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Night at Niuzhu on the Yangzi:
Sky dark without a thread of cloud.
Aboard, I gaze on the autumn moon,
Thinking in vain of General Xie—
I too can chant a lofty song,
Though such a man can’t hear it now.
Tomorrow I’ll set sail and sit
While maple leaves scatter, one by one.
夜泊牛渚怀古
牛渚西江夜，
青天无片云；
登舟望秋月，
空忆谢将军。
馀亦能高咏，
斯人不可闻。
明朝挂帆席，
枫叶落纷纷。
Niuzhu (“cow island”) Mountain juts into the Yangzi somewhat upstream of Nanjing, where according to legends Li Bai later drowned while drunkenly trying to catch the moon’s reflection. General Xie is Xie Shang who, while moored here some four centuries prior, heard someone chanting poems in another boat and became that poet’s patron—in other words, Li Bai would love to have a patron too. As a reminder, just as the big overtone of spring is “wanton,” that of autumn is “aging/withering.” Line 5 has another rare-in-poetry first-person pronoun, now archaic. Idiom: one by one/one after the other is the modern Chinese sense of 纷纷, literally “scatter scatter.” Lost in translation: he literally “boards a boat.”
---L.
Sky dark without a thread of cloud.
Aboard, I gaze on the autumn moon,
Thinking in vain of General Xie—
I too can chant a lofty song,
Though such a man can’t hear it now.
Tomorrow I’ll set sail and sit
While maple leaves scatter, one by one.
夜泊牛渚怀古
牛渚西江夜，
青天无片云；
登舟望秋月，
空忆谢将军。
馀亦能高咏，
斯人不可闻。
明朝挂帆席，
枫叶落纷纷。
Niuzhu (“cow island”) Mountain juts into the Yangzi somewhat upstream of Nanjing, where according to legends Li Bai later drowned while drunkenly trying to catch the moon’s reflection. General Xie is Xie Shang who, while moored here some four centuries prior, heard someone chanting poems in another boat and became that poet’s patron—in other words, Li Bai would love to have a patron too. As a reminder, just as the big overtone of spring is “wanton,” that of autumn is “aging/withering.” Line 5 has another rare-in-poetry first-person pronoun, now archaic. Idiom: one by one/one after the other is the modern Chinese sense of 纷纷, literally “scatter scatter.” Lost in translation: he literally “boards a boat.”
---L.