Early Autumn 2, Xu Hun

A single leaf drops down before the steps …
South of the Huai, this man already grieves:
I squandered all my young man’s expectations—
The distance decreases to my ‘white-cloud’ time.
In age, I’m truly Xiangru in the end;
In poverty, I’m sadly Manqian: hungry.
A new duke and an orchard manager—
Where are these men? For they are my teachers.

早秋 之二
一叶下前墀，
淮南人已悲。
蹉跎青汉望，
迢递白云期。
老信相如渴，
贫忧曼倩饥。
生公与园吏，
何处是吾师。

Second of a three-poem set, only the first of which was included in 3TP. The set is closely linked, with opening lines echoing line 7 of the previous poem and responding to it. Idiom: young is literally “green,” and if it wasn’t tonally totally off, I’d render “young man” as greenhorn. Xiangru is Sima Xiangru, a literati famous for spending much of his middle years in poverty compounded by poor health, before being rehabilitated by Han Emperor Wu as a court poet. Manqian is the courtesy name of Dongfang Shuo, a literati and reputed Daoist immortal who acted as Wu’s court jester, but I don’t see anything in that potted biography that explains the hungry comparison. (Also, I haven’t found a way to make that line not read totally awkwardly, which might mean I’m not reading it correctly.) The orchard manager is the philosopher Zhuangzi, who supposedly remained the manager of a lacquer-tree plantation rather than accept a more important position, but I’ve no clue who the duke might be—I’m guessing something Zhou Dynasty, or at least someone (like Zhuangzi) even more ancient than the Han examples.

TLDR: I lack a lot of cultural background.