What to do? On the even lighter side, this Saturday, 10 am-4 pm, you may enjoy the EU Embassy Open House. It's between that and the Susan G. Komen Global Race for the Cure. Either way, at least for me, a lot of walking will be involved.
Looking back On Monday, Fatima, whom I had emailed my teacher's blog when she was absent a few weeks ago, suggested that I post some of our recent conversations so that you could practice new vocabulary. If you, like Fatima and Julia, especially admired Li Po's poem, perhaps you want to recite it in Chinese! Seriously, below is a newer translation than the one we used that may give you a slightly different impression of the poem. For me, Tsai's translation is less elegant, more clunky, although perhaps more specific and easy to understand. In my own anthology, 100 Poems from Tang and Song Dynasties, translator (and mystery novelist par excellence) Qiu Xiaolong illustrates Changgan Song with a painting of a melancholy young woman whose curving posture is echoed in a delicate frame of budding branches surrounding the pagoda where she sits, gazing out, ignoring her tea and her book.
A Poem of Changgan (Changgan xing)
When my bangs hung about my forehead
I played by the gates, bending off flowers;Circling the well in play, infant plums in hand:
Living in the lands of the boatsmen.
My shy cheeks widened for laughter not once.
Beckoned a thousand times, I answered not once.
I would follow you as ashes mix with dust.
I won't climb the look-out for you.
Where the Horse-Head Rocks pile high.
The apes call of sorrow, the heavens wail.
Grew of green moss,
By autumn wind. Early this year.
Flying over the grass in the Western Garden.
She frets on a chair for her cheeks growing old.
When you will come down from Sanba.
Even on the Sands of Lasting Wind.
Riding on a horse of bamboo, you come
Two children without dislike or suspicion,
At fourteen I became your wife.
I lowered my head to a dark wall;
Only at fifteen my eyebrows opened to you:
I gave you my antique promise.
At sixteen you traveled far beyond the Gorge,
Beware the month of May- there
Your footsteps at the gates
Moss deeper than broom sweepings. Leaves fell--
In August butterflies turn yellow, pair by pair,
They hurt your wife, pair by pair.
Tell me in a letter
I will meet you-- nowhere is far---
Translated by S-C Kevin Tsai, a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His poetry has appeared in Salamander and Del Sol Review.
Just to expand, here's the first stanza of a much more recent poem about yearning, love without physical contact. Does looking at a crowd of people instead of one lonely little wife make the newer poem less poignant? Take a look and let me know if we should discuss the heartache blues on Monday.
Everybody Has a Heartache: A Blues
In the United terminal in Chicago at five on a Friday afternoon
The sky is breaking with rain and wind and all the flights
Are delayed forever. We will never get to where we are going
And there’s no way back to where we’ve been.
The sun and the moon have disappeared to an island far from anywhere.
In the United terminal in Chicago at five on a Friday afternoon
The sky is breaking with rain and wind and all the flights
Are delayed forever. We will never get to where we are going
And there’s no way back to where we’ve been.
The sun and the moon have disappeared to an island far from anywhere.
As always, your comments are invited.
