Yeah, it's really worth reading the whole collection. I have the last five queued up for some future posts, and then I'll publish them all together in one post. Many of the published translations are partial, or leave out the weird last one, but I find it really satisfying to look at the whole 20 and know that this is the collection that Wang himself put together. Perhaps when I've got time I'll try to put the Pei Di series into verse as well, to really recreate the book as they wrote it. But it won't be quick work...
Interesting that the setting of the poem and the setting of the prose translation by Pei Di is similar, but the timeliness of what they are describing is a bit different.
In Wang Wei’s poem the river is bathed in moonlight. But in Pei Di’s prose version the sun has just set and the clouds have disappeared suggesting a time just after dusk, almost full darkness, no mention of moonlight.
But the line in Pei Di’s prose, “there is a chill on the river” almost acts similarly to the line where Wei references the myth of the beautiful, kidnapped girl. Perhaps both would bring up the myth in the mind of a contemporaneous reader.
Very nice explication for how the poem would have been read and understood by his contemporaries using the analogy to our Arthurian legend.
I like learning that aspect of these poems from China where 1 or 2 characters (浣纱) have such a deeper meaning. It reminds me of the 4-character sayings (成語/chéngyǔ) where the 4 characters have a much deeper backstory and context than the surface translation. Thanks for sharing.
Yeah, it's really worth reading the whole collection. I have the last five queued up for some future posts, and then I'll publish them all together in one post. Many of the published translations are partial, or leave out the weird last one, but I find it really satisfying to look at the whole 20 and know that this is the collection that Wang himself put together. Perhaps when I've got time I'll try to put the Pei Di series into verse as well, to really recreate the book as they wrote it. But it won't be quick work...
Interesting that the setting of the poem and the setting of the prose translation by Pei Di is similar, but the timeliness of what they are describing is a bit different.
In Wang Wei’s poem the river is bathed in moonlight. But in Pei Di’s prose version the sun has just set and the clouds have disappeared suggesting a time just after dusk, almost full darkness, no mention of moonlight.
But the line in Pei Di’s prose, “there is a chill on the river” almost acts similarly to the line where Wei references the myth of the beautiful, kidnapped girl. Perhaps both would bring up the myth in the mind of a contemporaneous reader.
Very nice explication for how the poem would have been read and understood by his contemporaries using the analogy to our Arthurian legend.
Thank you. "Translation is a distant mirror by Plato."
I like learning that aspect of these poems from China where 1 or 2 characters (浣纱) have such a deeper meaning. It reminds me of the 4-character sayings (成語/chéngyǔ) where the 4 characters have a much deeper backstory and context than the surface translation. Thanks for sharing.