Yang Guifei redux

Improving my previous translation

Having discovered Jeanne Larsen, I bought a copy of her Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China, and looked at how she approaches some poems that I’ve translated. The one surviving poem by Yang Guifei made for interesting reading - just in terms of page layout, Larsen seems to feel the same way about the poem as I do. She chose different wording, which I don’t want to try to imitate. But she also has a better reading of the source poem, which I am learning from and will shamelessly copy to make my old translation better.

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For the Dancer Zhang Yunrong
Yang Yuhuan

When she dances
        Her sleeves pulse with fragrance
                that doesn't fade
When she dances
        She is pink lotus, sinuous
                in autumn mist
Set in motion by the breeze
	She is cirrus on the hilltop
	Tender willow that gives the pond
		its first caress

杨玉环  赠张云容舞
罗袖动香香不已，红蕖袅袅秋烟里。
轻云岭上乍摇风，嫩柳池边初拂水。

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Yang Yuhuan (719-756) was the concubine with whom the Emperor Xuanzong fell in love as an old man (Guifei is a title, meaning ‘consort’). What we know of her is mainly the grotesque story of how Xuanzong took her from his own son, and at the end of his life, had her executed to save his own skin. Her own voice is almost absent from the historical recored, but she must have been an extraordinary individual, so it is fascinating to think that these might have been her own words.

In this poem, she comments on another dancer in Xuanzong’s harem. Lines two (“pink lotus”) and four (“first caress”) look like sexual references, presumably just euphemistic enough to be considered suitable for the official palace records. The cloud metaphor in line three may have been inspired by Zhang’s name, which means “cloud appearance” (though it may not have been her birth name; women’s original names from this time are often unrecorded).