The Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhongqiu Jie, or 中秋节) is a traditional Chinese holiday where families have dinner, eat moon cakes, drink wine, and watch the moon. There's a story behind this (there's a story behind everything), about Houyi and Chang'e, who lived back at the dawn of history. When I taught English in Anhui province, this is how my students told it to me:
Once, there were ten suns in the sky. They were too hot and burned up the land, so the Emperor found a very great archer named Houyi, who shot nine of the suns out of the sky. As a reward for saving the world, the Emperor gave Houyi a special medicine that would make Houyi and his wife, the beautiful Chang'e, immortal. There was only one pill of this medicine. The Emperor told Houyi to eat half of it and give half to his wife. Houyi, for reasons of his own, hid the pill. Maybe he wanted to reconsider the virtues of eternal life. My students didn't say.
Houyi's wife, Chang'e, found the pill while he was out one day, and, not knowing what it was, she ate the entire thing. She became immortal, yes, but the pill so altered her that she floated into the sky, all the way up to the moon, where she lives to this day.
This was my students' version of the story, a condensation of different tellings they'd heard from parents, grandparents, older cousins. They were great storytellers, but they were not masters of a tradition or a craft. In retelling this story for you now, I've adapted it further, added my own interpretations and the rhythms of my own language.
This is how we hope to approach the Three Hundred Tang Poems. As Matt said, neither of us are professional translators. We both speak Chinese, and we've traveled extensively on the Chinese mainland; I lived in Anhui for two years, and spent many summers in Beijing. At the moment, both of us are in America; this is one way of keeping our connection to China alive, even if we make mistakes along the way.
When I was in Anhui, my co-teacher and I asked our students to dream up their own holiday. One of my co-teacher's students came up with the concept of "Li Bai Laughing Day" - a day on which everyone dresses up as drunken Tang poet Li Bai, drinks wine, and wanders around laughing at the universe. While not all Chinese poetry shares Li Bai's lighthearted spirit, I hope the original poets would laugh in good humor at our attempts to present their work in a language which does not precisely suit it.
Check back Monday, and see what kind of a start we make.
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