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Three Hundred Tang Poems #170-183
6 August 2022 02:07 pmOnward to the seven-character regulated verse from Part 6. This is pretty much the same form as five-character regulated verse, only 40% larger—so expect more complex images and narratives. Despite this—or perhaps because of?—some poems have longer titles than typical for previous. Yeah idk.
There are 54 (well, really 53, but I’ll explain that later) poems in this section, which I’ll again post in four installments: I don’t want to overwhelm you guys with long-ass compilations, plus more frequent posts will make me feel like I’m achieving something. 😆 These are, as usual, revised from rougher drafts posted in my other journal.
It seems worth reiterating this every so often: my translation priorities are to render the literal sense (including the understood meaning of idioms) in a way that matches the original’s emotional tenor, rhetorical structures, and relative compression, while using as close to regular English meter as I can manage without doing violence to those other priorities. For the antithetical couplets of the middle lines of this form, I try to maintain the parallelisms, but languages sometimes work differently. Where it is easy to do without departing “too far” from the original, I sometimes incorporate glosses for obscure referents into the translation, but otherwise save explanations for the notes.
In practice, fwiw, I aim to render seven-character lines like these with six-beat lines, but this is not always feasible—sometimes, such as when the syntax is especially compacted or the content is strongly imagistic, it takes seven beats. Ideally, I’d render a given form the same way every time, but here sense takes priority over consistency. (Similarly, I aim for four beats for five-character lines, but sometimes need five.)
( I cannot worry, hearing swan-geese in the village— / They show you won’t pass cloudy mountains till mid-journey )
The next installment will be almost entirely Du Fu. Assuming I can hike over that mountain range.
---L.
Index of Chinese translations
There are 54 (well, really 53, but I’ll explain that later) poems in this section, which I’ll again post in four installments: I don’t want to overwhelm you guys with long-ass compilations, plus more frequent posts will make me feel like I’m achieving something. 😆 These are, as usual, revised from rougher drafts posted in my other journal.
It seems worth reiterating this every so often: my translation priorities are to render the literal sense (including the understood meaning of idioms) in a way that matches the original’s emotional tenor, rhetorical structures, and relative compression, while using as close to regular English meter as I can manage without doing violence to those other priorities. For the antithetical couplets of the middle lines of this form, I try to maintain the parallelisms, but languages sometimes work differently. Where it is easy to do without departing “too far” from the original, I sometimes incorporate glosses for obscure referents into the translation, but otherwise save explanations for the notes.
In practice, fwiw, I aim to render seven-character lines like these with six-beat lines, but this is not always feasible—sometimes, such as when the syntax is especially compacted or the content is strongly imagistic, it takes seven beats. Ideally, I’d render a given form the same way every time, but here sense takes priority over consistency. (Similarly, I aim for four beats for five-character lines, but sometimes need five.)
( I cannot worry, hearing swan-geese in the village— / They show you won’t pass cloudy mountains till mid-journey )
The next installment will be almost entirely Du Fu. Assuming I can hike over that mountain range.
---L.
Index of Chinese translations