#sending meng haoran off at yellow crane tower

[woofieheadintranslation]

Translating Li Bai’s Sending Meng Haoran Off At Yellow Crane Tower

I have started writing a The Untamed fanfiction with a poetry subplot. Unfortunately, this necessitated brushing up on my Chinese poetry. To make a long story short, I now have two different Chinese poetry translation books at my house, two more on hold at the library, and I am now attempting to translate my own poems for this aforementioned fanfiction. This is mostly a reference for myself. This project was for fun, and this is my first time translating a Chinese poem, so this is definitely not professional! Please gently point out any errors or faux pas, and also if you want to discuss English or Chinese poetry or translation or the translation of this poem or poetry as it relates to The Untamed, hop on in, I will be delighted. For anyone not in the know, Li Bai is probably the most famous Chinese poet, ever. Meng Haoran was his friend, also a really wonderful and talented poet- I may translate a few of his poems later. Back in those days, when someone left to another part of the country it was very likely you would never see them again, so the farewell was a huge deal. There’s actually a long and plentiful tradition of this type of poem. Chinese Text:

黄鹤楼送孟浩然之广陵

李白

故人西辞黄鹤楼 烟花三月下扬州 孤帆远影碧空尽 惟见长江天际流 Word By Word Translation: 1. old friend west depart Yellow Crane Tower 2. smoke flower third month down Yang Zhou 3. lone sail far reflection jade (referring to colour) sky end 4. only see Changjiang (Yangtze) sky edge flow Translation 1, by Wai Lim Yip, in Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres *I know nothing about copyright law. is this illegal? no idea: My old friend takes off from the Yellow Crane Tower In smoke-flower third month down to Yangchou. A lone sail, a distant shade, lost in the blue horizon. Only the long Yangtze is seen flowing into the sky. *By the way, this is an amazing book, super informative, super comprehensive, and super fun, so definitely hats off to Wai Lim Yip. I recommend you check it out if you’re in any way interested in Chinese poetry. Translation 2, at this link-- http://www.learnancientchinesepoetry.org/2017/09/09/li-bai-at-the-yellow-crane-tower-sending-off-meng-haoran-who-is-going-to-guang-ling/: Old friends going west from the Yellow Crane Tower Clouds of March blossoms on the way to Yangzhou. Solitary sail reflected in the distance, disappears into the bluish green mountains Only see the Changjiang flow to the end of the sky. I looked at a few more, but the Xu Yuanchong version sacrifices too much accuracy for my liking, and some other versions are just strange. I am very much indebted to these translations- my Chinese is not good, and I approach this with an English poet’s perspective. I bow to their expertise. With that said, though, all translations have value, and so I believe it’s not a total waste of time for me to make my own. Line 1: 故人西辞黄鹤楼 This line is largely straightforward. The Chinese starts with simply 故人 (gù rén), which basically means “old friend”, although I think it has greater emotional implications than “old friend” does. I won’t use “My old friend”, as in the first translation. I will also not be using “old friends”, plural, as in the second translation. I am truly unsure of why they did that; this poem is, after all, meant for a specific person. 西辞 (xī cí): 西 means West, while 辞 means “depart”, “resign”, “take leave”. In the first translation, the translator omits “west” entirely, and uses “takes off”. I’m not a fan of this decision, because I feel that for the sake of accuracy “west” should be included, and “takes off” feels too happy and cheerful for a somber scene of leavetaking, and also just makes me think of a plane or a rocket every time I read it, which is not the desired tone of this poem. “Going west” is better, but I feel that “going” is too mundane and colloquial. I must admit that I don’t know about the usage of the word 辞 at the time this poem was written, but to my modern ears, it seems more formal. With that said, I will be using “west departs”. It’s not technically grammatically correct in English, but I think grammar rules can be bent a little in poetry, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be reminded that you aren’t reading an English poem, and that the poem doesn’t take place in a Western context. Also, if I use “departs west” it sounds excessively businesslike and dispassionate, as in: The train departs west from Central station. 黄鹤楼 (huáng hè lóu) means Yellow Crane Tower. Good job, translators! However, I am going to make the controversial executive decision of not capitalizing Yellow Crane Tower. As you may have noticed, Chinese names tend to be excessively literal to our English-speaking ears, and it sounds very strange where it wouldn’t sound at all out of place in Chinese. I’m hoping that if I remove the capital letters, it will mitigate some of that effect. So, for line 1, I will translate it as: Old friend west departs from yellow crane tower Line 2: 烟花三月下扬州 Things are getting a little more complicated! We run into an issue with the very first two words. 烟花 (yān huā), literally means “smoke flower”. It is translated to “smoke-flower” in the first version and "clouds of ... blossoms" in the second, but it's a little confusing because what I think 烟花 refers to is the phenomenon of flowers blooming so abundantly they look like clouds of smoke. With smoke-flower, it becomes hard to tell if you're talking about smoke that looks like flowers or flowers that look like smoke. On the other hand, "clouds of ... blossoms" doesn't work for me either for two reasons: firstly, "clouds" is different from "smoke" and I'm aiming for accuracy here, and secondly, "blossoms" can also be used as a verb. I’m going to borrow a little from both translations (thank you very much, and I’m sorry), and translate 烟花 as “In smoke of ... flowers”. This, unfortunately, is still ripe for confusion, but I thought about it for hours and didn’t come up with a better solution. It sounds more poetic, at least.

三月 (sān yuè) just means “third month”, and it’s just what Chinese people call the month of March. I’m going to translate it as “third-month” instead of March, because I think March may be a little too Western, and also third-month is a bit more rhythmic. Combined with 烟花, my translation would be: “In smoke of third-month flowers”. (As a bonus, we get a slant rhyme with “tower”!) And yes, March is actually flower-blooming season in Northern China. At least according to my mom.

下扬州 (xià yáng zhōu): Means "down to Yangzhou”. (Yangzhou is a place, by the way, and if you’re wondering about Yangzhou vs. Yangchou, the first is pinyin and the second is Wade-Giles romanization. Both are correct.) This is what the first translation uses; the second uses “on the way to Yangzhou". I am going to keep “down to Yangzhou”. I think it works fine, and I like that it uses “down”, which is the literal translation of the character 下. So, to recap, I’m translating line 2 as: “In smoke of third-month flowers down to Yangzhou.” Line 3: 孤帆远影碧空尽 This. This is where things really get tricky. Let’s break this down: 孤帆 (gū fān): 孤 refers to "lonely", "lone", "solitary", while 帆 means “sail”. 远 (yuǎn) means "far", or "distant". I'm on the side of "far" because Chinese is a monosyllabic language, so in my opinion the more monosyllabic words you can incorporate the better. 影 (yǐng) is where things get complicated. 影 can refer to shadow, image, picture, reflection. The first translation uses “shade”, which is effective, if a little strange. In context, 孤帆远影 most likely refers to "lone sail far reflection" in a very pictorial way. As in: the far reflection of a lone sail. This is closer to the second translation of "solitary sail reflected in the distance". However! Since Chinese has little syntax, you can also think of it as two separate visual images. As in the first translation, designed to be interpreted both ways with its translation of “a lone sail,(comma!) a distant shade”. I want to give readers the same choice and ambiguity that would be present in the original Chinese, so I am actually going to go with the translation: “Lone sail, far shadow”. Technically, shadow is not the most correct term, but I think it’s more poetic and appropriate to the mood than “reflection”, and also has less syllables, and also has the benefit of rhyming with “Yangzhou”. I am taking out the “A” in “a lone sail”, “a far shadow”, because that would give me too many syllables, and also because it isn’t present in the original. Onto the real kicker: 碧空尽 (bì kōng jìn). 碧 is a character often used in conjunction with 璧玉. 玉 means jade. From this, you can get the translation of 璧 as bluish-green, or jade-green, or jade-blue. I think this is the character second translation uses when it says "bluish green” mountains. The first translation just uses "blue” horizon. There is another translation floating around that uses “azure”. However, the colour of jade, while usually bluish green, is not necessarily so. There’s also jade that is almost clear. Additionally, I’m leery of using words like “blue” and “green” because describing something as 璧 is pretty literary and poetic, and “blue” and “green” seem too mundane. Therefore, for accuracy, I’m simply going to use “jade”. 空, the second character, means “empty”, but in this context is more along the lines of “air” and “sky”. I think this is where the first translation gets "horizon" (no idea where the second translation got "mountains" from, which would be 山 and is not, in fact, anywhere in the poem). I am actually going to use “sky”, because this has been a line with a lot of imagery, and I think “sky” works better as an image than “horizon”. Additionally, “sky” works better with the secondary meaning of “empty” than “horizon” does. Interestingly, though, according to my Chinese book, 璧 actually refers to water, and 空 refers to air. Specifically, they use the words: 璧水蓝天, meaning literally "jade waters blue sky". This seems to be a relatively common interpretation, that 璧空 doesn’t refer solely to sky, but instead the place where water and sky merge into the same shade of colour. (水天相接). Keeping this interpretation in mind, 碧空 becomes “jade water and sky”. I’m going to rearrange this into “jade sky and water”, because then “water” rhymes with “tower”, and it slips off the tongue more easily. Although this isn’t the rhyme scheme of the poem in Chinese, I think it works because in terms of familiarity to each language’s respective readers, the English ABAB rhyme scheme is a pretty close equivalent. 尽, the last character, is pretty straightforward; it just means "end". The entire line taken together with this character would come to something roughly similar to “lone sail, far shadow, (at) jade water and blue sky ends.” However, the first translation uses “lost in”, and the second “disappears into”. In the Chinese book I own, it is explained as 消失, which also roughly means “disappears”. I think this is more accurate to the imagery of what is actually happening, so I will tentatively go with something similar, also a monosyllabic word: fade. The third line becomes: “Lone sail, far shadow, fade to jade sky and water”. Line 4: 惟见长江天际流 This is the line where I am going to take some serious liberties (moreso than I have previously), so please buckle your seatbelts and hang in tight. 惟见 (wéi jiàn) means “Only see”. Can you see (pun not intended) the problem? Generally, in English, there needs to be a subject. “He only sees”, “They only see”, so on, so forth. The first translation sidesteps this with “The long Yangtze is seen”, which is definitely a solution, but one that I, unfortunately, will not be using. I think it interrupts the flow of the poem, but more importantly, I need to rhyme something, as I will further elaborate- oh, a couple paragraphs down.   长江 (cháng jiāng) is easy! It’s just the Yangtze river. It literally means “long river”, which is why whenever I see “the long Yangtze” I have to laugh a little. It’s the same deal as “chai tea”. I understand the reasoning behind it (you want the non-Chinese readers to get the general meaning), but in my opinion I don’t think it’s necessary to hand-feed cultural context in all circumstances. And “long Yangtze” doesn’t really get across the sheer grandeur and cultural/literary importance anyways. (Also, I really don’t need to make this sentence any more complicated than it’s going to be).  I will be using the pinyin version of Yangtze, which is Changjiang. So far: “Only see the Changjiang...” 天际流 (tiān jì liú): 天 means “sky”. In modern Chinese, you would actually combine this with the earlier 空 (kōng) to make 天空, and this is the more common compound word that means “sky”. 际 means border, edge, boundary, etc. For some reason, the first translation has omitted this altogether, while the second has chosen “end”. This is...fine, I guess, but I actually think for the purposes of this poem 天际 can simply be translated to “horizon”. 流 is easy; it just means flow. However, this will be giving me a lot of trouble later, because 流 (liú) actually mostly rhymes with the English “flow”. This means an opportunity to preserve part of the original rhyme scheme, which is an opportunity I will absolutely take, sacrificing the laws of grammar and good writing to do so. So, just to recap, the general image of these lines are as follows:

In line three, the shadow of the boat is disappearing against the blue sky. In line four, the speaker is still looking the horizon, but the boat is no longer there- in its place, the Yangtze, which looks like it is flowing over the horizon where the colour of the sea merges with the colour of the sky. With that said, while that imagery is hopefully setting in, I’m translating this last line as “Only see the Changjiang over the horizon flow.” I know, I know, it’s clunky. However, it’s what I have decided, and I am sticking by my decision. Final Translation: Old friend west departs from yellow crane tower, In smoke of third-month flowers down to Yangzhou. Lone sail, far shadow, fade to jade sky and water- Only see the Changjiang over the horizon flow. I’ve changed the original punctuation slightly, turning the third line comma into a dash. It reads better in English, and it’s similar enough in function to a comma that it doesn’t change the original meaning too much. This is super long, wow. As a bonus: I am scoring these poems based on how applicable to Wangxian they are. I’m giving this one a 7. The first two lines are a little too specific, but I can definitely see the last two working in a Wangxian fic. It’s just a very sorrowful scene. There’s nothing super applicable to WWX or LWJ’s individual characters or situations, but as a multipurpose “saying goodbye” quote, it’s very lovely and definitely works very well. Anyway, this is honestly a very complicated and very desperate plea to the Untamed fandom to please incorporate poetry into your fic if you can- it would kill me, in the best way possible. *I copied this post onto this secondary blog I made, because I think this is going to end up being an ongoing project. 

[silkscroll]

Farewells

故人西辭黃鶴樓，烟花三月下揚州。 孤帆遠影碧空盡，唯見長江天際流。

We say farewell at Huanghelou — The flow’rs of March befall Yangzhou. A single boat sails far from sight, Alone I watch the Changjiang flow.

Li Bai, “Sending off Meng Haoran to Guangling (Yangzhou) at the Yellow Crane Tower”

“Yellow Crane Tower,” silk tapestry (Qing), Shanghai Museum

[woofieheadintranslation]

Translating Meng Haoran’s Lodging At Jiande River

Hello, and thank you to *checks notes* the two of you who left likes on my previous post. I’m very aware that these appeal to an extremely niche audience, haha, so I didn’t start doing these with the intent to have them read, but I’m glad that they aren’t going totally unnoticed! 宿建德江 (sù jiàn dé jiāng), sometimes translated as Stay-Over at Jiande River, is one of 孟浩然 (mèng hào rán)’s most famous poems. The last two lines, especially, are ones that everyone will know. The only one of his poems that is more famous is probably 春晓 (chún xiǎo), Spring Morning. I was actually going to translate that one, but it’s too famous, and also I couldn’t get past the first line because the Chinese school memories were so strong. (For those of you not in the know, 春晓 is one of the first Chinese poems Chinese children learn, and they hammer it into you until you can recite it in your sleep, after running a 10k marathon, and on your deathbed.)   Some background information on Meng Haoran: Like Wang Wei, he’s part of the Landscape (山水) school of poets. He’s considered the first of the High Tang poets, and he was a good friend of Li Bai, who wrote actually wrote several poems for him. One of them (Sending Meng Haoran Off At Yellow Crane Tower) was actually the first of my translations.  This is a wujue, a five character four line poem.  Chinese Text:  宿建德江 孟浩然 移舟泊烟渚， 日暮客愁新。 野旷天低树， 江清月近人。  Word by Word Translation:  move/boat/moor/smoke/islet, bank sun/dusk/traveler/grief, sorrow/new wilds, wilderness/vast, far-reaching/sky/low(ers)/tree river/clear/moon/near(s)/man Due to its fame, there are many different translations. I’m going to be using three. 

Translation 1- Witter Bynner (The Jade Mountain):  While my little boat moves on its mooring mist,  And daylight wanes, old memories begin... How wide the world was, how close the trees to heaven! And how clear in the water the nearness of the moon! There are some words in this translation that aren’t present in the original, and I think we can do better in terms of imagery. I especially dislike when words like “while” are added; it adds temporality and narrative that isn’t in the spirit of Tang poetry.  Translation 2- Wai-Lim Yip: (Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres) *I’m determined to get as much as I possibly can out of this book*:  A boat slows, moors by beach-run in smoke. Sun fades: a traveler’s sorrow freshens. Open wilderness. Wide sky. A stretch of low trees. Limpid river: clear moon close to man.  I really like this translation, I think it’s great. Honestly, I really can’t do better. I am going to do it differently though (which honestly is probably going to make it worse, but oh well.)

Translation 3- http://www.learnancientchinesepoetry.org/2017/07/31/meng-haoran-stay-overnight-on-the-jiande-river/ (the site is learnchinesepoetry.org, and it’s an amazingly comprehensive resource, I recommend you check it out):  Move the boat, cast anchor in misty islet Sunset, this traveler with new sadness, homesickness Landscape and sky vast and empty, bare trees Moonlight on the clear river my friend.  As you can see, these translations are all very different! This one separates the poem into two groups of two. I think it captures the feeling of the original quite well, though translation 2 is more polished and accurate, both grammatically and in terms of fidelity to the source. Line 1: 移舟泊烟渚 (yí zhōu bó yān zhǔ) 移 (yí) means “to shift” or “to move”. 舟 (zhōu) is “boat”. Due to the ambiguous nature of Chinese, this could be “The boat moves”, “the moving boat”, or “move the boat”. Yip translates it as “the boat slows”. This is not the most accurate translation of 移, but considering the boat is described as “mooring” later on, it’s a logical extrapolation. I considered translating it like this as well, but I’m a huge stickler for accuracy.  I’ve discarded the “move the boat” option, because that’s a direct command, which I think feels pretty out of place in a landscape poem that’s about the poet and not really addressed to anyone.  There are really no good options here. I ended up going with “a boat moves”.  泊 (bó) means “to moor”, or “to anchor”. I’m going to use “to moor”, because it just sounds more poetic. Also, it’s more accurate. The poet is travelling across a river, presumably on a small boat- I don’t think it would have an anchor.  烟 (yān) is “smoke”. In this case, it’s referring to the mist that collects near the surface of the water. This one gave me a headache. Yip simply used “smoke”, but I honestly think that might be confusing. Yip has greater trust in his readers than I do, I guess. If this were a metaphor in the original, I would probably have left it as is, but a secondary definition of 烟 is actually “mist”. (My Chinese dictionary says 像烟的东西：～雾. In English, this is “something like smoke: smoke-fog.) I ended up using “mist”, which also happens to give me some nice alliteration.  渚 (zhǔ) means “islet”, as in a small island in a river or a lake, but it can also mean “bank”. I’m not sure why Yip has translated it as “beach-run”, which is not actually a word. I’m going to go with “bank”, which could theoretically be either an islet in the river or the bank of the river itself.  Translation: A boat moves to moor by misty bank.  Line 2: 日暮客愁新 (rì mù kè chóu xīn) 日暮 (rì mù): 日 refers to “sun”, and 暮 refers to “dusk”, “twilight”, or “evening”. Honestly, the 日 is kind of unnecessary. But anyways, I’m going to translate this simply to “setting sun”. “Sun fades”, as Yip translated it, is honestly kind of confusing. I wanted to translate it simply as “dusk”, but I ultimately decided against it because it breaks up the pattern set up by the first line. Also, I wanted to incorporate the 日. 客 (kè) means “guest” or “traveler”, and likely refers to the poet himself. “Traveler” works fine.  愁 (chóu) is a bit of a complicated word. It usually means “to worry”, as in the case of 发愁 (fā chóu), but it’s a bit broader than that, and encompasses a bit of what we would call “grief”, or “sorrow”. I'm going to translate it as “griefs”, plural. “Grief” is too specific, but “griefs” is slightly broader. 

新 (xīn) means “new”. I’m going to translate it as “renew”, because it could theoretically mean “to be renewed”, as in to be freshened, but it’s slightly less specific than simply “freshens”.  Thus: Setting sun- a traveller’s griefs renew. I would actually prefer to simply write “traveller” instead of  “a traveller”, but unfortunately because I used “a boat moves” in the previous line, I need the “a” here too for continuity.  Line 3: 野旷天低树  (yě kuǎng tiān dī shù) These lines are so famous (for good reason), that it’s very important to me that I get them right.  野 (yě) means “wild”, “wilds”, “wilderness”. 旷 (kuǎng) means “open”, or “vast”. 天 (tiān) means “sky”, 低 (dī) means “low” or “to lower”, and 树 (shù) is “tree”.  Due to the structure of Chinese, the 旷 (kuǎng) can be referring to the 野 (yě), the 天 (tiān), or both. It could be “open wilderness”, it could be “open sky”, or it could be both. This is why Yip has essentially doubled the 旷 (kuǎng), translating it into “open” for “open wilderness” and “wide” for “wide sky”. Similarly, translation 3 has put “landscape and sky vast and empty”, and Bynner has put “the world” is wide. If I were to do this, I would probably go the same route as Yip. However, I think all of these translations feels too much like adding something that isn’t there. I think the interpretation of 旷 (kuǎng) applying to both 野 (yě) and 天 (tiān) is a secondary interpretation, because most Chinese wujue poems are meant to be read in a group of two followed by a group of three.  If 旷 (kuǎng) applies to 野 (yě), the three characters 天低树, “sky low(ers) tree(s)” is a distinct unit. Unlike the Yip, “a stretch of bare trees”, and translation 3, “bare trees”, the sky is connected to the trees. This can be interpreted as “sky lowers to trees”, as in “the sky is close to the trees”, as with “...how close the trees to heaven!” in the Bynner translation.  I’m going to translate this line like this:  Open wilderness: sky lowers to trees.  I think if I translate it like this, the imagery of the “open wilderness” carries over enough to “sky” to have the same implication. Also, the use of the colon implies that the “sky lower(ing) to trees” is the open wilderness, which should technically make the “open” also apply to the sky.  Line 4: 江清月近人 (jiāng qīng yuè jìn rén) Same problem with this line! (Makes sense, because it’s parallel to line 3).  江 (jiāng) means “river”, 清 (qīng) “clear”, 月 (yuè) “moon”, 近 (jìn) “close” or “near(s)”, and 人 “person”.  You can see that Yip has done the same thing as the previous line, where he translated 旷 (kuǎng) twice, into “open” and then “wide”. Here, he translates 清 (qīng) into “limpid”, as in “limpid river” (江清), and then “clear”, as in “clear moon” (清月). I, on the other hand, am going to do pretty much the same thing I did in the previous line.  近 (jìn): This is a word that feels very immediate, so I don’t want to use “close to”, which has a sense of distance.  This line is a bit more complicated than the previous. This is because the last three characters of line 3 and line 4 can be interpreted as logically following the first two characters in their respective lines. So, for example, instead of two distinct images of a clear river, and then a moon close to a man, you can follow logical causation. Let’s say you do this with line 3. It’s is pretty direct: because the wilderness is vast and open, the sky appears low as the trees. However, in this line, there’s an added layer of reasoning: because the river is clear, the moon is reflected upon the river. Because the moon is reflected upon the river, it’s closer to the poet in his boat. Thus, moon nears man.  Because of this, I don’t want to just use “moon nears man”, even though it’s the most poetic option and I’m really sad I can’t use it. It gives the moon agency, which pretty effectively kills the interpretation of the moon’s reflection on the river being what causes it to appear closer.  Thus, I’m actually going to translate it as:  Clear river: moon nearer to man.  Oh, and also, I’m translating 人 as “man” because “person” just. Doesn’t work. And “human” is even worse. Why, English, are you like this. I hope you can forgive me on the basis that the poet is likely talking about himself, who is in fact a man.  Final Translation:  A boat moves to moor by misty bank.  Setting sun- a traveller’s griefs renew.  Open wilderness: sky lowers to trees.  Clear river: moon nearer to man.  Ah, it’s really hard to get across the beauty of the final two lines in translation. Also, the first line still doesn’t feel right, but I really can’t think of anything better. Welcoming suggestions! Experimental Translation:  Moving boat, mooring  in smoke by the shore.  Dusk- a traveller’s griefs renew.  Wilderness vast-  Sky lowers to the trees.  River clear-      moon nears                     man.  I rate this poem 3/10 in Wangxian applicability. It is kind of a Wei Wuxian and Yunmeng mood though. I can see this working in a CQL post-canon fic, possibly involving a Yunmeng Shuangjie reconciliation.