Happy Gushiwensday Shabbes, we've got a Du Mu tonight! Here's "On the subject of water pavilion of Kaiyuan Temple at Xuanzhou." It includes a little foreword by Du: "Below the pavilion are winding creeks, between which people dwell."
The relics of the Six Dynasties are now just manuscripts fading to air
but the sky's mild clouds are as lazy now as they were in ancient times.
Birds come and birds go through the color of the mountain;
people sing and people weep among the sound of water.
Rain in deep autumn, door-curtains for a thousand houses,
and at sunset on the balcony, a flutelike wind.
Feeling melancholy because I'll never meet Fan Li,
who disappeared into the jagged mist and trees at Five Lakes.
I'm really not sure what all Du Mu was going for with this one... I just tried to make my translation kind of abstruse because it's what he would want. Here are some notes, though!
Kaiyuan Temple at Xuanzhou --- in modern Anhui province on the Wanxi River.
relics of the Six Dynasties --- specifically 文物 cultural relics. The term is ill-defined even now, including vehicles, clothing, ritual objects, and documents. We're not totally sure what it meant in the Tang Dynasty. But either way, the Six Dynasties period ended about 250 years before this poem was written.
manuscripts fading to air --- a lot of ways to interpret this one. 草连空 "grass joining emptiness" is the gloss I went with. As Laurence pointed out it's fun that this line ends with 空 and then next line in the couplet starts with 天 since they can both refer to the sky, so I wanted to end my line with "air."
through the color of the mountain --- seriously, what does 山色里 mean? I wasn't confident enough about any interpretation to do anything other than literal, although Laurence points out that 色 is often used poetically to mean scenery. My translation is a little intentionally occluded because I like the ambiguity and the possible alternate image of birds emerging from a painting of a mountain, which feels very Mushi-shi to me.
deep autumn --- maybe better translated as "late autumn" but the literal is so juicy.
door-curtains --- Sounds a little awkward. I feel like the best vibes-based translation of 帘幕 is maybe "awning," but in the West awnings are curved, so you don't get the image of rain as a curtain.
Fan Li --- a politician and businessman from the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, some 1300 years before the time of this poem's writing. As I understand it he was being pursued by his former lord and decided to disappear.
jagged mist --- 参差 fantastic word, maybe meant to convey uneven or patchy, but can also mean serrated.
Full of emotion but withdrawn
facing our cups of wine our smiles fail
the candle feels the same and hates to part
it substitutes for tears until the dawn
Happy Gushiwensday Shabbes!! We come with a lovely poem by Du Mu: "Double Ninth, Climbing Qi Hill."
The river holds a mirror up to autumn, when wild geese first fly south.
My guests and I carry pots of wine up Chizhou's humble blue hill.
In this earthly life it's hard to find good companions to talk and laugh with--
you must cover yourself in chrysanthemums and return with your hair full of flowers!
We'll get drunk and entertain ourselves for the Double Ninth festival--
no point in climbing scenic overlooks just to mourn the setting of the sun.
Since when? Since forever! This is the only way things can be.
Should I climb Mount Niu all alone and soak my clothes in tears?
This is a poem about the Double Ninth festival, observed around October on the ninth day of the ninth month. It's traditional to climb mountains, plant dogwood, and drink chrysanthemum wine or tea. Some people also visit their family's graves, so the mix of joy and remembrance of death kind of reminds me of the High Holy Days! Anyway here are my notes.
holds a mirror up --- the river 涵秋影 "contains autumn's reflection/shadow." I originally had this as "holds autumn's reflection" but the pun with holding a mirror was too cute to say no.
Chizhou's humble blue hill --- Chizhou isn't mentioned in the poem, but it's the city the Du Mu was governor of at the time and 齐山 Qi Hill is in the middle of the city. So this is more of a fun evening out with friends than climbing a mountain. Here he refers to it as 翠微, "blue-green and small."
it's hard to find... laugh with --- I think it's hilarious how different in tone Laurence's and my translations are here. I interpreted 难逢开口笑 very literally: difficult to come across [people with whom to] start to talk and laugh. I wrote this from the perspective of someone who was lucky enough to find good friends.
setting of the sun --- I gather that this isn't a usual phrasing for sunset; 落晖 could be literally translated as sinking sunlight or sinking splendor. It gives a very clear image of something that's incredibly beautiful but also about to end. Which is fun because one of the things you do on Double Ninth is remember your loved ones who have passed.
Mount Niu --- an allusion to what seems to be a personal motif of Duke Jing of Qi, who (according to Gushiwen) climbed 牛山 Mount Niu to mourn that he would soon die and afterward used the location as poetic shorthand for grieving the ephemerality of life.
Happy Gushiwensday Monday! Today we have a poem by Du Mu titled “To Magistrate Han Chuo of Yangzhou”
the green hills are dim spectres, the water endless.
autumn is spent, but jiangnan's grass hasn't withered yet.
I stand in the moonlight on twenty-four beauties bridge,
but where is the beauty who will teach me to play the flute?
notes and original text under the cut.
寄扬州韩绰判官
青山隐隐水迢迢，秋尽江南草未凋。
二十四桥明月夜，玉人何处教吹箫？
I didn’t really think I had a specific objective for the translation of this poem, and then I read Laurence’s version and realized I was optimizing it for gothness. Du Mu misses his bestie.
dim spectres --- 隐隐 faint or indistinct. It rules how many repeated character phrases there are for this in Chinese. I chose “spectres” here for assonance with endless/spent/yet, but Laurence says it gives a good autumn-winter vibe.
endless --- 迢迢 could also be read as “far distant” but that’s kind of poetically meaningless.
spent --- 尽 is a word we come across a LOT while translating poetry, and it’s so evocative every time. We’ve seen it in “used up to the very last,” “very distant place,” and “worn down to nothing.” It’s also the only character I’ve seen meaning “end” in the poetry we’ve translated! Very evocative.
jiangnan --- the region south of the Yangtze River; the city of Yangzhou is in Jiangnan.
twenty-four beauties bridge --- 二十四桥 twenty-four bridge(s). According to Gushiwen, there is a bridge recorded in Shen Kuo’s 梦溪笔谈 “Dream Pool Essays” (!!!) which is supposedly nicknamed Twenty-Four Bridge because twenty-four beauties played the flute (xiao) there. I added this reference to the name of the bridge so I could connect it to the next line
beauty --- 玉人 literally “jade person,” which could be a jade carver, a statue, or metaphorically a beautiful person. Here it refers to Han Chuo. Laurence found a chengyu (?) 玉人吹箫 “flute player wins a beauty,” which seems to allude to a story about an immortal and a princess who played a duet so beautiful they both turned into phoenixes. That kind of ending seems like something Du Mu would be thinking about when he misses his friend badly; those flute players won’t have to part again, unlike Du Mu and Han Chuo.
Du Mu's *Qīngmíng* is perhaps the most famous qījué in the Chinese tradition — a traveler, adrift in sorrow on a rainy tomb-sweeping day, finds direction through a shepherd boy's gesture toward a village of apricot blossoms.
The response poem picks up a thousand years later: the rain still falls on Apricot Blossom Village, and the wine is still warm. The modern speaker reaches back through time, seeking the same old promise in the east wind — and finds that one branch of spring still arrives at the door. Where Du Mu's traveler needed to be shown the way, this speaker already knows the way and waits for spring to come to them.
