Inscribed in an Inn North of the Dayu Mountains, Song Zhiwen (Tang Shi #96)

Tenth Month, the wild geese start to fly south
And rumor has it they return to here,
Yet I go on instead of stopping now—
And when will I come once again back home?
The river’s calm, the tide begins to fall;
The forest dark, its vapors not yet broken.
One bright dawn, I shall gaze upon that town
And see plum blossoms on the mountain peak.

题大庾岭北驿
阳月南飞雁，
传闻至此回，
我行殊未已，
何日复归来？
江静潮初落，
林昏瘴不开。
明朝望乡处，
应见陇头梅。



(Hang on, I need to gaze at that picture some more.)

(Okay, there.)

The “inscribed” is understood as brushed onto a wall—there’s a lot of that sort of literary graffiti in this collection (I think of it as similar jotting in a guest-book). The range is between Jiangxi and Guangdong provinces, in the south, and tied with that the “vapors” are specifically malarial. As in Japanese, where just saying “cherry” implies specifically the blossoms, so in classical Chinese with “plum.” And, wow, that’s the first time I’ve met the modern first-person pronoun 我 in a classical text: turns out it was a first-person pronoun back then too, but I’ve no idea what register it marked.

—L.