Larry's Pretty Good Poetry Journal

A city spring: there’s nowhere without flowers flying—
Cold Food: the east wind blows court willow branches askew.
At dusk, the great Han palace passes out wax/ candles—
Light smoke disperses, entering five noble houses.

寒食
春城无处不飞花，
寒食东风御柳斜。
日暮汉宫传蜡烛，
轻烟散入五侯家。

This needs some background. In Tang observances, the day before the early April Qingming, or Tomb-Sweeping, Festival was Cold Food Day: all fires were put out and everyone ate cold food. Decorations included willows branches for the departed, put over doorways—the ones here are inside the imperial palace. When the observance was over, a fire was kindled in the palace or a local lord’s manor and propagated to other households by candles or lanterns.

So with that unpacked, there’s an another layer: the poem refers to an incident during the eastern Han Dynasty when five palace eunuchs were ennobled on the same day, by way of safely satirizing contemporary corruption.

Even aside from all the glossing needed, the language is especially compressed in this one. This is also the first double negative I’ve met in a classical poem.

—L.

I much prefer this sheltered grass beside the brook.
Above, an oriole sings from a shadowed tree.
The spring tide brings on rain—evening comes apace.
Out in the open, an unmanned ferry drifts across.

滁州西涧
独怜幽草涧边生，
上有黄鹂深树鸣。
春潮带雨晚来急，
野渡无人舟自横。

Chuzhou is a little north of the lower Yangzi, west of Nanjing. The ferry is apparently for crossing a nearby lake. That’s “tide” as in sea-tide, not time of year, and no I don’t get what it has to do with the rain.

—L.

I gaze east at my hometown down the long, long road;
My two sleeves are decrepit, my tears have not yet dried.
We suddenly meet by chance, but I’ve no brush nor paper:
“I’ll have to ask you to report, ‘He’s safe and sound.’”

逢入京使
故园东望路漫漫，
双袖龙钟泪不干。
马上相逢无纸笔，
凭君传语报平安。



(When your dictionary uses a poem as a usage example, I think it’s safe to assume it’s well-known.) The poet was traveling for the first time away from his home in Chang’an, heading to an official posting in the far west, in what’s now the western end of Gansu Province. If it’s not clear from my wording, he’s asking the envoy to pass on an oral message to his family.

—L.

My old friend leaves the west and Yellow Crane Tower
In March’s mists and flowers, descending to Yangzhou.
The distant shadow of a lonely sail fades into sky—
I only see the Yangzi flow to the horizon.

送孟浩然之广陵
故人西辞黄鹤楼，
烟花三月下扬州。
孤帆远影碧空尽，
惟见长江天际流。

Yellow Crane Tower is a famous pagoda in Wuhan overlooking the river. Guangling district in Yangzhou is five-hundred-plus miles east down the Yangzi (here literally “Long River”), near modern Nanjing.

—L.

A gauze sleeve stirs the incense smoke unceasingly,
Red lotus blossoms spiral up the autumn mist.
Soft clouds upon the mountain suddenly shake in the wind,
Light willows by the pond begin to brush the water.

赠张云容舞
罗袖动香香不已，
红蕖袅袅秋烟里。
轻云岭上乍摇风，
嫩柳池边初拂水。

Yang Yuhuan, also known as Yang Guifei (“Consort Yang”), was a musician, legendary beauty, and the last principal consort of Emperor Xuanzong; her death during the An Lushan Rebellion was memorialized in "Song of Everlasting Sorrow". And as I was looking through the massive Complete Tang Poetry anthology, I stumbled across a poem attributed to her.

I like the opening out from an indoor scene into effects on the outside world, the expanding then contracting scales, and the interlocking parallels of smoke | wind || mist | water. It's not a profound poem, but it's both graceful and intricately constructed. The yun of the dancer's name is cloud, but I don't think the clouds in the poem are supposed to represent her -- the clouds are acted upon, while her dancing is otherwise the agent of all the motion.

(I did, btw, come across a poem by the dancer.)

---L.

Empty mountain after fresh rain—
A breeze, and evening comes to autumn.
The bright moon shines between the pines;
The clear spring flows upon the stones.
The bamboo rustles, a washing-girl returns;
The lotus stirs, a fishing boat floats down.
Naturally, spring flowers rest—
Descendant of Kings of course can stay.

山居秋暝
空山新雨后，
天气晚来秋。
明月松间照，
清泉石上流。
竹喧归浣女，
莲动下渔舟。
随意春芳歇，
王孙自可留。

Back to 300 Tang Poems with a jump to a random poem in another form, as an experiment to see whether I find a longer poem in shorter lines easier than a shorter poem with longer lines. Preliminary answer: yes, but it could also be that Wang Wei is that kind of So Good. (It could also be logistics: I’m doing all this on my phone, and longer lines are more awkward on a small screen.)

The form in question is five-character “regulated verse” (lüshi), with a single rhyme across all even lines and (as with jueju) a couple possible tone patterns, plus tight semantic parallels in each of the two middle couplets. Wang Wei was, incidentally, instrumental in popularizing the form.

The boat may be “coming back” or even “disembarking” instead of “going down[stream]” —all are possible senses of 下 (xìa). The sound of the bamboo forest is sometimes (often?) read as the chatter of returning washerwomen.

(Hmph heterometricity. I don’t want to lengthen the other lines, which are nicely tight and graceful, but I don’t see good ways to shorten the bamboo and lotus lines while still sounding good. Such is the ‘joys’ of translation, having to choose which ways to be unfaithful. At this point, I’ve pretty much given up on rhymes, despite a couple near misses here.)

—L.

Spring sun’s been wanton for a couple months—
Both grasses and the waters show it’s so.
Upon the way I met a scrumptious youth,
And now regret we hadn’t met before.

丹阳孟珠歌一首
阳春二三月，
草与水同色。
道逢游冶郎，
恨不早相识。

(This poem immediately follows the one in my previous post.) Not much is known about Meng Zhu: she was a singer, lived sometime between the 3rd through 6th centuries, and has 10 lyrics attributed to her in surviving anthologies. Danyang is in modern Zhenjiang, on the south bank of the Yangzi a little downstream of Nanjing.

“Wanton” double-translates a secondary meaning of 春 (chūn), which ordinarily is “spring.”

—L.

The cassia sprouts two or three new branches,
The orchid opens four or five new petals.
It’s time—and yet my lord has not returned;
The spring wind’s disciple is this laughing one.

鲍令晖寄行人一首
桂吐两三枝，
兰开四五叶。
是时君不归，
春风徒笑妾。

The speaker uses the humble pronoun used by women, rendered as "this one". "New" is interpretive padding in both of the first two lines, added to fill out the meter (even though I don't even come close to regular in the last line). It might be more idiomatic to render "two or three" as "a few" and "four or five" as "several," but that weakens the clear progression. In modern Mandarin, the tree literally "vomits" the branches, which is … startling. Bao Linghui, a younger sister of renowned poet Bao Zhao, flourished around 464.

---L.

Within her quarters, a young bride knows no worries.
One spring day, I dress and climb the emerald tower—
Then catch sight of the forms of roadside willows
And regret I asked him to seek fame and glory.

闺怨
闺中少妇不知愁，
春日凝妆上翠楼。
忽见陌头杨柳色，
悔教夫婿觅封侯。

Willows are associated with parting: a branch was often given as part of sending off someone heading on a journey. Literally, she asked “[my] husband to seek appointment as a marquis,” and the means for this is to perform heroics as an army officer—so I ended up translating something between gloss and interpretation.

—L.

Alone, a stranger staying in this strangers’ land,
Come festival time I all the more recall my family.
Though far, I know my brothers all ascend that height,
All put on now their flowers—lacking just one person.

九月九日忆山东兄弟
独在异乡为异客，
每逢佳节倍思亲。
遥知兄弟登高处，
遍插茱萸少一人。

Written when he was traveling at 17, in a town on the western foothills of Mt. Hua in Shaanxi, while his brothers were in Chang’an, well to its east. The festival on the 9th day of the 9th (lunar) month is related to longevity; climbing a local peak and wearing certain propitious flowers were common customs for its observance. The flower named might be either a type of boneset (an aromatic herb believed to ward off evil sprits) or dogwood—dictionaries and commentaries seem confused on this point.

Both of the first two lines have become proverbial, the first as an idiom equivalent to “a stranger in a strange land.”