4: On Oranges and Government

What is Zhang Jiuling getting at in this week's poem? In the first three Poems of Encountering, his focus progressed from the purely natural world, to the intersection of the natural world and the lonely hermit, to the hermit himself. Then comes this fourth poem, which returns from the hermit to nature again, but reads differently to me than the first poem with its careful opposition of kingfishers and swans.

The Fourth Poem of Encountering begins with Zhang meditating on the red tangerine. In the tradition of Qu Yuan, he uses the tangerine to comment on politics and politicians: in the fair-weather climate of the Imperial court, he says, it is truly remarkable that a man in a position of influence could remain uncorrupted, or evergreen. When Zhang asks why the tree is secluded, he means, why keep such a person away from court? Why would you exile him to Hubei province, to live out his life as an isolated scholar? Why can honest men not survive in government?

The fourth verse takes an abrupt turn from this simple and well-trod metaphor to questions of cosmic significance. Fate creates the conditions of the world. All actions are tied to other actions. The universe is an immense network of cause and effect, where events set the stage for their own recurrence. Violence creates pain, pain creates anger, anger creates violence again, naturally and without end. Children growing recreate their parents in themselves. This is Zhang's answer to the question, why can honest men not survive in government? In the end, fault does not lie with a political faction, or a rival. Honest men can't survive in government because all actions have consequences.

This understanding transcends the simple framework of the First Poem of Encountering, where envy, and human attachment to high office are the problems, and detaching oneself from those is the solution. The final couplet of the Fourth Poem anchors this cosmic statement in reality: A tree grows and bears fruit. In Chinese, we call a "result" 结果 jiéguǒ; the second character literally means "fruit." The honest man acts, and his actions achieve results. Yet his growth to maturity, and his actions, cast shadows. The shadow and the tree and its fruit cannot be separated from one another. They are all part of the same great system. Consequences are born in the moment of action.

The common narrative of the exiled official describes a man wrongfully accused, betrayed, and set aside to watch his country destroy itself. Zhang, in these poems, tells a different tale, in a kind of triumphant realism: the exiled official has done his honest work, and he has been set aside. His sacrifice is complete. This is the heart of the Encounter of the poem's title: the encounter of courage and honesty with their necessary consequences. For the rest of his life, the honest man may struggle to accept the consequences of his choices, but he could not have acted any other way. The tangerine grows in secluded valleys, but at least its heart does not wither in the cold.

4: Alluding to Qu Yuan

This poem is a great example of the intertextuality Matt mentioned last month, and a good introduction to Qu Yuan 屈原, a master of Chinese verse -- arguably the first master of verse, as he is apparently the first Chinese poet to have his name directly associated with his works. Qu Yuan lived some three centuries before the Common Era, during the period of history called the Warring States, when the territory that is now the Chinese heartland was ruled by, well, warring states. The fiefdoms that took power as the Zhou declined were eventually devoured into seven large nations, and Qu Yuan worked as a high minister for the king of Chu, one of the seven.

At the time of Qu Yuan's life, another of the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of Qin, was growing ever more aggressive, the ruling family's ambitions given strength by the rise of a philosophy of meritocratic totalitarianism (more or less) called Legalism, which a philosopher friend of mine describes pithily as "Evil Daoism." Qin scored a sequence of decisive military victories, and seemed a threat to all seven kingdoms, including Chu. Qu Yuan advocated an alliance between the six kingdoms against Qin, but he was betrayed for his trouble and sentenced to exile in Hubei province. Exiled and beset by deep depression, he composed poetry. If you think this sounds familiar, you're absolutely right. Many Chinese poets have walked the path of exile and literature; Qu Yuan is noteworthy, though, because even if he did not walk it first, he is the first one we remember. He is, quite literally, the one they made the holiday after.

Oh yes: in his depression, Qu Yuan wrote a sequence of poems about government, loyalty, duty, and sorrow, that have been the touchstones of Chinese romantic verse for two millennia. Then he walked into a lake carrying a heavy rock, and drowned. Villagers raced out in their fishing boats to save them, but they were too late. Unwilling to let such a great man be devoured by the beasts of the water, they threw rice and dumplings into the lake: eat this, but leave his body unharmed. When that failed, they beat the water with their paddles to frighten hungry fish away. Every year to this day, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month of the Chinese calendar, people around the world race their dragon boats into the lake to save Qu Yuan, and always fail; they throw rice into the water so the fish will not devour him.

It looks sort of like this.

In the end, Qu Yuan proved right. The combination of the political control granted by Legalism, and the military leadership and ambition of a ruling family rightly measured against the early Caesars and Phillip and Alexander of Macedon, proved too much for the other six kingdoms. In 221 BCE, the Qin unified all China under a single banner, and commenced a rule infamous for bloodthirsty suppression of dissenting opinion, bookburning, and the murder of scholars. The Qin lasted for only fifteen years before they were toppled by a peasant rebellion led by the charismatic Liu Bang, who founded the Han Dynasty, but they left deep marks on China.

One of Qu Yuan's poems was an extensive poem praising the red tangerine, called 橘颂 júsòng, "Tangerine Ode." Here, Qu Yuan praises the tangerine for the same reasons as Zhang Jiuling (perhaps I should write that the other way 'round, of course), citing the value of its remarkable constancy. Reading this poem biographically, you hear Qu Yuan's lament for the world of human affairs, where constancy is not so highly regarded, or rewarded.

Zhang takes this poem as his base, establishing the scene and alluding in the same breath to Qu Yuan, with whom all his readers would be familiar. Then he asks why the tree is so secluded, thereby raising the question: why has he been banished? Why was Qu Yuan banished, for that matter? Why are men of good faith banished from the halls of power?

I'll get to those questions, and the poem's overall meaning as near as I can fathom it, tomorrow.

4: Fate and All It Encounters

I had trouble translating this week's poem, which was a shame considering that it's the last we'll hear from Zhang Jiuling for a while. One of the lines that bothered me the most was the following couplet:

運命唯所遇，循環不可尋

which I ultimately translated as:

Fate and everything it meets: a
wheel whose end we cannot seek.

There are some things that bother me about this translation, including the almost-rhyme between meet and seek, which feels ugly to me. Then again, there's a similar vowel rhyme in the original, between yù, the last character of the first line, and xún, the last character of the second line, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it.

The first line is the only instance in these four poems of the character 遇 yù, which as you might have noticed is one of the two characters used to name the whole set: 感遇四首, the "Feeling / Encountering Four Poems," which I've translated as "Four Poems of Encountering" and has been translated elsewhere (esp. by Witter Bynner) simply as "Thoughts," which I feel doesn't express the complexity of 感遇. I translated 遇 in the poem as "meet" rather than "encounter" for metrical reasons.

The second line, though, is the source of my confusion. Broken down into its components, it reads: 循環 (circle, cycle) 不可 (cannot, must not) 尋 (seek). How does a cycle we cannot seek square with "fate and all it meets"? Or a cycle that cannot be sought? Seems unlikely: fate is all around us, inescapable. What, then, are we to make of this line?

There is a tight parallelism between the two lines, which helps:

運命 唯所 遇
循環 不可 尋
(noun) (adverb) (verb)

It seems clear from this that the cycle is (or is closely connected with) fate; I tried to emphasize this by enjambing the two lines in English. Moreover, the two adverbial phrases are opposite in meaning, at least as I read them: 唯所 includes all possibilities, while 不可 denies possibilities. Then, if we think of 遇 as the ongoing process of meeting, might not 尋 be the ultimate result of seeking? In Japanese, 尋 means "to fathom" (according to my dictionary), and 尋找 in Chinese can mean "to find" as much as "to seek." So, is it possible that the cycle, rather than being impossible to find, is simply impossible to follow through to the end (because it is endless)? And then, y extension, can fate cannot be worked through to the end?

Maybe. Then again, maybe I'm just crazy.

4: Fourth Poem of Encountering, by Zhang Jiuling

A few changes to format here; I'll discuss them tomorrow. For now, enjoy my meager attempt at our last Zhang Jiuling poem for a little while!

004张九龄:感遇四首之四

江南有丹橘，經冬猶綠林。
豈伊地氣暖，自有歲寒心。
可以薦嘉客，奈何阻重深。
運命唯所遇，循環不可尋。
徒言樹桃李，此木豈無陰。

Zhang Jiuling: Four Poems of Encountering, Number Four

The Southlands have a red tangerine, that
endures the winter in still-green groves

In a realm of such mild weather
it has a heart to bear the cold.

You might give it to noble guests;
Why is it secluded so deep?

Fate and everything it meets: a
wheel whose end we cannot seek.

Someone says: tree, peaches, plums,
how can this wood not have shadows?


Jiāngnán yǒu dān jú, jīng dòng yóu lù lín.
River south has red tangerine, endure winter still green forest
qǐ yí dì qì nuǎn, zǐ yǒu suì hán xīn
how this place air warm, self have severe cold heart
kě yǐ jiàn jiā kè, nài hé zǔ zhòng shēn!
may be present good guest, nevertheless how kept heavy deep
yūn mìng wéi suǒ yù, xún huán bù kě xún.
luck / life (fate) think so encounter, cycle not can search
tú yán shù táo lǐ, cǐ mù qǐ wú yīn?
disciple say tree peaches plums, this wood how could not (shade, yin)?

3: Terms of Art (and Religion)

Yesterday I introduced the basic tenants of Buddhism, and discussed how it arrived in China and became a part of Chinese thought by the time when our poets lived and wrote. Today I'm going to focus the poem's Buddhist language.

The first of these is the second line of the first couplet:

滞虑洗孤清
zhì lǜ xǐ gū qīng
sluggish consider wash alone clear

The character 滞 zhì dictionary-translates as "sluggish," but can also be read as "congealed" (which is its meaning in Japanese). Thoughts, the detritus of experience, accumulate in the mind as karma; they attach to things, and cause suffering. To alleviate suffering, we wash those accumulated thoughts away. This doesn't mean that a Buddhist wants to eliminate cognition--quite the opposite. Think of thought as blood. When blood flows freely through the body, the body is healthy. When blood clots and hardens, though, it is life-threatening. Buddhism observes that human thought is mostly clotted: when we see the world we see our preconceptions of it to the exclusion of the world itself. The monk, by "washing" his thoughts, returns their clear and liquid state.

空意 kōng yì, in the third couplet, is another interesting example. In order to liberate the mind from suffering, Buddhism advocates realizing that things as you think of them have no independent, eternal identity. Everything is causally connected to everything else. No phenomenon can be isolated from other phenomena. As such, the world is "empty" - nothing exists in and of itself. (In this way Buddhism has a lot in common with certain threads in Catholic thought, though I'm sure any good theologian would have serious issues with this position of mine.)

In the poem, 空意 kōng yì might mean "the meaning of emptiness," or else "the emptiness of meaning" - that is to say, the emptiness of inherent meaning. I chose to translate it as "emptiness" alone, relying on the degree to which the association between Buddhism and emptiness exists in American culture. This also saved me from having to decide one way or the other on the meaning of 空意, and then having to fit "meaning" into the weird rhythm structure I attempted in this translation. Then again, maybe the elision is too convenient. What do you think?

3: Boo-dhism

Sorry about that; I needed to fit some kind of Halloween reference, and it's hard to shoehorn thrills and chills into Zhang Jiuling!

Matt asked me to talk about Buddhism in the third Poem of Encountering. For those of you with no experience of Buddhism whatsoever, the Buddha's most basic teachings are:

1. There is suffering in life.
   
2. Suffering comes from attachment to things.
   
3. Suffering can cease when attachment to things ceases.
   
4. There is a path out of suffering.
   

The "path" is the Middle Way of moderation, care, and compassion. Buddhism first came to China in the Han dynasty, carried by traders along the Silk Road and by pilgrims from India. It reached full flourishing under the Tang dynasty, when our poets lived and wrote. Bodhidharma, the founder of Chan (Zen) Buddhism in China, came from the West (that is, India) in the 5th century, and his movement flourished under the Tang alongside native religious and philosophical movements like Daoism and Buddhism. In fact, the three traditions were seen as complementary, and a term, Three Teachings (三教), arose to refer to all at once.

When I was a child, learning about this stuff for the first time, the fact that these three religious existed side by side without sectarian violence blew me away. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the fact of the matter is that Zhang Jiuling was educated in the Confucian system, and surrounded by and familiar with Buddhist and Daoist teachings. The tension between Confucian thought, which emphasized engagement with the official world and duty, and Daoist or Buddhist thought, which placed less importance on worldly affairs, can be seen throughout these three poems. Daoism, with its emphasis on natural behavior and "flying free," is all through the first of these three poems; the image of the hermit-monk stretches between Daoism and Buddhism, but the poem's language, especially its emphasis on washing the mind and on freedom from attachment to worldly affairs, seems explicitly Buddhist to me. The anxiety I mentioned yesterday, though, is all Confucian.

Tomorrow, I'll focus on the way the specific words Matt mentioned, and the role they play in the poem. As per usual, this topic could consume another week all by itself!

3: What We Talk About When We Talk About Encountering

(With apologies to Raymond Carver)

Matt requested some discussion of the Buddhist themes in the comments to the last post, and I'll oblige tomorrow. Tonight, I want to talk about this poem as part of the sequence of 感遇 (gǎnyù) poems.

Zhang Jiuling's first poem compared two types of birds - the lone swan flying over the ocean, and the kingfishers nested in the high tree. Zhang's sympathy appears to be first with the swan, claiming that as he wanders high and far, the arrows of men cannot harm him. However, Zhang writes this poem after being banished from the imperial court and sent to a distant province. In fact, his position has a great deal in common with the kingfishers, who, nesting in the tall tree, are nevertheless vulnerable to the "golden bullets" of a hunter's sling.

Similarly, in the second poem, we naturally project Zhang onto the hermit wandering the lonely valley among the cinnamon and lotus flowers in the autumn and spring. However - and I'm going with Matt's excellent read on the character 折 zhé as "select" in the sense of "pluck" or "pick" - by the end of the poem there's considerable ambiguity as to whether the poet identifies more with the peaceful religious hermit or the flowers, which, rejoicing as they grow, don't care whether they might be picked by the hermit. However, we're not certain whether it's a good thing for the flowers to be plucked. Zhang and his readers certainly thought that the hermit was a virtuous figure, but is being picked by a hermit an honor for the flowers, or certain death? This is particularly interesting given the form Zhang's exile took: he was selected (picked / 折'd) by the Emperor as a governor of a backwards province, and in the process ripped out of his flowering, carefree life at court.

In this poem, Zhang's focus shifts from the natural world to the hermit himself: a religious recluse living away from the urban press of humanity in some secluded valley, meditating and perfecting his mind (more on which later). Of the ten characters in the poem's first couplet, two (独 dú and 孤 gū) emphasize the solitary, lonely nature of the hermit's retreat. The hermit, isolated from the universe, achieves perfection by contemplating emptiness. What a fitting image for a poem by a man separated from his society!

But Zhang doesn't stop there, of course. In the last two lines, he arrives again, strangely separate from what at first appeared to be the main character of the poem:

From flying or sinking affairs am I cut off;
what comfort do I gain from dedication?

In contrast to the first two lines, which contain two characters meaning "lonely," the last two lines contain two characters, 自zǐ and 吾wù, that both mean "I" - in the same position as the two "lonely" characters in the first couplet. It seems likely to me that this is an intentional parallelism (and one almost impossible to capture in English translation, of course). The emphasis on the personal pronoun is weird in a a poem like this: the Tang poet has many different ways to narrate or describe a situation, yet here Zhang draws our attention to an "I" in a manner most uncharacteristic of a Buddhist monk.

I see a few different possibilities here:

1. The monk is talking. A Buddhist sage seems unlikely to communicate in such a self-centered manner. Maybe I'm misreading the line, but I think this is the least probable option.
   
2. Zhang is talking, and the "dedication" in the last line is meant to be read as "dedication to the Emperor" or "the court." In that case, he might be saying: "look at this monk! When I am distant from court, I feel really, really sad -- what does that idle dedication gain me? I should start meditating like the monk here."
   
3. Zhang is talking, and the "dedication" in the last line refers to Buddhist practice. In this case, Zhang is wistfully confessing his inability to focus on contemplation like the ideal monk: "all this meditation doesn't help me; what comfort can I gain from dedicating [myself to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha]?"
   

Regardless of which interpretation we choose (or others I've missed that y'all should feel free to point out for me), thinking about the last three poems this way has given me a lot of respect for Zhang's mastery of perspective and subtlety. I wonder where he'll take us next.

3: Zhang Jiuling, Four Poems of Encountering #3

The 300 Tang Poems opens with four Zhang Jiuling works, of which you've seen two aready. This one is less famous than the first pair, which has made it harder to find good annotations. Be prepared for retractions and madness to come!

003
张九龄:感遇四首之三

幽人归独卧,滞虑洗孤清。
持此谢高鸟,因之传远情。
日夕怀空意,人谁感至精?
飞沈理自隔,何所慰吾诚?

yōurén guī dú wò, zhì lǜ xǐ gū qīng
hermit return lonely bed, sluggish consider wash alone clear

chí cǐ xiè gāo niǎo, yīn zhī chuán yuán qíng.
hold this wither tall bird, (therefore) spread far feeling

rìxì huài kōng yì, rén shéi gǎn zhì jīng
day night cherish empty meaning, people who feel to perfect?

fēi shěn lǐ zǐ gé, hé suǒ wèi wù chéng
fly sink at a distance I cut off, how that which console me sincere

---

The hermit returns to the solitary bed,
agglutinate thoughts washed lonely and clear.

Hold these to thank the soaring birds;
Because of them his mind spreads far.

Day and night embracing emptiness--
who on earth can know such perfection?

From flying or sinking affairs am I cut off;
what comfort do I gain from dedication?

2: Everyday Study, Everyday Up!

In the comments to the Monday translation, Matt pointed out a couple points where my work conflicts with the interpretation of Baidu Baike, a gigantic Chinese online encyclopedia. Reading through the notes on Baidu, I see a couple clear failures of my translation, but I'm not certain how to fix them.

Starting in the first half of the third couplet, "谁知林栖者", the phrase "lín xì zhě" (forest lonely person) properly translates to "hermit" in the religious recluse sense: someone living away from the world in order to seek enlightenment. Baidu identifies the hermit with the 美人 in the final couplet -- grouping the two characters 美 and 人 together as "beautiful person", rather than separating them as I've done in my translation. In that case, Mike's proposed translation of 美 as "virtuous" yesterday gets closer to the truth than my "honor," as it focuses on the hermit's virtue. Moreover, Baidu interprets 坐 in that third couplet as "deep," which I'm not certain how to handle.

相悦, xiāng yuè, I translated originally (on the basis of another annotation) as "like one another" in the sense of resembling, but on retrospect, and realizing the subject is a hermit, I feel that the phrase refers to mutual happiness, along the lines of the dictionary definition. Who would have suspected that the dictionary was right all along? In that case, the mutual rejoicing is probably between the hermit and the flowers, as there are no other people in the poem.

Given this parsing, that line:

谁知林栖者,闻风坐相悦。
shéi zhī lín xì zhě, wēn fēng zuò xiāng yuè
who know forest lonley (type of person), hear\smell wind deep mutual joy

becomes:

"Who knows the solitary forest man, who smells the breeze, deep, rejoicing in their joy?"

Or, if we take "谁知", "who knows," as declarative (Where's John? Who knows!), the sentence might scan:

No one knows the solitary forest man, who smells the breeze, deeply rejoicing in the flowers' joy.

I keep "林栖者" expanded as "solitary forest man" because each of the three characters which comprise the word carries a meaning in Chinese which is lost by the direct translation to "hermit" in English. Maybe I should render it as "solitary forest hermit" to avoid confusion, though.

So much to learn! This is going to be one heck of a project. Oh well; Everyday Study, Everyday Up, as the walls of my classroom in Anhui province said.

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?"

2: Parallelism

I'll start with something I vaguely understand about this poem, and leave the points of my confusion for later in the week.

(Apropos of nothing, "The Points of My Confusion", or possibly "The Points of His Confusion" sounds like the title for some kind of rich caramel society novel, best read on stormy day with tea and honey.)

The first couplet of this poem is an accessible example of how Chinese poetry uses parallelism:

兰叶春葳蕤,桂华秋皎洁。

Each character or phrase in the first line of this couplet corresponds with a character or phrase in the second line. This may be easier to visualize if the lines are presented vertically:

兰叶春葳蕤
桂华秋皎洁

The dictionary reads these lines as:

orchid leaf spring (abundant, luxurious)
cassia flower autumn (clear, pure)

I enclose the translations of 葳蕤 and 皎洁 in parentheses because each of these two pairs of characters forms a set phrase with the meanings I've bracketed above. These two lines have a strict form: (plant name) (part of plant) (season) (adjectival double-phrase). We could continue to riff on this phrase for subsequent lines if we wanted:

Holly berries in winter: red, round.
Dandelion seeds in summer: floating free.

Such parallelism is more than just a neat trick; in many poems it's key to comprehending a subtle line. When translating poem #1, I was stymied by the couplet 美服患人指,高明逼神恶 (měifù huàn rén zhǐ, gāo míng bī shén wù) which reads in the dictionary: beautiful clothes worry men point, high shine meet god hate. I was stymied at this point, but Matt pointed out that I should focus on the parallelism in this couplet, where 患 huàn and 逼 bī work as verbs, měifù (beautiful clothes) and gāo míng (high and shining, sort of like high and mighty) both refer to a kind of elevated or haughty condition, and rén zhǐ (people pointing) and shén wù (god hate) are situations to avoid.

I wasn't happy with the parallelism in my English translation of that line ("Beautifully clothed, beware pointing fingers; greatness and glory bring spirits' wrath"); in the end it felt like a poorer representation of the Chinese than was the raw dictionary translation. I tried to be more strict in communicating the parallel here:

Orchid leaves in spring: abundant, luxurious; cinnamon flowers in fall: bright, pure.

I think these two lines hold together, but I'm cautious about falling into the trap of writing lines so similar to the Chinese that they don't work in English. Thoughts?

2: Zhang Jiuling - Four Poems of Encountering, No. 2

Matt's madcap rebellion regardless, I intend to continue with the poems in Hengtang Hermit Edition order. I don't know enough Tang poetry to know which poems out of the 300 I really like; one of my minor goals with this project is to learn more about Tang dynasty poetics. I have to move in some order, so I might as well proceed in the traditional one, which will provide me with classics and hidden gems in equal measure.

002张九龄:感遇四首之二

兰叶春葳蕤,桂华秋皎洁。
欣欣此生意,自尔为佳节。
谁知林栖者,闻风坐相悦。
草木有本心,何求美人折?

lán yè chūn wēiruí, guì huā qiū jiǎojié
orchid leave spring abundant luxurious, cassia flower autumn clear pure

xīnxīn cǐ shēng yì, zǐ ér wèi jiā jié
happy happy this life meaning, I you become good festival

shéi zhī lín xì zhě, wēn fēng zuò xiāng yuè
who know forest lonley (type of person), hear\smell wind & so mutual joy

cǎo mù yǒu běn xīn, hé qiǔ měi rén zhé?
grass wood have root heart, why beg beauty person return?

Zhang Jiuling, Four Poems of Encountering, No. 2

Orchid leaves in spring: abundant, luxurious; cinnamon flowers in fall: bright, pure.
Happy, happy this life; spring and fall are joyous revels.
Who knows the lonely forest, hears the wind and so becomes like breeze.
Grass and wood have a rooted heart; why return to seek honor among men?

Even without Kang Laoshi to excoriate me I can see a handful of issues with this translation, which I'll start to bring up tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy your evening!

1: Zhang Jiuling - Four Poems of Encountering, No. 1

Let's start with the raw language at first: the poem in its original Chinese, followed by the pronunciation with a word-for-word dictionary translation. Then, I'll try my hand at a full English translation.

001张九龄:感遇四首之一

孤鸿海上来,池潢不敢顾。

侧见双翠鸟,巢在三珠树。

矫矫珍木巅,得无金丸惧。

美服患人指,高明逼神恶。

今我游冥冥,弋者何所慕。

Gū hóng hǎi shàng lái, chíhuáng bù gǎn gù.

Lone swan ocean on come, pool puddle not dare visit

Cē jiàn shuāng cuìniǎo, cháo zài sānzhūshù

side see pair kingfishers, nest at three pearl tree

Jiǎojiǎo zhēn mù diān, dé wú jīnwán jù.

arrogant / military(x2) treasure wood peak, how not gold pellet terror

měifù huàn rén zhǐ, gāo míng yù shén wù.

beautiful clothes worry men point, high shine meet god hate

jīn wǒ yóu míngmíng, yìzhě hé suǒ mù

now I swim / wander high and far, arrow -ingperson how where admire

Zhang Jiuling, Four Poems of Encountering - 1

Lone swan comes over ocean; pools and ponds it dare not visit.

Beside, see a pair of kingfishers, nesting in a triple pearl tree.

Mighty on their treasure-wood peak, how can they not fear a sling's gold stones?

Beautifully clothed, beware pointing fingers; greatness and glory bring spirits' wrath.

Now I ramble high and far; archers, what hope have they?