Apologies for a late post! In my defense, I've been in London the last four days, wandering about with friends and enjoying some pints -- a past-time which Li Bai, whose poems I turn to this week, would have respected. So, without further ado:
005李白:下终南山过斛斯山人宿置酒
暮從碧山下, 山月隨人歸,
卻顧所來徑, 蒼蒼橫翠微.
相攜及田家, 童稚開荊扉.
綠竹入幽徑, 青蘿拂行衣.
歡言得所憩, 美酒聊共揮.
長歌吟松風, 曲盡河星稀.
我醉君復樂, 陶然共忘機.
Twilight from a green mountain falls; the
mountain moon follows their return,
but lonely they walk upon the path, a
gray, gray slash on a blue-green ridge.
Watch her led to the house in the fields: a
child opens the chaste-wood gate.
Green bamboo lines the quiet way;
green vines brush the gown.
With happy words achieve at last this rest,
beauty and wine all shared and scattered.
The pine-tree wind sings long songs,
melodies exhausted by sparse river stars.
I am drunk, and you are once more happy,
joyful, all the seeds of care forgotten.
---
mù cóng bìshān xià, shān yuē suí rén guī,
Twilight from green mountain down, mountain moon follow person return
què gǔ suǒ lái jìng, cāngcāng héng cuìwēi.
however lonley which comes path, gray gray across blue green hillside
xiàng xié jí tiān jiā, tóng zhì kāi jīng fēi.
watch taken by the hand to the farmer's house; a child opens the chaste-tree gate
lǜ zhú rù yōu jìng, qīng luò fú xíng yī
Green bamboo enters the secluded path, Green radishes are brushed aside by the gown.
huān yán dé suǒ qì, měi jiǔ liáo gǒng huī.
Happy words receive this rest, beauty wine for a time share and scatter
cháng gē yín sōng fēng, qǔ jìn hē xīng xī.
Long songs hum pine wind, melodies all river star sparse
wǒ zuì jūn fù lè, táo rán gǒng wàng jī
I drunk you again happy, happy and carefree all forgotten (root cause, seed)
This one I can't abide.
ReplyDelete顧 does not mean "lonely" but rather "look back" (usually over one's shoulder.) 美酒 does not have a compound meaning ("beauty and wine") but rather a descriptive one (i.e. "beautiful wine") Even though 美 could (rarely)have a nominal meaning in Tang-era Chinese, here it is parallel with the preceding verb-noun combination and therefore a quality-verb.
所 is used in its capacity as a function particle roughly meaning "the place where"- and therefore an adverb for purposes of parallelism. This means that 共揮 is also an adverb+verb combination.
河星 does not mean "river stars." As a general rule, whenever you find some celestial object (such as a cloud, the stars, etc) used attributively or qualitatively to describe a river, unless there's an obvious contextual reason for it, it's usually a reference to the Milky Way. In this case, since it is 河星 and not 星河, it would be best read as "the stars which fill the Milky Way."
機 does not mean root or seed or anything of the sort. The character on its own normally has the prose-meaning of "mechanism" more or less. However, here (as is frequently the case for this character in poetry) it is being used in metaphorical reference to "the things of Mankind, the engines of Man, worldly designs." This latter meaning is a contraction of the expression 機心, a phrase originally found in chapter 12 of Zhuangzi where the use of a well-sweep instead of human power for drawing water from a cistern is condemned because it is a mechanical contraption, an artificial replacement of natural effort, a degrading attempt to cheat Nature.
Sorry for the pedantry, but here it seemed necessary.
Good points all, and thanks for them! I'll take them into account as I revise this translation. Your notes about the river in particular are excellently helpful, and present a neat challenge for translation. The more meaning packed into two characters, the harder the whole line becomes to translate in a poetic fashion...
ReplyDelete機 is an interesting case; the dictionary that I had to hand as I worked on this translation (古汉语常用字字典) lists five meanings for 機 including its use in a manner similar to 幾 when it means "事情得苗头或预兆" as in 三国志; I'm more familiar with the mechanistic meaning in modern Chinese of course, but the idea of forgetting the seedling or cause of matters seemed more in keeping with the spirit of that section of the poem than did forgetting mechanisms or equipment. That Zhuangzi citation bridges the gap in a wonderful way.
If I'm using the wrong lexicon, could you point me in the direction of a better one? As characters drift over time, it becomes hard to find meanings that are appropriate for a given span of history.
It isn't uncommon, as I'm sure you know, for characters to borrow meanings from other characters which differ only by a radical. However, I'm wary of *assuming* that such borrowing is taking place unless there's a pretty good contextual reason for it (like the characters core meaning making no sense.) Here, where the reference is to Zhuangzi, and considering how heavily Taoist Li Bai's worldview was, it just doesn't make much sense to me. The only alternate meanings I know of off the top of my head for 機 are things in the general area of "moment" or "chance" or "means (i.e. to an end)".
ReplyDeleteAs for lexicons to use, that is one area where sinologists haven't cared as much as they should. Ideally, every period and genre of literary Chinese should have its own dedicated dictionary. However, for Tang Poetry there actually is a fairly useful lexicon: "A Tang Poetic Vocabulary" by Hugh Stimson. The main source material used to compile the thing is actually the 300 Tang poems (plus maybe a few dozen others.) It doesn't give much in the way of semantic nuance, but it does do a pretty good job of pointing out the general semantic core of characters and common Tang-era compounds. In my experience it is best used alongside the more fleshed out (but ahistorical) definitions of one of the larger dictionaries from China.
Incidentally (I don't know if this interests you) it also features a transcription of the characters in Middle Chinese pronunciation, which at the very least will give you a general idea of which characters were homophones back then, and what could suggest what. However the backbone of the transcription, unfortunately, is basically a typographically convenient reworking of Karlgren's reconstruction, which was immensely flawed (by conflating two very different periods of the language) and is now quite out of date as a work of real historical linguistics.