8: Mountains and Aspects

Footnotes to the previous Du Fu poem:

1. Daizong refers to Mt. Tai, the quintessential Chinese 'sacred mountain', so the poem is about Du Fu contemplating Mt. Tai as he looks on it, or from its heights down onto the world. In China a 'mountain' refers not to a single peaked formation, but to a collection of what Westerners might call individual mountains or hills; a system of heights, like /\/\/\ instead of /\.
2. During the Spring and Autumn period, the border between Qi and Lu ran through Mt. Tai, so this use of the place names parallels the later use of Yin and Yang in the way it divides and dualizes the mountain.
3. Great Transformations is a philosophical term that makes reference to the basic operations of nature itself. Literally, the two characters mean "Creation / Change" but I have chosen "Great Transformations" for reasons I explain below.
4. Yin and Yang are familiar to many in the West as the Twin Forces that underlie certain strands of Chinese metaphysics. In many ancient texts, such as the Book of Songs, they also refer to the northern and southern faces of mountains.

9: Tuesday Literary Allusion Blogging

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?