The following poems are written in Classical Chinese, the syntax and vocabulary from the first millennium B.C. (For some help in reading them, here's a short grammar of Classical Chinese.) The poems themselves were written much later, though; these are all from the Tang Dynasty, which covers much of the latter half of the first millennium A.D.
Tang Dynasty poetry is widely considered the zenith of Chinese poetry. Poets wrote within a variety of strictures that had evolved since the time of Confucius into an elaborate set of rules regarding the distribution of character tones, rhymes, and figures of speech. A beautiful poem not only had evocative content, but its parts fit together like an elaborate puzzle.
All this means that any English translation of these poems is at best an incomplete image of what the poet could create in the original Chinese. It can capture the sense of the poem, and perhaps a little of the intricate wordplay, but surely not with the poet's own fluidity. Even so, I think it's worth trying to see some of that, so here are some of my own attempts at showing in English what the poets saw.
All of the Chinese texts below are presented in rows read from left to right, just like English.
Looking for my old friend in the mountains,
I came upon a young boy in a copse.
He said his master, my old friend, had gone,
Gathering medicinal herbs. He never leaves
these hills, he told me, but my friend
is hidden by the clouds, and the fog.
--Jia Dao, also known as Pei Tao (779-843)
The spring dawn has crept upon me,
heralded only by the singing of the birds.
Last night's rainstorm has subsided:
who can say, how many flowers have fallen?
--Meng Hao-Ran (690-740)
Having come from your hometown,
you must know of matters there.
Tell me, on the day you left,
had the winter flowers bloomed?
--Wang Wei (701-761)
This poem is a good illustration of how Chinese has evolved from its Classical roots. The first character of the poem, §g [jun1], means "lord," but was also used as a polite form of address, as to a superior. Classical Chinese did have a second person pronoun, but it was often avoided as being too intimate a form of address. The following character, ¦Û [zi4], now means "self," but in Classical times, it was a preposition meaning "from."
In the South grows the red bean;
it covers the ground in spring.
Kindly pick some more, my friend,
it conjures the best memories.
--Wang Wei
The white sun glimmers on the mountain,
the Huangho flows out to sea.
To follow it over those thousand miles,
I must rise one level more.
--Wang Zhi-Huan (688-742)
It took me a while to get around to it, but here's a picture of a scroll of this poem. It comes as some surprise to non-Chinese readers that anyone can actually decipher this text. It does help that it's a reasonably famous poem; I think I have this poem on three different scales: on a scroll, on a small fan, and on a rice grain-sized piece of ivory. (Really.)
The silver moon lights my bed,
like a layer of silent frost.
Overhead the springtime moon--
all around me, memories of my home.
--Li Bai, also known as Li Po (701-762)
I have travelled far, a stranger in a strange land,
and the holidays bring anew thoughts of my family.
Back home, I know, my brothers are climbing the mountain,
Still missing one companion for the dogwood ritual.
--Wang Wei
The following is a poem by Du Fu (712-770), written in 757, in Chang-an, when he was a captive of the ill-fated An Shi Rebellion. He and Li Bai (see above) are the most celebrated of all the Tang poets.
On the left is the Chinese original: the title, followed by the eight lines of the poem. In the center, each line is transcribed twice: first, in the reconstructed tongue of Middle Chinese (the more or less uniform dialect of the Tang dynasty), and then, in the modern phonetics of pinyin. Notice that rhymes that matched perfectly then (lines 2, 4, 6, and 8) don't always do so anymore. On the right is my translation, which departs somewhat from the standard interpretation.
Some people may wonder why the Chinese poems are so compact, compared to their translations. As it happens, Chinese explanations of the poems are no shorter than their English counterparts. Words that require two or three-syllable phrases to convey in modern Chinese needed only one in Classical Chinese.
Here's a short guide to Chinese phonetics, at least as it applies to the preceding transcription. [Middle Chinese transcription taken without permission from S. Robert Ramsey's The Languages of China, which I recommend for anyone interested in the topic.]
The autumn leaves are falling like rain.
Although my neighbors are all barbarians
and you, you are a thousand miles away;
there are always two cups at my table.
--Unknown (not my translation)
I've seen this alleged translation of a Tang Dynasty poem so often on the Web I've lost count. Sometimes, the first line reads, "Here at the frontier, leaves are falling." In one case, the first line was missing altogether. The remaining three lines are always the same.
As far as I can tell, the poem is not in a famous selection of 310 Tang Dynasty poems, but there are lots of poems that are not in this selection, and friendship and separation are certainly common themes in these poems. On the other hand, the poem's text has a decided non-Chinese flavor to it, especially the third line. My personal guess is that this isn't a genuine Tang Dynasty poem, but if anyone can establish that it is (other than having seen it on the Web as such), I'd be very interested in hearing about it.
(c) 1996, 2006 Brian Tung
