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Replying to Palace Official Guo, Wang Wei (300 Tang Shi #181)
Thursday, 28 July 2022 07:25The inner gate and tall pavilions—mists are afterglowed.
The plums and peaches dark and shadowed—willow seeds are flying.
In what’s forbidden, faint clock bells—the residence grows late.
Within the bureaus, bird cries—functionaries are thinning out.
At dawn, swinging jade pendants converged upon the Golden Hall—
At dusk, receiving edicts, bow out the broken-patterned gate.
It’s hard: you long to serve your lord but helplessly grow old
And will, because of illness, one day loosen your court robes.
酬郭给事
洞门高阁霭馀辉，
桃李阴阴柳絮飞。
禁里疏钟官舍晚，
省中啼鸟吏人稀。
晨摇玉佩趋金殿，
夕奉天书拜琐闱。
强欲从君无那老，
将因卧病解朝衣。
Guo’s title is for someone who had access to the emperor and the power to edit edicts, and so was fairly high ranked. For lack of a specific translation, I render it generically. Idiom: the gate to the inner palace is literally a “penetrating” one. Again, Wang uses “yinyin,” but in context this seems to mean more shadowed than gloomy. All hail the wide-spectrum words. For the pendants hung from the belt, see #177. The door to the audience hall was decorated with a pattern made of fragmented lines. I am guessing at the implied pronouns in the last four lines: either “we” or “you” feels appropriate. I like how the evening images all tie together into the old age conclusion, though. Compare #119, also replying to a high-rank official.
As an aside: I aim to render seven-character lines as six-beat lines, but let them stretch to seven as needed—which can happen when the syntax is especially compressed or the poem is densely imagistic. Wang Wei’s long-line poems, I’m finding, are almost always that last, with long runs of nouns and adjectives. (Many of his five-character regulated verses also needed five beats instead of the four I aim for.) He was better known in his time as a painter than poet, and it’s commonly claimed that his poems are paintings and his paintings were poems. (None of his paintings have survived except as later copies.)
---L.
The plums and peaches dark and shadowed—willow seeds are flying.
In what’s forbidden, faint clock bells—the residence grows late.
Within the bureaus, bird cries—functionaries are thinning out.
At dawn, swinging jade pendants converged upon the Golden Hall—
At dusk, receiving edicts, bow out the broken-patterned gate.
It’s hard: you long to serve your lord but helplessly grow old
And will, because of illness, one day loosen your court robes.
酬郭给事
洞门高阁霭馀辉，
桃李阴阴柳絮飞。
禁里疏钟官舍晚，
省中啼鸟吏人稀。
晨摇玉佩趋金殿，
夕奉天书拜琐闱。
强欲从君无那老，
将因卧病解朝衣。
Guo’s title is for someone who had access to the emperor and the power to edit edicts, and so was fairly high ranked. For lack of a specific translation, I render it generically. Idiom: the gate to the inner palace is literally a “penetrating” one. Again, Wang uses “yinyin,” but in context this seems to mean more shadowed than gloomy. All hail the wide-spectrum words. For the pendants hung from the belt, see #177. The door to the audience hall was decorated with a pattern made of fragmented lines. I am guessing at the implied pronouns in the last four lines: either “we” or “you” feels appropriate. I like how the evening images all tie together into the old age conclusion, though. Compare #119, also replying to a high-rank official.
As an aside: I aim to render seven-character lines as six-beat lines, but let them stretch to seven as needed—which can happen when the syntax is especially compressed or the poem is densely imagistic. Wang Wei’s long-line poems, I’m finding, are almost always that last, with long runs of nouns and adjectives. (Many of his five-character regulated verses also needed five beats instead of the four I aim for.) He was better known in his time as a painter than poet, and it’s commonly claimed that his poems are paintings and his paintings were poems. (None of his paintings have survived except as later copies.)
---L.