“is it easier when you don’t have to count to ten?/ when you don’t have to pretend?/ i want to know”

This poem appears four times in Complete Tang Poems, attributed to three different authors—I stumbled first across the Li Bai version, given as the second of a two poem set, the first being the famous “Changgan Ballad” aka 3TP #43 aka Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife.” Given that auspicious pairing, I translated this as well:

A Changgan Ballad, Li Bai or Li Qi or Zhang Chao

Recall this one within her quarters
With “smoke and dust” still unacquainted,
Married to a Changgan man
And from a sandbank watching the winds.
When Fifth Month comes, the south winds rise—
Consider, sir, descent to Baling.
When Eighth Month comes, the west winds start—
Remember, sir, your growing son.
My sorrows come and go, and why?
You’re rarely seen, departing often.
How many days to reach Xiangtan?
This one yet dreams of wind and waves.
Last night, the wild winds gusted through,
Snapping a tree on the river bank—
Dark waters flooded boundlessly—
The travelers there, what happened to them?
Good carriage pulled by Floating Clouds,
A wedding east of Orchid Isle,
Paired mandarin ducks above green reeds,
Within the kingfisher brocade screens—
I pity that me, once barely fifteen,
Complexion once peach-flower red.
The work of being a merchant’s wife:
Worried by water, worried by wind.

( some scrolling hanzi )

… I am disappoint. Unlike the first Changgan Ballad, this is a genre-typical complaint, at length, by the homebound wife of a river merchant. I know even Homer nods, but I have no hesitations asserting that a) it’s probably by either Zhang Chao (张潮) or Li Qi (李益) and b) I don’t care which.

Obligatory annotations: Changgan was a city, now a district of downtown Nanjing, particularly associated with Yangzi river merchants and freighters. The “smoke and dust” is that of the world, or worldly affairs. The point of the months is that the Three Gorges were passable only part of the year, depending on seasonal water levels and (when heading upstream) winds. Baling is part of modern Yueyang, Hunan, downstream of the Gorges, and Xiangtan is a little upstream of that. Floating Cloud was the name of Han Emperor Wen’s horse, so a type for a really fine steed.

---L.

Index of Chinese translations

Subject quote from Good Girls, CHVRCHES.