白居易诗
Poems of Bai Juyi
Index
夜入瞿唐峡
Night Comes to Qutang Gorge
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瞿唐天下险 夜上信难哉 岸似双屏合 天如匹帛开 |
This gorge is Heaven's most dangerous. Night falls and the peril is worse. Walls like great, close painted screens. Sky like silk stretched overhead. |
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逆风惊浪起 拔菍暗船来 欲识愁多少 高于滟滪堆 |
Headwinds and great waves rise up. Obstacles lurch out of the darkness. If you wish to know how bad it is Imagine a navigator's worst nightmare. |
-- 白居易
废话
Towering cliffs like really, really big painted screens? The sky at nightfall like fluttering silk overhead? Is this a first-hand description of a dangerous river-run? Did Bai Juyi even get wet? Yawn. Bai Juyi is no Gary Snyder. Do not confuse Tang poets' love of beauty with a more modern love of the natural world. In an earlier poem, a pine tree was an example of human virtue. This terribly dangerous gorge is an example of Bai Juyi writing poetry on the slightest excuse when, maybe, he should have just been watching the moon instead and giving his brain a rest.
As a side note, the character nie4 (菍), on line 6, should be nian4, the same character with the cao3 (艹) replaced by zhu2 (竹). Nian4 is a simple boat, perhaps raft-like, constructed with bamboo withes. Its character, being rare, does not exist in the utf-8 font set.