a generation or so of the anthology's compilation, which was probably in the 530s. I'm not sure how to understand 回持 (huí chí, literally "return/repeat hold/grasp/support"), but my best guess is the speaker-with-implied-pronouns is securing from being seen a costly gift from a secret lover by rehiding it within her/his sleeve, and then covering up their action by tidying their hair. (There are some homoerotic poems in the collection and gay male relationships were A Thing among the aristocracy of the time, so absent a clear marker we shouldn't assuming anything about the speaker's gender.) "Disordered" might be a better translation than "wild" — or to go full-on interpretive, "windblown."
(BTW, no reference numbers for these poems because my base text doesn't have any.) (I'll return to 300 Tang Poems eventually.)
---L.
My jacket’s light, it seems my wrist’s exposed.
I raise my sleeve, wanting to block my shame:
I re-conceal it, and tidy my wild hair.
近代雜詩一首
玉釧色未分，
衫輕似露腕。
舉袖欲障羞，
回持理發亂。
"Modern" in this case seems to mean composed within a generation or so of the anthology's compilation, which was probably in the 530s. I'm not sure how to understand 回持 (huí chí, literally "return/repeat hold/grasp/support"), but my best guess is the speaker-with-implied-pronouns is securing from being seen a costly gift from a secret lover by rehiding it within her/his sleeve, and then covering up their action by tidying their hair. (There are some homoerotic poems in the collection and gay male relationships were A Thing among the aristocracy of the time, so absent a clear marker we shouldn't assuming anything about the speaker's gender.) "Disordered" might be a better translation than "wild" — or to go full-on interpretive, "windblown."
(BTW, no reference numbers for these poems because my base text doesn't have any.) (I'll return to 300 Tang Poems eventually.)
---L.