Lamenting by the riverside

Du Fu's capital has been taken

Lamenting by the Riverside
Du Fu

Though tears run down this Shaoling rustic’s face,
My sobs are swallowed. Quietly, I pace
Beside the Twisting River’s twists in spring.
The thousand palace gates beside the stream
Are locked. Now slender willows sport new green
And rushes sprout, but who is there to see?
In my memory, great flags as dazzling
As dawn patrolled South Park, and every thing
The park contained displayed its finery.
First Lady of the Hall of Shining Sun
Accompanied her sovereign for the fun
Beside him on the royal pleasure gig.
The palace’s most gifted stalked in front
With dainty bows and arrows for the hunt
As silver horses champed on golden bits.
They arched their backs and loosed their arrows free
Into the clouds, then trilled with mirth to see
A pair of feathered trophies fall to earth.
Where now, her sparkling eyes and white teeth?
She is a blood-stained, itinerant wraith,
Unable to return and find her rest.
She stayed beside the river flowing east
While he withdrew to Mt Jian’s cliff-cut fast;
Between the two, no words can pass again.
These passions flood our lives; my shirt is wet
With tears. What consummation can I expect
From flowing rivers or the river flowers?
Dusk falls. The back and forth of foreign horse
Raised dust that cloaks the city. Walking south,
My path unknowing twisted to the north.

杜甫  哀江头
少陵野老吞声哭，春日潜行曲江曲。
江头宫殿锁千门，细柳新蒲为谁绿？
忆昔霓旌下南苑，苑中万物生颜色。
昭阳殿里第一人，同辇随君侍君侧。
辇前才人带弓箭，白马嚼啮黄金勒。
翻身向天仰射云，一笑正坠双飞翼。
明眸皓齿今何在？血污游魂归不得。
清渭东流剑阁深，去住彼此无消息。
人生有情泪沾臆，江水江花岂终极！
黄昏胡骑尘满城，欲往城南望城北。

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The boundary between the personal and the public cut differently back then. Du Fu is in Chang’an during the occupation by An Lushan’s rebel forces. He is walking by the river and reflecting on the dramatic history that has brought them to this point. And it’s very much focused on Yang Guifei. There was something about her, and Emperor Xuanzong’s epic romance with her, that caught the imagination of poets.

The palace’s most gifted: Members of the imperial harem.

She is a blood-stained, itinerant wraith: Yang Guifei, executed beside the road during the emperor’s evacuation from the city.

Mt Jian’s cliff-cut fast: A hilly area with boardwalks cut into or cantilevered out of cliff faces.

Walking south: Du Fu’s house was to the south of the city.

To the north: The crown prince, leading the loyalist forces trying to recapture Chang’an, had camped to the north of the city.

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Listening to the reconstructed reading, below, I think I’m missing something in the rhymescheme here. On the surface, this is just a standard single-rhyme poem. Every couplet ends with and -iuk rhyme. However, there are two features of the rhyme that I don’t understand yet. First, sometimes the first half of a couplet rhymes with the second half, and I don’t yet know why poets choose to do that. In this poem, the two halves of the couplet rhyme in the first couplet, and in the second to last - the dramatic message of the poem, marked with an exclamation mark. I’ve marked this shift in my translation semantically, with a switch back to the first person, rather than with rhyme or meter. But this is mostly a guess, because I just don’t know how it *felt* to Du Fu to insert that extra rhyme there.

The other problem with the rhyme is that for half of the poem, the first half of the couplets are in half-rhyme, with a shared nasal ending. I’ve never read anyone talking about how half-rhyme works in Tang poetry, so I just have no idea if that was a deliberate move by Du Fu, or if it just sounded irrelevant to him.

The rhymes aross the ten couplets looks like this:

....iuk, ....iuk.
.......n, ....iuk.
.......n, ....iuk.
.......n, ....iuk.
.......n, ....iuk.
.......n, ....iuk.
......ai, ....iuk.
.......m, ....iuk. 
....iuk, ....iuk.
.....ng, ....iuk.