Really enjoyed this translation. I'm curious about the use of 王 in the poem（王城、王帅顺）- was 王城 a common name for Luoyang at that time? Did 皇 have a different pronunciation/tone that would have made it a poor fit? Is no-one outside of court sycophants using 皇帝 to refer to the emperor this long into a hideous bloody civil war?
First, 王 means ruler, and definitely can be used as a shorthand for the emperor. It would be rude to use the word 王 directly to refer to the actual emperor who rules at the moment - the word 王 is far too informal for that. (Plus 王 has also evolved into a specific label for the highest level of regional nobility, of a lower status than the emperor, something like 'prince' in modern English. Think of how the heir to the throne in the UK is called the Prince of Wales). You're going to need your 天子 and 陛下 and 皇上 to refer to the real emperor. But as a *generality* you could use 王 to talk about rulers in general. Which works out just nicely, because no poet would ever be silly enough to write about the real living emperor - that's a short cut to the death penalty. Poets were *always* just writing in generalities about some general rulers, somewhere. So the use of 王 kind of fits the polite conventions of poetry: the poets pretend their work isn't about the current emperor, and the emperor pretends not to be angry about any implied criticism.
This explains the phrase 王帅顺: it's the ruler and his generals, with ruler here meaning the emperor; and the 王 would be disrespectful if it referred directly to the current emperor Suzong, but it's not quite so direct.
王城 is a bit different: obviously it originated as a phrase meaning "the king's city," but it's just one of the names of Luoyang. Several cities had this name, for obvious reasons, but in this poem the referent is clearly Luoyang. By the Tang, this name had lost its meaning, and was just a conventional place name.
The conventions around poetic vocabulary remind me a bit of the conventions around newspaper headlines in the 20th century. In particular, tabloid headlines were a genre unto themselves, with a stock of short words that weren't that common in ordinary English, but made easy sense in context. Like: Cops Nab Drug Kingpin in Big Apple - it's not exactly ordinary language, it's a genre-specific jargon.
Ah OK, that convention makes sense. My only real experience of classical Chinese literature is 三國演義，which does distinguish between 皇 and 王s all the time, but of course that's referring to events more than a thousand years old by the time the stories were compiled - and the later Han dynasty was tripping over itself for minor nephews' concubines' grandsons with the title 王.
Wow. I'm still trying to find a primer on Chinese poetic forms (4x5; 7x5 apparently) particuarly wrt rhyme, tone patterns. Haven't found anything much in English yet but its just a hobby so i don't search so dilligently. Great poem and thank you for your translation!
(The second one is a blogpost discussing another amateur translator of Tang poetry, Frederick Turner, whose aims seem very similar to mine! His selection of translated poems is available here https://frederickturnerpoet.com/?page_id=210.)
Then, if you really want to get into it, there is a big academic book with plenty of detail by Michael Fuller called An Introduction to Chinese Poetry.
The basics are: Most poetry is in couples of two lines, each with 5 or 7 characters. Two couplets and 4 couplets are common lengths, though any number of couplets is acceptable. There is always punctuation at the end of each line, and each line is a self-contained sentence. Usually, the last character of a couplet will rhyme.
Beyond that, it gets really murky! In Tang poetry, there are two big meters: old and new (also called ancient and modern or ancient and recent-style; new is also known as 'regulated'). New meter includes a lot of extra rules about what tone is allowed to appear in what position. It's very hard for us to get a feel for what that sounds like, and what effect it creates, because no-one speaks Tang Chinese any more. Secondly, lots of these poems are actually song lyrics, and we don't know the tunes they were set to. That makes lots of our emotional interpretations very suspect.
So the problem of meter is a massive one. Firstly, we don't really know how meter sounded and felt to writers and readers of Tang poetry. Secondly, for translators, we aren't sure what kinds of meters to use to recreate the feel of Tang poetry for modern readers. One of the things I'm doing in my translations is trying to use a wide range of different meters just to test them out, and hopefully inspire more translators to explore more different options in future!
Really enjoyed this translation. I'm curious about the use of 王 in the poem（王城、王帅顺）- was 王城 a common name for Luoyang at that time? Did 皇 have a different pronunciation/tone that would have made it a poor fit? Is no-one outside of court sycophants using 皇帝 to refer to the emperor this long into a hideous bloody civil war?
Yeah, there's a couple of different things there.
First, 王 means ruler, and definitely can be used as a shorthand for the emperor. It would be rude to use the word 王 directly to refer to the actual emperor who rules at the moment - the word 王 is far too informal for that. (Plus 王 has also evolved into a specific label for the highest level of regional nobility, of a lower status than the emperor, something like 'prince' in modern English. Think of how the heir to the throne in the UK is called the Prince of Wales). You're going to need your 天子 and 陛下 and 皇上 to refer to the real emperor. But as a *generality* you could use 王 to talk about rulers in general. Which works out just nicely, because no poet would ever be silly enough to write about the real living emperor - that's a short cut to the death penalty. Poets were *always* just writing in generalities about some general rulers, somewhere. So the use of 王 kind of fits the polite conventions of poetry: the poets pretend their work isn't about the current emperor, and the emperor pretends not to be angry about any implied criticism.
This explains the phrase 王帅顺: it's the ruler and his generals, with ruler here meaning the emperor; and the 王 would be disrespectful if it referred directly to the current emperor Suzong, but it's not quite so direct.
王城 is a bit different: obviously it originated as a phrase meaning "the king's city," but it's just one of the names of Luoyang. Several cities had this name, for obvious reasons, but in this poem the referent is clearly Luoyang. By the Tang, this name had lost its meaning, and was just a conventional place name.
The conventions around poetic vocabulary remind me a bit of the conventions around newspaper headlines in the 20th century. In particular, tabloid headlines were a genre unto themselves, with a stock of short words that weren't that common in ordinary English, but made easy sense in context. Like: Cops Nab Drug Kingpin in Big Apple - it's not exactly ordinary language, it's a genre-specific jargon.
Ah OK, that convention makes sense. My only real experience of classical Chinese literature is 三國演義，which does distinguish between 皇 and 王s all the time, but of course that's referring to events more than a thousand years old by the time the stories were compiled - and the later Han dynasty was tripping over itself for minor nephews' concubines' grandsons with the title 王.
Wow. I'm still trying to find a primer on Chinese poetic forms (4x5; 7x5 apparently) particuarly wrt rhyme, tone patterns. Haven't found anything much in English yet but its just a hobby so i don't search so dilligently. Great poem and thank you for your translation!
Thanks, Eric. There are a few places you can look. For a very quick and dirty overview, these two links will give you a start:
https://chinatxt.sitehost.iu.edu/EAsia-survey/Tang_Poems.pdf
https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/the-rhyme-and-meter-of-tang-poetry/
(The second one is a blogpost discussing another amateur translator of Tang poetry, Frederick Turner, whose aims seem very similar to mine! His selection of translated poems is available here https://frederickturnerpoet.com/?page_id=210.)
Then, if you really want to get into it, there is a big academic book with plenty of detail by Michael Fuller called An Introduction to Chinese Poetry.
The basics are: Most poetry is in couples of two lines, each with 5 or 7 characters. Two couplets and 4 couplets are common lengths, though any number of couplets is acceptable. There is always punctuation at the end of each line, and each line is a self-contained sentence. Usually, the last character of a couplet will rhyme.
Beyond that, it gets really murky! In Tang poetry, there are two big meters: old and new (also called ancient and modern or ancient and recent-style; new is also known as 'regulated'). New meter includes a lot of extra rules about what tone is allowed to appear in what position. It's very hard for us to get a feel for what that sounds like, and what effect it creates, because no-one speaks Tang Chinese any more. Secondly, lots of these poems are actually song lyrics, and we don't know the tunes they were set to. That makes lots of our emotional interpretations very suspect.
So the problem of meter is a massive one. Firstly, we don't really know how meter sounded and felt to writers and readers of Tang poetry. Secondly, for translators, we aren't sure what kinds of meters to use to recreate the feel of Tang poetry for modern readers. One of the things I'm doing in my translations is trying to use a wide range of different meters just to test them out, and hopefully inspire more translators to explore more different options in future!