Spring Prospect, Du Fu (300 Tang Shi #106)
Wednesday, 2 February 2022 07:52![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammerStates break, mountains and rivers abide.
Spring city, grasses and trees grow deep.
Feeling the times, flowers splash tears—
Hating our parting, birds startle my heart—
Signal fires for the last three months—
Home letters are worth ten-thousand golds.
I scratch my white hairs, getting thinner—
Soon they won’t even hold a hairpin.
春望
国破山河在，
城春草木深。
感时花溅泪，
恨别鸟惊心。
烽火连三月，
家书抵万金。
白头搔更短，
浑欲不胜簪。
Written in early 757 while still captive in Chang’an. Given the context, I do not regret making a deliberate echo of Ecclesiastes, foreign though it is. As it is, Du Fu’s poetic syntax makes it hard to understand whether, for example, the birds startle the speaker’s heart or are themselves startled. Upper-class men wore hair bound up in a topknot beneath a hat or cap fixed with a pin. The first two lines are especially famous, while the last two have haunted me for years.
---L.
Spring city, grasses and trees grow deep.
Feeling the times, flowers splash tears—
Hating our parting, birds startle my heart—
Signal fires for the last three months—
Home letters are worth ten-thousand golds.
I scratch my white hairs, getting thinner—
Soon they won’t even hold a hairpin.
春望
国破山河在，
城春草木深。
感时花溅泪，
恨别鸟惊心。
烽火连三月，
家书抵万金。
白头搔更短，
浑欲不胜簪。
Written in early 757 while still captive in Chang’an. Given the context, I do not regret making a deliberate echo of Ecclesiastes, foreign though it is. As it is, Du Fu’s poetic syntax makes it hard to understand whether, for example, the birds startle the speaker’s heart or are themselves startled. Upper-class men wore hair bound up in a topknot beneath a hat or cap fixed with a pin. The first two lines are especially famous, while the last two have haunted me for years.
---L.
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