Forums → Art, Music, and Writing → The Moon Stil Rises (Parsat's Writings and Translations)
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Since portfolios are a tradition around here, I guess I'll start this one of my own.
One of my hobbies is reading and translating Ancient Chinese poetry. There's a major challenge in that classical Chinese may take only 3-5 characters to express a major idea. Therefore, in Chinese what is meant and interpreted is much more important than what is actually written. It's this challenge that has sustained the memory of these poems for so long.
Feelings on Watching the Moon
Bai Juyi
Hard times and famine render fields bare,
And my brothers have scattered everywhere.
Those gardens few by war were razed,
My kin wander on beaten roads, dazed
Like forsaken geese, by shadows only are we bound,
Or like the tree, by September's gust uprooted from the ground.
We see the same moon, and hot tears run;
With our prayers for home five places become one.
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I don't speak it formally because not that any people primarily speak Mandarin here.
I speak Mandarin only, since my family is from Beijing.
Now this poem is from the Song Dynasty. In this time period, poems were not rigid in their structure but much more like "free verse." So in its spirit, I've also made mine more freeform.
Thoughts on the Rain
Mo Qiyong
Drip drop drip drop.
It doesn't stop.
Outside my window it splatters on the plantain leaves;
Inside my window my candle burns
For I cannot sleep.
My dreams are disturbed;
How I loathe this lack of inner peace.
But the drips cares not if my melancholy self
Dislikes the noise of its pattering;
Still it drips on empty steps until day.
This is based off of a very famous poem (you might be able to guess it). It will be 5 chapters in length.
The Shadow Rises
Chapter One: Dead Penny
The wind swirled about in a land where there was nothing but dust and rocks to be seen and to be moved. The sky was overcast, so dark one would not have been able to tell whether the time of day was the night, or the morning, or the afternoon. What other month could this have been, but April, the cruellest month in its transition?
Inexplicably, shadows moved. Take pause and wonder why if there was no light, shadows could move in the first place. But the land was hollow, it was void, nothing or no one could comprehend the moving shadow, shifting invisibly but tangibly.
Under the perambulating shadow of a rather large boulder (red it was, and very dry) was the only sign of life in the wasteland, the one image unbroken by the misfortune foretold of the sailor and the Lady of the Rocks and famous clairvoyance. It was a smallish patch of snow, enduring in the cold but failing in the heat. From its middle sprung dwarves of fallen beauty, two flowers that even in their shrunken, plucked state seemed to battle each other for some vain prize to the fairest. Both were blue, if they could have been examined, one a lilac, and the other a hyacinth. So entwined were the two in conflict that they scarcely would have noticed the scarlet hue of the snow, if they could have seen it at all, if they were hollowly swaying in the wind.
The snow lay sanguinely, not from any joy it derived in its own, but in its present physical state, warmly drenched in a most humorous fashion. The body lay close by, in the middle of the puddle. Perhaps whoever it was had lost a long battle, had his strength fail, and like the lilac or the hyacinth would after defeat, topple to the ground and exhale his last sigh. Short and infrequent indeed.
Out of nowhere a penny fell. It could have been conjured by the shadow, the brown fog that lay as an unreal vision. It could have come from anywhere, perhaps a sudden fluttering of the butterfly's wings in Mylae or in Phoenicia or over London Bridge had caused it to form and drop in the middle of this God-forsaken land, this macabre garden. Maybe the hollow landscape was not so hollow after all.
Swirling and gyrating, it tumbled into softness, landing on a microcosm of a wasteland in itself, a tessarae of shallow valleys and dales crisscrossing the landscape. In the most deliberate fashion, fingers closed upon it--warm they were!--Dante looked before the shadow he had slain, the shadow he had purged, whose blood flowed. Even in death he was determined to make a mockery of the being who had created him. A penny for the Old Guy, indeed.
Eh, saw your earlier post, Nicho's from Singapore I think... Thats Indonesia right? S'ore means 'City of the Lions'. Some Brit founded it...
Singapore used to be part of Malaysia before it seceded. Its population is mostly Southern Chinese, from Guangdong, Fujian, and those parts.
This poem is my personal favorite poem of all time. It's a very famous one, thanks to a musical rendering of the piece by Teresa Teng. It was written by arguably the best Song Dynasty poet, Su Shi, on the Mid-Autumn Festival while he was drunk and thinking of his brother, who lived very far away.
To the Tune of the Water Song
Su Shi
How long has the moon been in the sky?
Raising my winecup I inquire of the night sky:
In the halls and palaces of heaven,
What year has come upon us?
I wish I could ride the wind to the heavens
To make my home in those mansions of jade,
But I cannot withstand the freezing cold.
My shadow cavorts and dances in your pure beams,
But how could it compare to that world of yours?
Encircling the red pavilions,
Dipping through the carved doors,
It shines on the sleepless.
Surely you bear us no ill will--
Why then are you so round in times of parting?
Humans have times of grief and joy, parting and reunion,
As the moon has times of darkness and light, waxing and waning;
Life has been hard since days of yore.
My only wish is that we live long lives
So that we may share the moon's beauty a thousand miles apart.
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