孟郊诗
Poems of Meng Jiao
Index
苦寒吟
Bitter Cold
|
天寒色青苍 北风叫枯桑 厚冰无裂文 短日有冷光 |
Cold sky a deep and distant grey as This north wind withers the mulberry trees. Thick ice, with no meaning in its cracks. Brief sunlight, with no warmth in its radiance. |
|
敲石不得火 壮阴夺正阳 苦调竟何言 冻吟成此章 |
My attempt to strike a fire fails, Force of shadow overwhelming the light. My bitter song ends inaudibly, Sealed by my frozen cry. |
-- 孟郊
废话
Meng Jiao is cold. Very cold. But he is not out in the wilds. Mulberry trees were cultivated. Meng Jiao is out in the farmlands, probably in a cold shack. Farmers lived in shacks, often several families to a single shack. But farmer's wives could keep a fire going. So he's probably in an old abandoned shack where he fails to start a fire, probably from lack of practice. It's beginning to sound like he is a young man. He is certainly not a middle-aged, married official. No wife in the poem at all. So he's not yet forty and it's before or after his first wife dies. A single bitter winter will make a proficient fire-starter out of anyone who doesn't freeze to death. So Meng Jiao is, possibly, quite young here, never married, on the fringe of farmlands, in a ratty old hut, freezing his honeybuns off. But 调 suggests a tune, which suggests a qin2 (琴), which usually gets translated as "lute" but is really much more like a koto. Playing a qin, writing a poem which he sings as he plays, too cold to finish the song, a fine start for a poetic career that endures for fourteen hundred years.