孟郊诗

Poems of Meng Jiao


Index

同李益崔放送王炼师还楼观兼为群公先营山居

With Li Yi and Cui Fang, taking Daoist Master Wang back to his small temple and going as a group to the master's Ying Mountain cottage


十年白云士
一卷紫芝书
来结崆峒侣
还期缥缈居

After ten years a wandering scholar,
A single scroll of distinctive poems.
Come join your Mount Kongtong companions
And return to your delicate, distant cottage.

霞冠遗彩翠
月帔上空虚
寄谢泉根水
清泠闲有馀

Dawn's red corona leaves behind a brilliant blue
With the moon still draped upon an empty sky.
We leave grateful offerings at the river's source and
In the sound of its pure water find rest enough.

-- 孟郊


废话

The poem is pretty straightforward. All the difficulties were in the title. There's a good chance that 李益崔 is a transcriber's error for 李益端, whom we have seen before. But maybe not, as this leaves 放 hanging. Is it a typo, too? 崔 is a family name. But is 放 a given name? I've used it here as one but I'm not happy about it. Today, 放送 means "announce" as in over media. It might have been a bigram back then as well with a different meaning. But modern dictionaries only have the one that goes with modern media.

Less of a problem is the 楼 with the 观. I've taken 楼观 as a "tower temple" as it fits with 练师 which is a kind of Daoist master. I'm even willing to be weakly confident about this decision. Otherwise we're going to go look (观) at a tower (楼) which is, for Meng Jiao, too insignificant to name. Unlikely.

Finally, there's 公先. The first character can be "Master," "Duke," or "father-in-law" as well as a kind of honorific for high officials. So the mountain hut could belong to our Daoist master or to Li Yi(duan?) or to one of Meng Jiao's father-in-laws. And these are in order of their probability here. Except -- what about the 先 character? This can be "first" or "earlier" of similar, as in 先生 or "firstborn," the traditional honorific which is equivalent to "Mister." So the only sense I can make of it in its present position, where it does not modify 公, is as "the master's earlier (hut)", his old hut up in the hills. But I'm not even confident enough about this to use it. 公先 here smells (weakly) like a lost bigram. I say this as the 先 seems awkward no matter how I try to fit it in.

Sooooo. Let us simply leave the title here, in its Cloud of Unknowing, and enjoy the poem.


Index