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Happy Gushiwensday Shabbes! Tonight we have two weeks' worth of poem for you, the hefty "Changping Arrowhead Song" of Li He!

The artist's brush paints the Redwater sands in ash and powdered bone while the murky old blood in the soil seeds copper flowers. The gleaming gold white-feathered shafts are long eaten away by the rain and my search finds only broken wolf's teeth still standing upright in the ground. I search the field so long my horse is exhausted; I must ride the other east from the relay station, over rocky fields, to the old wall drowned under wormwood. The wind is ceaseless, the sun's warmth brief, and the stars are dull. Black flags of wet cloud hang in the air and render day night. Souls on one side, spirits on the other, wailing from mouths of wasted flesh--- I promise them an offering of fermented milk and roast mutton when I'm done. For now I search: a wild goose writhing with worms, blighted reeds and bamboo shoots. The wind rises to see off its visitor and my little fire gutters in fear. An ocean overflows my eyes. I search, and find a snapped-off arrowhead. The fractured point is crazed with red, that once cut clean through flesh. A child comes riding south along the old east wall of the city telling me to change my gold for a bamboo shaft.

Plenty of notes and original text under the cut.

长平箭头歌

漆灰骨末丹水沙，凄凄古血生铜花。白翎金竿雨中尽，直余三脊残狼牙。我寻平原乘两马，驿东石田蒿坞下。风长日短星萧萧，黑旗云湿悬空夜。左魂右魄啼肌瘦，酪瓶倒尽将羊炙。虫栖雁病芦笋红，回风送客吹阴火。访古丸澜收断镞，折锋赤璺曾刲肉。南陌东城马上儿，劝我将金换簝竹。

This one was kind of a lot! As with a lot of Li He's work I prioritized atmosphere, and taking a little longer to finish it let me also do some stuff with nonliteral translations + consonance and mouthfeel. I also did some maybe slightly awkward stuff to ensure that I could get the word "search" in every pair of stanzas to kind of underline that the poet is here aaaaall day long. Here are my notes.

The artist's brush --- this first line has a LOT of words that suggest paint or pigment! 漆 paint 灰 ash or lime 末 powder 丹 cinnabar and 沙 powder again (sand in this case). To me it suggested mixing pigments on a palette, except the pigments are poison ash and bone dust.

Redwater --- it's just called the Cinnabar River (in Shanxi), but I thought "Redwater sands" sounded very nice.

broken wolf's teeth --- Li He goes into more detail about why they're like wolf's teeth; they're serrated! The literal line is a fairly dry description of arrowhead morphology.

drowned under wormwood --- it doesn't say "drowned under" it just says there's wormwood/mugwort growing there, but its habit seems drownsome and I'm goth.

and render day night --- arguably it just says "in the night air" but when I thought about it it didn't make a ton of sense that he would be looking for relics on the battlefield at night so I decided it's a very overcast day.

Souls... spirits --- 魂 is an immortal soul and 魄 is a mortal soul. I'm not an expert on the distinction but it sounds pretty gnarly on the ghost plane around here.

I promise them an offering --- it's not outright stated but heavily implied that this is a food offering for the emaciated dead who haven't received offerings in centuries because their bodies weren't recovered by family.

my little fire gutters in fear --- I'm not super sure about this one. It literally says 吹阴火 blow yin fire, and I don't know how to interpret "yin" here. Laurence had yin fire as "ghost fire" which is cool. I'm playing more in the space of yin as darkness or diminishing, but not in a way that's, like, grammatical.

An ocean overflows my eyes --- 丸澜 is a fun idiom for crying, consisting of 丸 round things [tears] and 澜 swelling water.

crazed with red --- this one puzzles me. We think it's more likely the arrowheads are bronze (maybe the 'copper flowers' mentioned above), not steel, so they wouldn't be rusting, and the red is 璺 cracks, not just dried blood. Maybe blood that has the appearance of cracks? I chose a somewhat nonliteral word for this reason.

change my gold --- otherwise known as "buying." I think the reason he didn't just say "buy" was probably metrical, but I feel like the exchange is kind of striking and wanted to draw attention to it; it has something to say about tourism, the commodification of emotion. It's a pretty striking end for this poem wherein the poet has spent hours listlessly haunting the battlefield with the rest of the ghosts, weeping, and now a kid is trying to sell him souvenirs.

bamboo shaft --- there's some debate about the identity of the souvenirs: are they arrowshafts, or are they offering plates for temple sacrifices of meat? I chose to go with arrowshafts because it feels more... kitschy and pointless.

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