孟郊诗
Poems of Meng Jiao
Index
君子勿郁郁士有谤毁者作诗以赠之
Gentlemen, Do Not Despair. A Warrior Has Destroyed the Slanderer and Sends This Poem to You.
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君子勿郁郁 听我青蝇歌 人间少平地 森耸山岳多 |
Gentleman, do not despair. Hear my slanderer's song. Among men, there is little peace. Among the mountain forests, much. |
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折輈不在道 覆舟不在河 须知一尺水 日夜增高波 |
Break an axle and you're stuck. O'erturn the boat and you are wrecked. You should know as you begin, day and night, The waves grow higher. |
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叔孙毁仲尼 臧仓掩孟轲 兰艾不同香 自然难为和 |
Our descendants will destroy Confucius and Wealth will be Mencius's downfall. The noble and the mean have different odors. Naturally, it is hard to be harmonious. |
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良玉烧不热 直竹文不颇 自古皆如此 其如道在何 |
Good jade remains cool within the fire. Honest gentlemen will speak, but not too much. But in this age, it is as if Everyone has left the Way. |
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日往复不见 秋堂暮仍学 玄发不知白 晓入寒铜觉 |
Days come and go, unseen. But in Autumn halls the fading light still shines. Dark radiance illumines nothing, While daybreak comes and wakes the sleeping stones. |
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为林未离树 有玉犹在璞 谁把碧梧枝 刻作云门乐 |
The trees do not yet realize their forest Nor the jewel that rests within the uncarved block. Who grasps the jewelled branches of the Tree of Heaven Can inscribe the music of the ancient dance. |
-- 孟郊
废话
This is one of those poems where almost every line needs too many footnotes. And I don't do footnotes. Only these useless remarks. The poem is about clinging to culture and maintaining it, in common with one's cultured peers.
Usually, when the first line of a poem is in the title, it is one of those poems which has become a touchstone and everyone from the Han to the Ming has tried their hand at it. This isn't, so far as I can tell, one of those. Or this could be a rendering of a song. But I don't think it is that, either. Songs tend to have lines of varying length. My guess here is that some Tang equivalent of a right-wing big-mouthed pundit wrote some poem or essay called "Gentlemen, Do Not Despair." And this set on edge the teeth of Meng Jiao and his right-minded, non-conformist friends. So Meng Jiao steps into the breach (once more) and fires this broadside across the original author's bows (to mix my warlike metaphors.)
But again, these are only guesses. It would be nice, in general, if the collators of the scrolls, who lived closer in time to our poets than we do, had taken the time to annotate them intelligently while they were at it. We know next to nothing about almost every poem and poet. Helping us know twice as much would have been an easy task.