ok well. all this chinese poetry posting has put me on a bit of a translation high so i wanted to share my most recent translation project, which i actually just finished recording and uploading yesterday after two whole months of waffling. the poem itself is SO fucking cute but SO hard to translate and i'm honestly very proud that i stuck with it to the end. it instantly became one of my top favourites the very first time i heard it so i hope other people can also find some joy from it!
here is the original:
青玉案 · 元夕
【宋】 辛弃疾
东风夜放花千树，更吹落、星如雨。宝马雕车香满路。凤箫声动，玉壶光转，一夜鱼龙舞。
蛾儿雪柳黄金缕，笑语盈盈暗香去。众里寻他千百度，蓦然回首，那人却在 灯火阑珊处。
and here is my translation:
Qing Yu An: Lantern Festival at Dusk
by Xin Qiji
Fireworks blossom beneath the touch of evening's eastern breeze; flurrying as they fall, sparks shower like stars. Prancing steeds pull chiseled carriages, sweeping fragrance across the path. The xiao’s decadent notes adrift, the jadelike light’s prismatic shift; the dragon-fish dance as the night-hours pass.
Combs shining in their hair, golden, silver, silken sway; sweet perfume and tinkling mirth linger in their wake. My searching gaze is futile as I scan the thronging crowds; at last I turn, and you are there, in the quiet dark of evening wane.
translation notes beneath the cut! there is a LOT, be warned!
translation notes:
so to start from the very top, let's first introduce the title 青玉案 · 元夕.
青玉案 (pinyin: Qing Yu An, lit. the matter of the verdant jade) is actually the name of a 宋词排名 (song cipaiming, song dynasty poetic/musical form). just as shakespeare wrote sonnets and basho wrote haiku, so the poets of the song dynasty wrote, among hundreds of other forms with fun names like this, Qing Yu An poems.
each 词排名 had a set number of characters per line, set rules for its tone patterns, and even came with its own tune. maybe a better western parallel would be twinkle twinkle little star, which uses the same tune as the alphabet song and baa baa black sheep.
the end result is that there are many titles under the heading of Qing Yu An, and even, according to chatgpt, another 青玉案 · 元夕.
anyway, this one by Xin Qiji, the most famous one, is titled 元夕 (yuanxi); 元 refers to 元宵节 (yuanxiaojie), the lantern festival held on the fifteenth day of the lunar new year which marks the end of the spring festival/chinese new year, and 夕 is dusk. hence a very naturally poetic name, lantern festival at dusk.
before i get into the text of the poem, i want to note that i often sacrifice rhythm/rhyme for precision of meaning. i ✨artistically✨ speed up/slow down some syllables while recording to preserve some sense of metre lol, but it does read quite awkwardly on paper. i'm a very inexpert student and have a lot to improve on!
ok so! line by line!
东风夜放花千树
--is a literally genius pun. it transliterates as: the east wind in the evening blows open the flowers of a thousand trees. very spring, right? haha spring festival get it.
however! its a chinese celebration, so what will there definitely be? fireworks 😎 and it just so happens that one word for "setting off fireworks" in chinese is 放烟花 (fang yanhua). yep, that's the same 花, which means flowers, but when combined with 烟 (smoke), it becomes a "fire-flower" 🎆!!
it's also the same 放, which in the context of actual flowers means the opening of petals, but in the phrase 放烟花 means to set off (the fireworks).
together, this line evokes both the blooming of the spring flowers under the eastern breeze* and the blooming of a thousand fireworks in the evening sky.
*spring comes from the east ofc; this is folklore and not science i think but lends to the spring-ness of the line
更吹落，星如雨
this one is pretty straightforward. lit. blown through the air by aforementioned wind, falling like a rain shower of stars.
宝马雕车香满路
oh boy. when i tell you my mom (who is my chinese teacher) and i got in several petty arguments over baomadiaoche...
so 宝马 (baoma) are just well-bred horses, prize steeds with a pedigree. a 雕车 (diaoche) (lit. carved chariot) is a very expensive carriage carved with lots of intricate decorations. in other words, these ppl are RICH.
however, it was difficult to convey the sheer decadence of 宝马雕车 without either using a miles worth of syllables or entirely losing the original cultural context. carved was too direct and ugly to hear besides, etched was not elite enough, sculpted conveyed entirely the wrong image... also, for some reason, "proud" to describe steeds was vetoed for being inaccurate???? hence the arguments.
in this scenario, the final word choice really is a matter of the least bad option.
at the same time, the second half of this line 香满路 (lit. fragrance fills the path) implies movement: the carriage is passing by, leaving the fragrance of rich people perfume in its wake. for the sake of syllables, i shifted that movement to the fragrance part of this line. i also like that this evokes a high-headed noble sweeping elegantly through the crowds.
overall, this line adds to the picture of a decadent, bustling market street during the most joyous celebration of the year.
凤箫声动，玉壶光转，一夜鱼龙舞
lit. the notes of the phoenix xiao (chinese recorder) move, jade gourd light shimmers, the fish dragons dance all night.
chinese ppl, ok, use two motifs to describe the beauty and virtue of every artistic thing ever: phoenix and jade. phoenix xiao means NOTHING. it's like virtuous xiao. jade gourd is a little harder; some say it's the moon, some say it's the lanterns. jade and light put together kinda implies moon anyway, so i just sidestepped the problem entirely.
as for 鱼龙 (lit. fish dragons), theyre a type of dragon lantern which supposedly has some characteristic of a fish. they are puppet-danced on sticks - dragon dancing, the classic. my mom and i both had a vivid image of this dragon-lantern-dancing, but we couldn't find it ANYWHERE. if anyone knows the right search query to pull this up, please lmk how to tame 谷大哥*. anyway, i left the lanterns implied because idk how the fuck to explain this whole thing in four syllables.
*lit. big bro google. its funnier in chinese
蛾儿雪柳黄金缕
this is the line that, when i finally bothered to properly research it, made everything about this translation click into place. these are all hair decorations. 蛾儿 (lit. li'l moth) are silk moths, 雪柳 (lit. snow willow) are silver tassels, and 黄金缕 (lit. yellow-golden cords) are gold cords lmao. hence golden silver silken sway, which was SO satisfying to come up with.
笑语盈盈暗香去
lit. laughing speech tinkles and faint fragrance goes by. this one is also fairly straightforward. 去 means to go, so we specifically want the image of a group of giggly teenage girls fading into the crowd.
众里寻他千百度。蓦然回首，那人却在 灯火阑珊处。
and finally we reach the most famous line, the 千古名句 (qiangumingju) - iconic line of a thousand histories!
lit. within the crowd, searching for him* in a thousand hundred directions; suddenly the head turns, it turns out that person is standing in the darkness where the lights have gone out.
*"him" is highly debated. 他, used in modern chinese like the pronoun "he", was historically a catchall pronoun for people of any gender. iirc, 她 for "she", and the gendered distinction, was only introduced when china started integrating to the west. in this line, 他 could be the teen girl that just passed by, or her beau. whichever way, one is the searcher, the other is the searched. i chose here to sidestep this by using i and you bc fuck gender.
anyway, when the searcher's head turns - even this bit had to be suitably poetic, a nightmare - they find their lover in the 灯火阑珊处.
灯火阑珊处 this phrase refers to a very specific image. imagine, in the early hours of the morning, a dwindling market street; the stands are closing one by one, lights winking out, leaving a gentle blanket of dark and calm behind. it is the quiet after the rain, the breath after the shout; it is the sigh of closing your front door at the end of the night. it's not the absence or complete lack of light, but rather the exit of it. a place of that just-left-behind dark is a 灯火阑珊处.
this sentence gave me so much grief and i am so proud to have done it even just a little bit of justice.
so after all that, the scene described by this poem is something like this: a lively late-night market street. people from many walks of life fill the path, celebrating the lantern festival, the turn of a new year and coming of spring, a riotous party of light and noise and joy. as the night slips into the sixteenth, the market begins winding down, stalls closing and lights winking out. amongst the teeming crowds ambling their way home, a young person searches for the their lover from whom they were separated; on some sudden instinct, they turn, to find their lover already looking back from the darkness of the fading festival, gaze caught in the divide between light and dark, wake and sleep: a quiet young love on the edge of spring, something fresh and new.
if anyone made it to this point, thank you and i hope this was an interesting read! please feel free to add comments questions and observations!! i would love to discuss at any level with someone other than my mom and chinese poetry truly is one of my passions even when it makes me want to kill, so i'm always down to talk. :] <3
fellas is it gay to live out the rest of ur days in a villa built by ur bestest friend and business partner which is also the ideal realisation of his famous architectural theory
fellas is it gay to live out the rest of ur days in a villa built by ur bestest friend and business partner which is also the ideal realisation of his famous architectural theory
somwthing something ur attention like sunshine on a cloudy day, one beam and i turn my face toward u in supplication, a word from u the nourishment i need, etc etc
ME WHEN YOURE AT YOUR MOST HONEST IN YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE!!!! ME WHEN YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN SAFE HARBOUR EVEN BEFORE YOU KNEW WHAT THE FUCK WAS GOING ON!!!!!! ME WHEN YOU KEEP GIVING AND GIVING AND GIVING OF YOURSELF AND LEAVE THEM SPACE TO GIVE ONLY WHAT THEY CAN!!!!!! BC YOU KNOW!!!! TOO MANY PEOPLE HAVE TAKEN MORE THAN THEY CAN GIVE!!!! AND ONE DAY!!!!!! THEY WILL GIVE YOU BACK!!!!! WHAT HAS BEEN IN THEIR HEART ALL THIS TIME!!!!!! IN A LANGUAGE YOU TOO CAN UNDERSTAND!!!!!! ME WHEN WE'RE ALL J LOVING THE ONLY WAY WE KNOW HOW!!!!!! im in tears
I LOVE LOVE!!! I LOVE FALLING SLOWLY!!! I LOVE BEING KNOWN AND KNOWING IN TURN!!!! I LOVE WHEN GIVING CARE IS SELF CARE!!!! I LOVE GROWING TOGETHER!!!! LIFE IS MADE FOR DEVOTING YOURSELF TO YOUR PEOPLE!!!! LIFE IS ABOUT CARVING OUT A ROOM IN YOUR HEART!!!!! KNOWING EVEN IF THEY GO!!!! THE DOOR IS UNLOCKED FOR THEM!!!!
My straight coworker who I am deeply in love with invited me to a Friendsgiving what kind of dessert can I make to convince her to leave her boyfriend of 9 years and run away with me
