Posted by Victor Mair
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Randy Alexander is not a professional Sinologist, but when it comes to reading Chinese poetry, he's as serious as one can be. The following poem is by Du Fu (712-770), said by some to be "China's greatest poet". In the presentation below, I will first give the text with its transcription, and then Randy's translation. After that we will delve deeply into the grammatical exegesis of one line of the poem, the last.
Dù Fǔ “Zèng Wèi Bā chǔshì"
—–
Rénshēng bù xiāng jiàn, dòng rú cān yù shāng.
Jīnxī fù hé xī, gòng cǐ dēngzhú guāng.
Shàozhuàng néng jǐshí, bìnfà gè yǐ cāng.
Fǎng jiù bàn wéi guǐ, jīng hū rè zhòng cháng.
Yān zhī èrshí zài, zhòng shàng jūnzǐ táng.
Xī bié jūn wèi hūn, érnǚ hū chéngxíng.
Yírán jìng fùzhí, wèn wǒ lái héfāng.
Wèndá wèi jí yǐ, érnǚ luó jiǔjiāng.
Yè yǔ jiǎn chūn jiǔ, xīn chuī jiān huáng liáng.
Zhǔ chēng huìmiàn nán, yī jǔ lèi shí shāng.
Shí shāng yì bù zuì, gǎn zǐ gùyì zhǎng.
Míngrì gé shānyuè, shìshì liǎng mángmán
杜甫《赠卫八处士》
—–
人生不相见，动如参与商。
今夕复何夕，共此灯烛光。
少壮能几时，鬓发各已苍。
访旧半为鬼，惊呼热中肠。
焉知二十载，重上君子堂。
昔别君未婚，儿女忽成行。
怡然敬父执，问我来何方。
问答未及已，儿女罗酒浆。
夜雨剪春韭，新炊间黄粱。
主称会面难，一举累十觞。
十觞亦不醉，感子故意长。
明日隔山岳，世事两茫茫。
Presented to Wei Ba, an Unofficed Scholar
——-
In life we don't meet each other.
We move like The Belt of Orion and Antares.
Tonight again, is what kind of night?
Together here the lights glow.
The young and strong are able — for how long?
Their sideburns each will also turn grey.
When visiting old friends who half became ghosts,
I cry out in pangs of emotion.
Who knew that in twenty years,
You would be taking up a post at a lord's manor?
Long ago when we parted, you weren't yet married.
Now your children suddenly line up in front of me.
Happily they salute their father's friend,
And ask me where I came from.
The questioning and answering hadn't had time to finish
when the children laid out the wine and juice.
In the night rain you cut the spring chives;
in the fresh-cooked rice there is millet.
Our host speaks of our meeting's difficulty;
With one motion he lifts ten cups.
Ten cups and you aren't even drunk;
I'm moved that your old friendship is growing.
As the bright sun separates the mountains,
the world and its affairs both are far away.
Here are Randy's principles for translating from Literary Sinitic to English:
My general rules for translation are:
1) don't add anything (except things like implicit pronouns) or take anything away,
2) as much as possible stick to the original word order even if it enters into syntactic poetic license in the English (of course within what's syntactically allowable in English poetry).
I don't read anyone else's translation first, but after I translate I will check some on the web to see if there are any major discrepancies. Here, the last line seems to be traditionally translated as something like "Tomorrow we will be separated by mountains, the world's affairs are unclear", but I see some problems with this (I don't think it's impossible, but there are some problems).
明日隔山岳，世事两茫茫。
First is the inanimate agency/cause of the passive gé 隔. I can't find anything in Hànyǔ dà cídiǎn 汉语大词典 (Unabridged dictionary of Sinitic) that has a similar structure for 隔. In a big grammar I have, Gǔ Hànyǔ yǔfǎ jí qí fāzhǎn 古汉语语法及其发展 (Ancient Chinese Grammar and Its Development) by Yáng Bójùn 杨伯峻 and Hé Lèshì 何乐士, I found a very small mention (p. 693 I think):
2.1.3 “(受事主语)·动·工具宾语”
宾语表示动作行为的工具。如:
(1)不夭斤斧。(庄子·逍遥游)30
“不夭(于)斤斧”。意谓不被斧子之类的器物所天折或天伤。
OK, so I guess it's "legal" to have a usage interpretation like that in this poem, but given its apparent rarity in Classical Chinese (I'm judging by the fact that I have only been able to find this one mention of this kind of usage and that it's quite old) I think it would be stretching it to say the mountains are separating them. The examples in HDC all seem to be X隔 (X separates (us/them), or 隔X (separates X).
Another problem is liǎng 两 ("two"). This is pretty clearly "two/both" which can only point to shì 世 ("world") and shì 事 ("affair[s]") as separate entities. If they are separate, then parallelism would strongly suggest (dictate?) that míng 明 and rì 日 ("day") are also separate. Despite the fact that 明日 ("bright day / sun") almost always means "tomorrow", if we can say míngyuè 明月 ("bright moon") then of course it's not ungrammatical at all to say 明日 ("bright sun / day"); perhaps Du Fu 杜甫 was mindfully using this as a kind of garden path sentence (similar to "The old man the boat."). This would shift the meaning to what I wrote above: "As the bright sun separates the mountains, the world and its affairs both are far away."
Du Fu 杜甫 lived through some difficulties and wrote (as I have so far seen) some dark stuff "Jiārén《佳人》("beautiful woman")、"Mèng Lǐ Bái《梦李白》("Dreaming of Li Bo"), but he also wrote "Wàng yuè 《望岳》("Gazing at the mountain"), which is not dark at all. Would it be inconceivable for "Zèng Wèi Bā chǔshì" 《赠卫八处士》 ("Presented to Wei Ba, an Unofficed Scholar") to have a happy-ish "screw-the-world" ending in the drunken spirit of Lǐ Bái 李白? He finally visits his friend after 20 years and they stay up until the sunrise, by that time forgetting the world and its affairs. He obviously dearly loved Lǐ Bái 李白 who we know knew how to use alcohol to forget the world and its affairs; wouldn't it be reasonable that he could do likewise? Also, if he had traveled so far after so long, wouldn't tomorrow be much too early for him to be already gone and on the other side of the mountains?
I eagerly await your response.
Randy several times asked for my critique of his interpretation of the last line, so I will give it, prefaced by my declaration that I think that context, content, sentiment, sense, drift, flow, and so forth outweigh strict grammatical rules, especially in poetry, and especially in the hands of a master like Du Fu. Also, the English version should not be jarring, should make sense, and convey what the poet was aiming to express. Here, in this last line, I think what Du Fu is trying to say is "Tomorrow we will be separated by mountains; both of us immersed in the boundless affairs of the world".
Back in the days of the towering Berkeley savant sinologues, Peter Alexis Boodberg (1903-1972) and Edward Hetzel Schafer (1913-1991), there were monumental disputes over whether Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic (CC/LS) had grammar, and, if so, whether it were absolutely strict and inalterably fixed. See, for example, Schafer's (in)famous "Supposed 'Inversions' in T'ang Poetry", Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 96, No. 1 (Jan. – Mar., 1976), pp. 119-121 (3 pages).
Of course, CC/LS had/has grammar, elsewise an author wouldn't be able to write anything that makes sense (without grammar, writing would just be a jumble of words). That is why I always felt comfortable and confident in teaching CC/LS to generations of students. A good presentation of Chinese grammar may be found in the three-volume A First Course in Literary Chinese (Cornell, 1968) by Harold Shadick. On the other hand, as you will see from my closing comment to this post, context trumps grammar. To read poetry and make elegant sense of it, one has to understand what the poet is trying to say, and that takes learning / knowledge and intuition. The only way to develop learning / knowledge and intuition is through vast amounts of reading / exposure to history and literature of all sorts.
Steve Owen translated the complete poems of Du Fu. Here's how he handled the last couplet of the one under discussion:
Tomorrow we will be divided by mountains,
for both the world’s affairs are a vast blur.
Xiuyuan Mi comments:
隔 is divide; 兩 simply introduces that the two would henceforth live different lives and rarely hear from the other person—quite difficult to parse out the syntax though.
Notice that Xiuyuan recognizes the difficulty of parsing the syntax, but still strives to grasp the poet's underlying intent.
Here are Denis Mair's observations:
Owen is right, but I think there's an additional level of meaning, the poignant sense that both of them will not know what happens to each other. In this moment of strong feelings about friendship, the wish of each to know what will befall each other is very strong.
I would translate the ge2 as "separated by"— "In days to come, separated by mountain peaks/"
I would translate liang3 as "the two of us," but also implying "each other" — "events in store for us beyond either's reckoning"
The beauty of 茫茫 is that it expresses unknowableness both in time (they both face an uncertain future) and in space (neither of them know what will befall the other, due to being apart).
Denis is a published poet, both in Chinese and in English, and has translated thousands of poems from and to Chinese.
Go with the flow, Randy.
Selected readings
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(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
