Finally, Meng Haoran with a bit of bite
Waiting for Ding Feng to Join Me for a Night at the Lodge of Master Ye, Deep in the Mountains Meng Haoran The evening sun fords the western hills, A pall is in the gullies, suddenly. The moonlit pines breathe the evening cool, And air from mountain springs sounds silvery. The logger folk have almost emptied out, A mist of birds is clumping down to roost. O master mine, expected for the night, This viny path, your lonely zitherist. 孟浩然 宿业师山房期丁大不至 夕阳度西岭，群壑倏已暝。 松月生夜凉，风泉满清听。 樵人归欲尽，烟鸟栖初定。 之子期宿来，孤琴候萝径。
Finally, this Meng piece generates a little more texture and friction on the mind. Here, Meng uses a combination of old vocabulary and obscure grammar to refresh some very stock images, and does so quite successfully. I’ll give a full exegesis, because I like this poem.
Line 1: 夕阳度西岭 The evening sun fords the western hills
The key here is the use of the word 度/ford, which is not a conventional image, but it works well. It connects the idea of a river, which is a natural boundary, to the boundary between day and night.
Line 2: 群壑倏已暝 A pall is in the gullies, suddenly
By far the most difficult line to translate, and my final version does not really do it justice. It starts with the unusual phrase 群壑, which combines the word for a group of mountains with valley. It’s like: a range of valleys. This is an example of the innovative ways in which Chinese writers solve the problem of having no plural. Meng wants to make clear that he means all of the valleys, not just one; so he finds this unusual way of turning it into a plural, by suggesting with the first word that he’s talking about a range, then instead of following up with the expected of hills or of mountains, he says, of valleys, turning the hills into a negative of themselves.
I used the slightly unusual word gullies to try to elevate the language out of the purely quotidian, but this is not a good solution. I just haven’t found a way to properly recreate Meng’s wordplay here.
The words for suddenly and pall are also archaic, giving the line a nice throwback feel.
Line 3: 松月生夜凉 The moonlit pines breathe the evening cool
This is a more conventional image, but boldly done, with Meng baldly stating that the cool of the evening literally comes from the moon in the pines.
Line 4: 风泉满清听 And air from mountain springs sounds silvery
This is an odd line that may be ungrammatical. Word for word, it may say: the springs on the wind are full of fresh listens. Some dictionaries claim that “fresh listens” is a real word somehow, but it certainly wasn’t a common word in Tang poetry (five uses in the Complete Tang Poetry, of which at three are grammatically not the same as Meng’s use here). Fortunately, English has a related device which I can exploit in the translation: the word silvery is used to describe sound, but is clearly colour-related in origin, so creates a gentle dissonance similar to the feel of the grammatically edgy Chinese.
Line 5: 樵人归欲尽 The logger folk have almost emptied out
Again, a simple and conventional image is refreshed with some odd phrasing. Word for word, it’s: the logger folk’s homegoing will soon be finished.
Line 6: 烟鸟栖初定 A mist of birds is clumping down to roost
The key phrase here is the mist of birds. It could mean birds in the evening mist. But the word for mist/smoke is also a conventional metaphor for the hustle and bustle of human life. It can be the smoke from chimneys, the sound of chatter from a market, the bustle of a busy street (viewed from the poet’s perspective, set apart). The commerce of the birds is very human: they are gregarious, form families, speak to each other in audible and beautiful ways. So their society lends itself to the same metaphor, the mist/smoke of bird life.
The phrasing in the second half of this line is nicely evocative, too. Their roosting, Meng says, has taken preliminary shape (初 initial 定 set). This is a really classic bit of Tang poetic thinking. It captures a moment, while simultaneously and explicitly noting that this moment is passing: the birds will fly up and resettle time and again. That complexity, of a moment that has its own emotional content, yet must quickly be contradicted by the passage of time, is compressed like a spring into just a few characters.
Line 7: 之子期宿来 O master mine, expected for the night
Meng maintains the heightened feel with a self-consciously ancient form of respectful address.
Line 8: 孤琴候萝径 This viny path, your lonely zitherist
The key image here is the viny path, which suggests both a lush forest, with trees festooned with vines; and that the path itself is winding and difficult to follow, reminding us that we are deep in the wilderness.
Despite the fact that there is nothing very new in this poem, every line offers phrasing to savour, enabling Meng to deliver a resonant, absorbing experience just using conventional images.