“the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name”

A small post on Chinese poetics.

So about those “parallel couplets” aka “antithetical couplets” that are integral to the regulated verse form I’ve been posting. These are not unique to the form—a casual reading of older Chinese poems will find them everywhere, and it seems like every other historical c-drama or manhua includes a competition at matching couplets—but they’re specifically required here, in the middle four lines.

An example from 3TP #91, which is fairly clear and easy to render:

灭烛怜光满，
披衣觉露滋。

Modern pronunciations are completely different from Middle Chinese, with a different set of tones, but here’s how it reads today:

miè zhú lián guāng mǎn
pī yī jué lù zī

No, the couplet’s lines don’t rhyme—generally they didn’t, but rather the second lines of successive couplets rhymed. But sound’s still important, because in regulated verse there was a strict pattern of which tones were allowed in which position, based on whether a character was pronounced with a “level” or “deflected” tone (though some positions allowed either), and between the two lines of a couplet, they are mostly contrasting, by way of ensuring the musicality of the lines. So that’s one level of parallelism, though it’s not the defining one—for that we need to look at semantic levels.

Here’s the relevant literal senses of the characters:

put out | candle | want | light | expire
drape over shoulders | clothing | aware | dew | increase

Note that, place by place in the line, not only does each noun or verb correspond to a noun or verb, but they’re usually from a similar semantic space and frequently with contrasting meanings: put out ↔ put on | candle ↔ clothing | want ↔ aware | light ↔ dew | expire ↔ increase

My translation is:

I snuff the candle, wanting no light,
And don a cloak, knowing dew gathers.

I managed to place the first three parallel words on the same beats, so mostly reproducing the parallelism—it’s rare to manage all five, because languages work differently. “Robe” would be more literal than “cloak,” but I wanted the liquid /l/ and two hard /k/ sounds to make the line sing a little more, and to alliterate with “candle” to bring out the parallel.

---L.

Subject quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act V, scene 1, William Shakespeare.