Chinese Poetry

Old Age by Ou Yang Hsiu

In honor of my mom, I'm posting the translation of a poem by Ou Yang Hsiu [Xiu], a Sung dynasty poet, writer, government official and historian. To my mom's credit and testimony of her faith, unlike the poem she does not give in to pity in the face of memory loss, confusion and tenuous health. When another tooth broke off the other day, she said philosophically, "Well what do you expect? I'm 81 years old..." and she still prays and sings every day. She can still get excited when she sees beauty, especially flowers blooming.

"Old Age"
by Ou Yang Hsiu

In the Springtime I am always
Sorry the nights are so short.
My lamp is burning out, the flame
Is low. Flying insects circle about it. I am sick. My eyes
Are dry and dull. If I sit
Too long in one position
All my bones ache. Chance thoughts from
I don't know where crowd upon me.
When I get to the end of a
Train of thought, I have forgotten
The beginning. For one thing I retain I forget ten.
When I was young I liked to read. Now I am too old to make
The effort. Then, too, if I come
Across something interesting
I have no one to talk to
About it. Sad and alone,
I sigh with self pity.

[from Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, 1971]
 
The Fisher Father

I'm back! :)

With the Dragon Boat Festival coming up, I thought that I would post a work of Qu Yuan. This isn’t a poem, it’s a piece of prose. I did not have any reference books lying around when I translated this, so it may not be as accurate as my other translation. Also, I haven’t translated anything this old before, so instead of making every word as accurate as possible, I just hoped to convey the overall meaning as clearly as possible. I hope you enjoy it.

The Fisher father

Having been exiled, Qu Yuan traveled along the River Lake. (1) He walked along the riverbank, his face pale and his features etched in worry.

The fisher father saw, and asked, “Are you not one of the three lords? (2) What brings you here?”

Qu Yuan answered, “The world is murky water, yet I am clean. While all are drunk, I alone am sober. Thus I was exiled.”

The fisher father said, “Wise men do not stubbornly keep to old ways, but go with the flow of the world. If the world is as murky water, why not stir up its mud and toss up waves? If all are drunk, why not eat from their broth and drink from their wine? Why stand proud and apart, exiling yourself?”

Qu Yuan answered, “I have heard, that those who have washed their hair must also dust their hats, and that those who have bathed must also shake the dust from their clothes. How can one stand in the cleanliness of the body, and suffer the filth of the world? I would rather go to the Xiang River, (3) and let the stomachs of the fish be my grave. (4) How can I, so white and clean, let the dust of the earth dirty me?”

The fisher father smiled slightly, and raising his oars he left. While leaving, he sang, “Are the waters of Cang Lang clear? (5) Then let them wash my hat. Are the waters of Cang Lang murky? Then let them bathe my feet.”

Thus he left, and did not speak [with Qu Yuan] again.​
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Footnotes:

(1)Without a reference book, I was not sure whether “River Lake” was an actual place name, or simply referred to a river/lake. A quick check on a relatively reliable site told me that it was an actual place name. But you know how reliable the internet is.

(2)Qu Yuan was one of the three most influential people in his country (next to the king) for some time. But as he tells the fisher father, he was exiled.

(3)Xiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze.

(4)As you will learn, Qu Yuan later committed suicide by drowning himself in the Xiang River.

(5) Cang Lang, a tributary of the largest tributary of the Yangtze.



Little Background?
Qu Yuan (340?~278BC) is known as the first patriotic poet of China. He lived in what we call the Warring States Period, which lasted from 476 to 221BC. The Warring States Period was in the later half of the Zhou Dynasty. By that time, the emperor had very little power, and politics was dominated by the stronger states. The Chu state, in which Qu Yuan lived, was originally one of the seven dominant states. However, as the state of Qin grew ever stronger, the king of Chu, supported by his nobles, asked for peace. Qu Yuan argued heatedly against this, as he knew that “peace” would not last and Qin would eventually take over Chu. The king and his nobles did not like this, and exiled the only person with any sense in the court. During his exile, Qu Yuan wrote many poems. In the end, as Qu Yuan predicted, Qin took over Chu. Angry and depressed, Qu Yuan drowned himself in the Xiang River.

Some people say that this piece of prose may not have been a work of Qu Yuan. We may never know. But if it was, it was probably written when he was in exile.




On Qu Yuan and the Dragon Boat Festival
Every child in Hong Kong knows the origin of the Dragon Boat Festival. It was to remember the great patriotic poet Qu Yuan. The Dragon Boat Festival is on the fifth day of the fifth month according to the lunar calendar, which is the day that Qu Yuan died. Legend says that the people loved Qu Yuan so much, they could not allow the fish to nibble his body. So to prevent that, they made zongzi (glutinous rice stuffed with different fillings and wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves), and threw them in the river, so that the fish would eat the zongzi, and not bother the poet’s body.

So today, we have dragon boat races, and eat the zongzi ourselves(instead of wasting it on the fish). It has become more of a celebration than a day of remembrance.

But some people say that the Dragon Boat Festival, or Duanwujie, as we call it in Mandarin, (Tuen Ng Jit, Cantonese) (Solar Maximus Festival, English) was around before Qu Yuan died. Some scholars say that the day was originally to worship one of the river gods, thus the boats. Others point out that it was a certain tribe that worshipped the dragon, and had dragon boat races on that day. Both theories are possible (they seem pretty similar to me), and I obviously do not know enough to comment.

But whatever it originally was, for the last 2000 years, the Chinese have been celebrating it in honor of Qu Yuan. So I’d say that the festival is no longer about dragons or river gods, but about Qu Yuan.

By the way, this year it’s on the 28th of May (Christian Calendar). i.e. Thursday.
 
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From what your footnotes tell, it sounds to me as if Qu Yuan was morally in the right, and the Fisher Father was a jerk advocating moral compromise. Be that as it may: would zongzi be where the Japanese got the idea for sushi?
 
Looking back at my translation, Qu Yuan did seem a bit more proud than in the original. Nonetheless, he was in the right.

As for sushi and zongzi, I doubt they are in anyway related. If you've ever had zongzi, you would find that they are very different. Just to be sure, I browsed several sites which I find pretty reliable. It seems pretty clear that sushi does not come from zongzi.
 
Q about Duanwujie

Lossëndil,
Zhu ni Duanwujie kuai le! (Did I get that right? "Happy Dragon Boat Festival!")
Thanks for the interesting background on that holiday and Qu Yuan.

Are you extemporaneously translating from Classical Chinese? without notes, that is impressive!

A couple of summers ago my daughter went to a Chinese culture camp that focused its activities to explain this holiday. They studied the story of Qu Yuan, made a play about his legend, even made miniature dragon boats out of water bottles and raced them in rain gutter tracks filled with water. One thing they did, however, that I did not understand was that they made little tokens of 5 venomous creatures: a toad, a newt (?), a centipede and 2 others. Do you know the significance of these 5 creatures with the Dragon Boat Festival?
 
I've read the piece once before, with notes. So that helped. Otherwise, I probably would have been stumped by the third sentence. :p



I've never heard of the 5 venomous creatures related in anyway to the Dragon Boat Festival. It may be a custom of a certain region. It's common for different regions to have different ways of celebrating, and as you know, they could vary greatly.

I would guess that making the tokens would be a way of banishing bad luck or something like that. For some reason, people like to banish bad luck whenever there is a festival.

Yesterday I saw several people burning paper money. Okay, technically that's not banishing bad luck. It's more like paying respect to the dead, or asking for ancestral protection. Still, I bet it's something most people don't see much.

Sorry I wasn't much help. And thanks for reading. :)
 
There’s been a poem I couldn’t get out of my mind the past month, but I’m finding it hard to translate, so here’s something else for the moment. Li Bai again. I’ve already posted two poems by him, if you’d like to read it, go to “Drinking Beneath the Moon” or “On Hearing a Flute.” (You’ll find a link on the front page.) Sorry that it’s Li again, I really should do someone else, there are so many other poets out there! But Li’s one of the most famous, and I’m reading about him at the moment, so here it is!


Thoughts on a Quiet Night

I thought, the moonlight before my bed,
To be mist upon the ground.
I raised my head, to see the bright moon;
Then bow my head, and remember home.​


A Little Background? Again, I’m too lazy to write about Li Bai all over again. So I’ll just copy and paste from the earlier post and paste it at the end of this one (feel free to skip it, you’ve read it all before).

Now a bit about the actual poem. Probably one of the three most well known poem in all of Chinese History. Any child however young would have heard of it. Anyone above eight knows how to memorize it. It is a standard 五言绝诗 [five-word-?-poem], that is, four lines with five words each. It’s pretty straight forward, thus no footnotes. But I’m afraid I can’t find anything about when and where and why he wrote it. Probably no one knows… I’ve attached a translation by Witter Bynner. Mine is more word-by-word, his is the work of a poet. ;)

In the Quiet Night

So bright a gleam on the foot of my bed—
Could there have been a frost already?
Lifting myself to look, I found that it was moonlight.
Sinking back again, I thought suddenly of home.​

A Bit About the Moon
The moon is very symbolic in Chinese poetry. It represents homesickness, or missing your loved ones. I could give any number if examples for it! The moon is most significant in poems written at the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival. That’s a time when the while family gets together and has fun, food and admires the moon. (It’s always a full moon at the festival. The Traditional Chinese Calendar is a lunar calendar, so each month is based on the cycle of the moon. So the fifteenth/ sixteenth day of each month is the night of the full moon, depending on whether it is a month of 29 or 30 days. Mid-Autumn Festival is on the fifteenth day of the eight month. Usually some time in September.) Some of the common grievances: “The moon is full, but the family is not whole” “We (family/ friend) upon look othe same moon, yet are separated by many miles” and so on.

There is a very famous poem by Su Shi (author of “Reflecting on Ancient Times At Chibi”) about moon. Basically every sentence is now a commonly used phrase about partings and blessings and such. Maybe I’ll translate it some day. It may be a slightly difficult job, I don’t know yet... We’ll wait and see. ;)


Li Bai (701 to 762 AD) lived in the Tang Dynasty. In fact, he lived at the peak of the dynasty, when everything was flourishing. He was a very very talented man. In his younger days, he went traveling with a bunch of Taoist, like the heroes of Kung Fu novels, fighting bad guys and things like that. In fact, there was once a TV show featuring Li Bai as a Kung Fu hero instead of a poet. He grew up in a rich family, which may be the reason of him being such a proud guy. At least he seems proud to me. The usual way of becoming an official would be to take the Civil Service Exams, but Li refused to take the exams. He said that he would wait to be invited by the government. Indeed, he was called in 742 AD (when he was 42), and became an official in the palace. However, he wasn’t too happy with his job. He was to write poems for the emperor on certain occasions, but what he really wanted was to gain political power. (Basically all Chinese poets wanted to work in the government, they wanted to have a chance to serve their nation. I know it sounds weird, but that’s a fact. So when poets get fired, they get real upset about being unable to be useful, unable to serve the nation.) Anyway, Li Bai wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, especially since he was upset at not getting a good job. He is also famous for drinking a lot. Even five year olds know that Li Bai loves wine. For these reasons, he got fired two years later. People believe this is a poem written just after he was fired. He is known as Shi Xian, something like The Immortal Poet.


I really like his poems. Some poets write very neat and tidy poems, toiling to make every word perfect. I admire them for their effort, but the poems are too neat, too formal in a way. Li Bai’s poems are like himself, rarely following the common rules, always different, and they always seem so unrestrained. Of course, he is very proud and too focused on wine (rare is the poet that does not love wine!), but I admire his poems.
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Hmm, when John Denver composed his song "The Breezes Here In Old Shanghai," he referred to the moon in its chorus. Do you suppose he had been informed of the moon's significance for those far from home?
 
Possibly, but I don't think so. After all, it is not uncommon to mention the moon in such a way even without knowing of it's significance in chinese culture. But then again, maybe he did know of it. I don't know...
 
A poem I rather like, by a poet in the Ming Dynasty. Not that I drink or anything, but I liked the sort of Chinese folk-song-ish nature it had. Especially the first few lines, which were what hooked me.

By the way, I know nothing of the poet, except that he was famous, and lived in the Ming Dynasty. So for more info, refer to Wikipedia.

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Song of the Plum Blossom Hut (1)

In the plum blossom village (2) was a plum blossom hut;
In the plum blossom hut lived a plum blossom immortal;
The plum blossom immortal plants plum blossom trees; (3)
And picks plum blossoms to sell for money for wine.
I sit before the flowers when sober;
I sleep beneath them while drunk.
Half sober, half drunk; day follows day.
Flowers bloom, flowers fall; year after year.
I hope to grow old and die amongst the flowers and wine,
And not have to bow before horse drawn carriages. (4)
The dust of the carriages and the hoofs of the horses are the joy of the rich;
While branches of blossoms and pots of wine are the lot of the poor.
If wealth is compared with humbleness, (5)
One is on the earth while the other is in the heavens. (6)
If the humble are compared with horses and carriages, (7)
They are to be driven while I am idle.
Others laugh at me, calling me mad;
Yet I laugh at them, who know nothing. (8)
Do you not see the tombs of the five kings? (9)
No flowers, no wine, only earth to be plowed. (10)​


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Footnotes:

(1) Technically, it should be translated Peach Blossom (a flower of a small Chinese tree Prunus persica), but I just thought that Plum Blossom (a flower of any of the several shrubs or small trees of the genus Prunus) sounded nicer. :o

(2) I was stumped by this character. When I memorized the poem, I went by the pronunciation our teacher told us. And for unknown reasons, I seem to remember that the word meant bay. However, when I looked it up in the dictionary, assuming that I pronounced it correctly, the character should mean village. The same character could mean bay, if pronounced in a different way. So make up your own conclusions here.

(3) Plum blossom trees, not very accurate. Should be plum trees, but I felt that it didn’t fit what little meter my imagination came up with here. *shrugs*

(4) Hoarse drawn carriages, refers to rich people, or people of power and status, the only ones that could afford carriages.

(5) Humbleness, literally it was “poor and lowly.” I considered translating it as “poverty,” but in the end I felt that “humbleness” fit the poem better and was closer to the poet’s meaning.

(6) On the earth and in the sky, just a metaphoric way of saying some are having a tough time while the others are enjoying themselves.

(7) Again, referring to the rich.

(8) In Chinese, it was originally “Yet I laugh at them, who do not see [the truth].” But that sort of overlapped with the following line, so I took the liberty of changing it.

(9) Referring to five magnificent tombs built for five kings of the Han Dynasty (202 BC to 220 AD). Of course, by the time of the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644 AD) there wasn’t anything left of them.

(10) Earth to be plowed, because the tombs were lost, it is natural to assume that it is now no more than farm land.
 
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Hmmm, was there not a peach orchard prominent in the early chapters of the Monkey King saga? Be that as it may, the poem's opening reminds me of "There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile..."

About Footnote Two: in old English usage, if I'm not mistaken, the word "isle" could mean not only an island in the surrounded-by-water sense, but also any place which was entirely IN-land, but was isolated from traffic AS IF it were out in the sea.
 
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burial mounds

Lossëndil said:
Do you not see the tombs of the five kings? (9)
No flowers, no wine, only earth to be plowed. (10)
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Beautiful poem -- thanks for sharing.
One image that these two lines above called to mind was the fact that
in some of the fields I passed through when visiting the China countryside in the 80's actually had these big mounds in the middle of the crops. I was told that they were actually burial mounds
 
In honor of a recent act of moral courage performed by Lossendil, I will offer here something you don't see often: a bilingual, bicultural PUN!


How do Sung Chiang and the other heroic outlaws of "The Water Margin" wash their hair?

With Liang Sham-Poo.
 
I'm still trying to recover from laughing. *helpless giggle*

Wait till I tell my sister about this one. How do you think up such things?
 
another Chinese pun

Excuse this departure from poetry, but Copperfox started this tangent and I can't resist!

Okay... did you hear the joke about the young novice who was training to be a monk?

After his head was shaved and he was dressed in robes, he was sent out all day to walk around barefoot with an empty bowl chanting "O-mi-to-fu*, O-mi-to-fu..." while people gave him rice or coins...

When he got back to the monastery, the Big Monk was debriefing him. "Well what did you learn, Little Grasshopper? What does "O-mi-to-fu" mean?"

The young novice thought a while and then humbly replied:
"Wo mei you tou fa?"**

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*O-mi-to-fu = a Buddhist chant (I think it may be a name for Buddha?)
**Wo mei you tou fa = I don't have any hair
 
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