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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.
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.