2: Beauty and Big Sheep

Veering from understanding to complete ignorance, I'm going to talk about the character 美 měi, which appears in the poem's last line：

何求美人折?
hé qiǔ měi rén zhé?
why beg beauty person return

I've translated měi as "beauty" above, which is its dictionary definition; some other suggestions from Wenlin include "pretty" and "self-satisfied," which I think is Wenlin being too pejorative about the state of being pleased with oneself.

Chinese characters come in many different varieties. The most common by far are semantic-phonetic combinations like 饿 è, which means "hungry." These types of characters are composed of smaller characters that suggest both the character's meaning and its pronunciation. The leftmost part of the 饿 character, 饣, is a simplified version of 食 shí, which means "eat," so we know this character has something to do with food; that's as much meaning as the character contains within itself. Meanwhile, the rightmost part of the character, 我, is pronounced "wǒ," and is supposed to suggest to us (or was once pronounced as - I'm going to beg Matt to post on this because his sense of tonal development is better than mine) the sound "è."

Some Chinese characters, though, are meaning-pictures. 好 (hǎo), the classical example, is composed of a picture of a woman (女) next to a picture of a child (子), and means "good." Woman + Child is good - a pleasant domestic and dynastic image that has a whole bunch of social connotations which I don't want to get into now. 美, at least according to one common etymological dictionary (which is not always correct but is often interesting), is the character for sheep (羊) on top of the character for "big" (大). Big sheep are beautiful! Or, Beauty is Big Sheep! The next time I look at images of Jolin Tsai or Sun Yanzi, I'll have to compare them to a big sheep and see what they have in common.

That aside, my question is, how to translate "měi" at the end of this poem. The dictionary translation above makes it look like the proper English would be "Why beg the beautiful people to return?" but that doesn't feel right: the poet's the wandering one, not the beautiful people. 求 qiú might be better read as "seek", in which case the line might read something like "Why, seeking the beautiful people, return?" This reading has its merits, but it sounds like the poet is plagued by concupiscence, while I think he's more worried about political position and influence. In that case, rather than reading 美人 "beauty people" as "beautiful people," maybe I should read it as "Why, seeking beauty from people, return?"

This is where I make a big jump, and this is where my translation probably fails. In love with the idea that the poet's talking about politics, I think, beauty and self satisfaction might be referring to a kind of official position or respect, much as did "高明“ (high and shining) and 美服 (beautiful clothes) in the first poem. Hence my translation as "honor," and the final reading of "Why return to seek honor among men?"