Feeling Autumn in Qin, Sent to Buddhist Monk Yuan, Meng Haoran (300 Tang Shi #129)

[lnhammer]

Secluded “One Hill,” I want to lie down,
This “Three Path” going home, bitterly poor.
I do not want be in this north land—
I treasure a teacher in Eastern Forest Temple.
My gold’s like cassia on a fire, gone,
And my ambitions fade with passing years.
With evening sun, a chilling wind arrives—
I hear cicadas, which just increases sorrow.

秦中感秋寄远上人
一丘尝欲卧，
三径苦无资。
北土非吾愿，
东林怀我师。
黄金燃桂尽，
壮志逐年衰。
日夕凉风至，
闻蝉但益悲。

The first couplet contains allusive idioms, the second two different explicit first-person pronouns, and the third especially strong poetical syntax—IOW, this is a challenge to translate. I went the route of incorporating a few glosses, but other choices could be made. Qin is the capital region around Chang’an, which places this in the time frame of failing to find an official position of #124 and 127. “One hill, one gully” is a four-character idiom for “living in seclusion,” of which only the first two characters are used, and a “three paths” is (via a historical allusion to a Han Dynasty official who retired and created three paths in his woods) a “person returning home to live in seclusion.”

I don’t get the significance of the two first-person pronouns, 吾 and 我. I mean, using any pronoun is rather emphatic, two doubly so, and in a parallel couplet you can’t use the same word twice—but the connotations of those particular pronouns, I do not know.

—L.

Comments

[sartorias]

Such scatteredd images, it's difficult to get much here but the general sense of melancholy.

[lnhammer]

The first four lines, jumping back and forth from himself to his friend, give me tonal whiplash.

[sartorias]

I'm tone deaf, alas, but the images are fractals. Hard to process except that sense of melancholia over all.