Qian Qi is in a rustic Eden

Both beautiful and translatable

Zhang Daqian, Landscape After Wang Ximeng, 1947

To Rectifier Yang, Written from My Study at Valley Mouth
Qian Qi

Patches of thatching straw sprout among the springs and gullies;
The haze at dawn begets curtains of climbing fig.
Here, bamboo luxuriates in the moments after the rain,
While the mountains love the slanting evening sun.
Autumn flowers cling on, determined to fall just a little later,
Unlike the egrets, birds of leisure, which take early to their roosts.
The boy is sweeping my liana path,
Because I promised, sometime when, to look out for the coming of my friend.

钱起  谷口书斋寄杨补阙
泉壑带茅茨，云霞生薜帷。
竹怜新雨后，山爱夕阳时。
闲鹭栖常早，秋花落更迟。
家僮扫萝径，昨与故人期。

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Happy Mid-Autumn Day, everyone! In the town where I live, Xiamen, Mid-Autumn Festival is the jolliest of the year. We roll dice into clattering china bowls, and hand out sweets, trinkets, and sometimes even household appliances to the winners. I’ll write it up one day.

But today, Qian Qi (722-780). He owned a house in the same area as Wang Wei’s famous estate, and was equally enamoured of its beauty.

This poem flows easily off the pen because the kind of parallelism he uses places similar things in the same place on each like. In the second couplet, the bamboo luxuriates, and the mountains love - and the comparison is obvious in English, even when I haven’t designed the rhythm of the lines to highlight it. Of course, it’s important to remember that translatability has nothing to do with quality. It just happens that sometimes poets use techniques that that work well in the other language, and sometimes they use Chinese-specific techniques.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this one, and take a moment to gaze at the full moon and think about family and friends.