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

[larryhammer]

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.

Comments

[sartorias]

Seems like along with tones, the words also had different meanings back then. I would have come to different conclusions because of lian, man, and jue. Evocative!

[larryhammer]

There's been a LOT of linguistic drift since classical times. Using the dictionary lookup of cText.org has become indispensable to me, since it quotes entries from several early dictionaries -- most lookups include entries from the Shouwen (说文) dictionary of c.100CE and the Guanyun (广韵) rhyme dictionary of 1007CE, as well as the unabridged Kangxi Zidian of mid-1700s. If the modern sense of a character isn't making sense, the Shouwen and Guanyun definitions (Tang is midway between them) usually point me to a relevant sense.

Taking a dive, how about a look at that lián 怜, modern meanings "pity/sympathy" -- snuffing the candle because you pity the light going out doesn't make sense. Looking up both the simplified and traditional forms of the character, the latter has the Guanyun entry 爱也，又哀矜也 "meaning love/want/sympathize with; also, meaning take pity on." In that first half, that "want," that makes sense: I snuff the candle because I want the light out.

As for mǎn 满, the modern "reach a limit" sense often idiomatically means "come to an end" and the "end of light" is to go out. I picked out that "reach a limit" sense over the more common "fill/get full" because it's antithetical to the "increase" sense of 滋 -- in other words, using the fact that paired words have antithetical/parallel senses to help me understand them. (This is easier to do with the lesser poets, who are in general more mechanical with their couplets.)

If all the permutations in context still don't make sense, then there's always checking a modern commentary such as the Baike Baidu article. (All the famous poems, and anything in 3TP is famous, have Baike Baidu articles.)

[sartorias]

Fascinating stuff, though it pushes over into the math hole in my brain.

[swan_tower]

Oddly enough, what that makes me think of is Catullus 85:

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Basically it translates to:

I hate and I love. How can this be, perhaps you ask?
I don't know, but I feel it happen and I am tortured.

But the entire poem (yes, that's the entire poem) is essentially one giant chiasmus, ABCD-DCBA. It gets slightly tangled in the English because as you said, languages work differently, but "hate" pairs with "tortured," "love" pairs with "feel," "be" pairs with "happen," and "ask" pairs with "know."

There's also a very dusty stirring in my mind that there was something grammatical about it, too, like odi is a . . . defective verb, maybe, and excrucior is deponent? i.e. they're not quite normal verbs, and ditto faciam/fieri, though maybe not the same types. So not tones, obviously, but again a deft little trick that enhances the inverse parallelism.

[larryhammer]

That is an excellent comparative example -- and a sweet, sweet chiasmus.

[swan_tower]

I know, right? I want to make use of something like this someday -- not so much in a poem I write for its own sake, but putting it into a story for some reason.

[larryhammer]

👍🏻