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He holds Green Silk, this Buddhist monk
From Emei’s summit in the west,
And it’s for me he waves his hands—
I hear a gorge with thousands of pines—
It washes my heart with flowing water—
Sounds linger, mingling with frost-bells—
I didn’t notice the mountain sunset,
Autumn clouds dark with unknown layers.
听蜀僧浚弹琴
蜀僧抱绿绮，
西下峨眉峰；
为我一挥手，
如听万壑松。
客心洗流水，
馀响入霜钟。
不觉碧山暮，
秋云暗几重。
The qin, a 7-string zither with a fixed bridge, was the preferred instrument of the gentleman-scholar and so shows up in these poems more often than the popular zheng. Green Silk was the qin of Han-Dynasty musician and poet Sima Xiangru, and claiming the monk now possesses it is flattery. Emei is a mountain in southern Sichuan with many Buddhist monasteries. The third line has a rare-in-poetry explicit first-person pronoun. “Waving one’s hands” means to play the strings. The thousands of pines are literally ten-thousand. Frost bells were legendary instruments so perfectly made that even frost settling on them made them ring. Lost in translation: the mountains are “blue-green.”
---L.
From Emei’s summit in the west,
And it’s for me he waves his hands—
I hear a gorge with thousands of pines—
It washes my heart with flowing water—
Sounds linger, mingling with frost-bells—
I didn’t notice the mountain sunset,
Autumn clouds dark with unknown layers.
听蜀僧浚弹琴
蜀僧抱绿绮，
西下峨眉峰；
为我一挥手，
如听万壑松。
客心洗流水，
馀响入霜钟。
不觉碧山暮，
秋云暗几重。
The qin, a 7-string zither with a fixed bridge, was the preferred instrument of the gentleman-scholar and so shows up in these poems more often than the popular zheng. Green Silk was the qin of Han-Dynasty musician and poet Sima Xiangru, and claiming the monk now possesses it is flattery. Emei is a mountain in southern Sichuan with many Buddhist monasteries. The third line has a rare-in-poetry explicit first-person pronoun. “Waving one’s hands” means to play the strings. The thousands of pines are literally ten-thousand. Frost bells were legendary instruments so perfectly made that even frost settling on them made them ring. Lost in translation: the mountains are “blue-green.”
---L.