孟郊诗
Poems of Meng Jiao
Index
新卜清罗幽居奉献陆大夫
New Divination for Capturing-Purity House, respectfully presented to Minister Lu
|
黔娄住何处 仁邑无馁寒 岂悟旧羁旅 变为新闲安 |
Where do the officials live? In righteous towns where hardships are unknown. After wandering for so long, who could Change at once into an idle, peaceful person? |
|
二倾有馀食 三农行可观 笼禽得高巢 辙鲋还层澜 |
Hard times? You'll have plenty of food. Farm life? Observe it at your leisure. A caged bird needs a lofty nest; A stranded fish, to return to the waves. |
|
翳翳桑柘墟 纷纷田里欢 兵戈忽消散 耦耕非艰难 |
In a courtyard hidden by the trees, Farming joys come one after another, At least, until soldiers scatter it away. Pastoral life is not without its dangers. |
|
嘉木偶良酌 芳阴庇清弹 力农唯一事 趣世徒万端 |
We pour our wine beneath the lovely trees. Their fragrant shade envelops our pure notes. A strong farmer needs only one thing -- Interest in everything pursued to its end. |
|
静觉本相厚 动为末所残 此外有馀暇 锄荒出幽兰 |
Peaceful consciousness was originally deep. Now it is disturbed by every hair. Besides, you'll find there is more leisure In hoeing the wilderness to grow rare orchids. |
-- 孟郊
废话
Among other things, this poem tells us that poem 57 is out of place in the scrolls. It belongs up here in the 170s or 180s. 陆大夫, in that poem and this, is not Lu Daifu (Doctor Lu) but Lu Dafu (Minister Lu). So far, we have three Lus: this one, Lu Yu (aka Lu Hongjian, the rejected of Li Ye) and Lu Zhongcheng (poet and qin player of the banquets).
Every time Yu Xuanji wrote a poem to a Li, her translators, unwilling to handle Occam's Razor, have her sleeping with another guy who has, amazingly, the same last name. When she writes her ex-husband, whom she always loved, by his nickname, they tally in another lover. There was only one Li in all those poems. Razor-wise, there are, probably (and probably is all we ever get), only two Lu's here. Combining what we know of Lu Yu from Li Ye and Meng Jiao, 陆大夫 is 陆羽.
This poem is full of plays on words and allusions to long idioms. The normal parallelism of lines implies that there are many more such things here which are not in modern dictionaries (at least the ones I can afford -- and I have some thick ones). 三农 references a farming idiom; so 二傾 probably references another. And so on.
The whole poem teases Lu Yu about his new rustic cottage. Unlike the hut of Recluse Ju in the last poem, Lu's apparently has all the amenities with as few as possibile of the inconveniences of "rustic" life. We can see that Meng Jiao does not expect Lu will get his hands dirty. What is also evident, in this continued teasing exchange, is that the two men must get along together just fine. One suspects that there are Lu Yu poems out there, in some burial mound, teasing Meng Jiao in return.