Du Fu is a lonely seagull

And drunk, and still able to place in your mind an image that will never leave

Adrift
Du Fu

Boat at night
River breeze
Towering mast
Waving reeds

Wild expanse
Stars loom
Flowing river
Rippling moon

No more job
In old age
Can’t live off
The scribbled page

Drifting, drifting
What am I?
Lonely seagull
Earth and sky

杜甫  旅夜书怀
细草微风岸，危樯独夜舟。
星垂平野阔，月涌大江流。
名岂文章著，官应老病休。
飘飘何所似，天地一沙鸥。

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Experiment in form today, putting the source poem with the translation.

Du Fu notes: Li Bai is the one who gets the credit for all the drinking, but I don’t think Du Fu was any slouch in this area. In this poem, for example, the mast is towering because he’s lying down in his boat. And there’s a lovely drunken logic to the way the poem moves from stanza to stanza: the bobbing, waving objects in front of his eyes; the bigger world around him; then his own nagging worries; and finally he lies back down, arms out, muttering, “I’m a seagull.” Of course, because he’s Du Fu, his drunken logic also perfectly matches the structure of Chinese poetry. And rhymes and scans. And contains this final image that simply will live with you forever now.

I don’t usually write much about the translation, but this poem is a nice encapsulation of everything I’m trying to do, so here are a few translation notes.

• This translation is entirely oriented around the last line. Almost every translation into English (here are 38) adds a word like “between” into the final line, because English grammar demands it. But a determined translator isn’t going to let a little thing like grammar stand in his way! There’s a gorgeous simplicity to the phrasing of the source: Du is making use of that flexibility in Chinese grammar to present us these three elements - earth, gull, sky - in the rawest possible way, so that we build the image for ourselves. I want to reproduce that in English.

• So I needed to find a way to force the reader to accept the phrasing “seagull, earth and sky” despite its lack of grammatical cohesion. And that’s something that rhyme and meter can do. If I establish a strong rhyme and meter from the start of the poem, it should carry the reader through those final two lines, and force the image onto them before their left brain can pick holes in the grammar.

• Strong rhyme and meter also suit the poem, which has an insistent and consistent rhyme scheme that helps create cohesion.

• Strong rhyme and meter also suit my broader goals in translating Tang poetry, which is to try to reproduce the extremely memorable, nursery rhyme-like effect of the source. I’m hoping to write poems that rhyme strongly enough to dig into your brain, so the next time you’re cruising down a level road with no-one around, you’ll ask yourself, “What am I? Lonely seagull, earth and sky.”