Friday, 11 October 2019

lnhammer: the Chinese character for poetry, red on white background (Default)
Alone in a quiet bamboo grove,
I play the qin, repeatedly sigh.
Deep in the forest, no one sees
The bright moon come to shine on me.

    I arrived at Bamboo Lodge
    As sun and road were close together.
    Coming and going: just a mountain bird—
    Quiet and deep: no people of the world.

竹里馆
独坐幽篁里,
弹琴复长啸。
深林人不知,
明月来相照。

    来过竹里馆,
    日与道相亲。
    出入唯山鸟,
    幽深无世人。

More literally, the title is lodge inside the bamboo, but as the name of a location, just bamboo lodge reads more naturally in English. (Out of context, as part of 300 Tang Poems, I rendered it as “Lodge in the Bamboo.”) (It’s also possible that 里 is the unit of distance li, so loosely bamboo-mile lodge, but Wang’s first line uses the inside meaning.)

Wang is still alone and getting consolation from nature. The qin is a usually 7-stringed zither with fixed bridges. Wang uses the same ambiguous sound word 啸 (xiào) as Pei’s #11, but with even less context, so commentaries are all over the place whether he’s whistling, singing, sighing, howling, or even making a drawn-out sound of effort/determination.

---L.

About

Warning: contents contain line-breaks.

As language practice, I like to translate poetry. My current project is Chinese, with practice focused on Tang Dynasty poetry. Previously this was classical Japanese, most recently working through the Kokinshu anthology (archived here). Suggestions, corrections, and questions always welcome.

There's also original pomes in the journal archives.

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