This week, I translated another extremely well-known poem by Du Fu, one of China's preeminent poets. Highlighting his exceptional range, this poem is of a different genre, and in some ways a very different style: where "The Beautiful Woman" was an imaginative, allusive, richly described allegorical tale, "For the Recluse Wei Ba" is a more straightforward gift of sincere friendship, filled with subtle moments of quiet emotion. Different sorts of textual ephemera lifted from a long life of same.
Especially since I ended up skipping over Du Fu's many references in my last translation (though I made a couple of comments about them last week), I'm determined to get right to the allusions in this week's poem, even if it means putting off some talk about the more obvious ways my translation deviated from the original. And so I'll start with this line:
今夕复何夕
At first I was frankly stumped as to its precise meaning, so I looked up the line. The lovely Baike described it as an exclamation of happy wonderment, which I can understand though I remained somewhat confused. Then by chance I heard a re-written version of the original sung while I was watching the movie The Banquet《夜宴》by Feng Xiaogang -- it turns out that it comes from
今夕何夕
which appears in the Book of Songs (《诗经 唐风 绸缪》to be precise). The original means something like "To-night, oh, what a night"; which then given the context of the song, is clearly a happy exclamation, looking forward to a marriage ceremony the next day. So Baidu Baike is correct, if incomplete. It is certainly meant to be a happy, wistful sort of exclamation at the night, but it is a twist on an old, sighing lyric of that feeling, not a direct copy. In Du Fu's version, for one, the poet's days of marriage have long since passed.
Du Fu's line, then, is a play on a lyric from one of the oldest extant folk songs in the world, a song that even now sees some of its lyrics sung in big-budget period movies and faux-Qing teahouses throughout China. The original lyrics are old enough that their grammar is noticeably different from the Classical Chinese of the Tang (Du Fu's time), which explains why it stuck out to me. Given its provenance it seems nothing but beautiful, but as for how to translate such beauty I am still stumped. My choice was a banal one, to try to simply convey in a modern free verse English what the direct connotation should be. I am unsatisfied with that, but I'm unconvinced there is much to be done. Anyone have any ideas?
Reading the Chinese, and your translation of it, I was struck by the Four Questions parallel. "Why is this night different from all other nights?" I wonder if we could make use of this effect somehow - your "What night could be like this night?" gets close. The Question is formal enough that even folks without much exposure to Jewish culture could probably get it. This would get across the purpose of the 诗经 quote (in my mind anyway), along with the allusions to 参 and 商: the elevation of this meeting with an old friend, and the exchange of wine, to the level of cosmic ritual.
ReplyDeleteThat's not a bad idea; I hadn't noticed that my line did that either. I think it's even harder than this though: the original 今夕何夕 might be equated to something biblical, but Du Fu's added 复 very deliberately alters the formula. So it would have to not only reference the biblical, but play with that reference. Oy.
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