Thinking About the Past While Passing a City Guard-Tower, Shen Qingxiang

Advanced Scholar Lu Qiao of Danyang was good at songs and poems. One night in 806, he visited a man he knew named Shen Yue, who sent for wine and invited Deputy Minister Fan (to join them). They then succeeded in summoning Yue’s son Qingxiang, who was possibly 10 or more years old. Yue pointed at him and said proudly, “This child liked writing poems, but unfortunately he passed away before me. Recently, the deputy minister and I passed by a city guard-tower, and he made a poem on thinking about the past, an extremely impressive one.”

Six dynasties have passed in this landscape—
We’ve thrived then died through many centuries.
Once flowering, now silent and desolate,
This morning market that was noisy and teeming.
The moon at night in water like glazed glass—
The winds of spring in blue-egg colored sky—
The time is short for pondering the past:
My tears fall down before the city gate.

过台城感旧
作者：沈青箱
〈元和初进士陆乔，家丹阳，好为歌诗。一夕，见一丈夫，自称沈约来候，命酒邀范仆射。云及召其子青箱至，青箱年可十岁馀，约指谓乔：“此子好为诗，不幸先吾逝，近从吾与仆射同过台城，有感旧诗，甚可观也。”〉
六代旧山川，
兴亡几百年。
繁华今寂寞，
朝市昔喧阗。
夜月琉璃水，
春风卵色天。
伤时与怀古，
垂泪国门前。

Because when a distinguished visitor arrives, you show off your child prodigy, even if he’s dead and you have to hold a seance. Okay then. Danyang is now a district of modern Zhenjiang, Jiangsu. The tower is the sort that’s built into the city fortifications, such as on either side of a gate. Since this is a ghost poem, I assume the son was already dead when he wrote it, but the headnote doesn’t make that clear. In the poem, “dynasties” could be “generations,” but reading it that way makes the first lines not quite as on-point—and this poem, like many by young poets, otherwise hammers its point hard.

---L.