孟郊诗

Poems of Meng Jiao


Index

答友人

Answering My Friends


白日照清水
浅深无隐姿
君子业高文
怀抱多正思

Daylight shines on this pure river
And the depths of its beauty are revealed.
This gentleman works at high culture,
Cherishing an abundance of right thinking.

砥行碧山石
结交青松枝
碧山无转易
青松难倾移

He polishes the stones of the blue mountains
And befriends the boughs of the green pines.
Blue mountains, without an easy path.
Green pines, hard to overturn.

落落出俗韵
琅琅大雅词
自非随氏掌
明月安能持

Naturally, he uses common rhymings
And reads aloud from the Book of Songs.
He eschews the ways of others and
In solitude, he finds his peace.

千里不可倒
一返无近期
如何非意中
良觌忽在兹

He could not avoid this long journey
And will not be returning soon.
So what if this was not expected?
He meets the goodness that is suddenly here.

道语必疏淡
儒风易凌迟
愿存坚贞节
勿为霜霰欺

Daoist words are necessarily thin.
Confucian ways fall into decadence.
He wants to remain faithful to the end
And not cheat the hardships that he's faced.

-- 孟郊


废话

Well, that was nice -- a straightforward poem. Not once did I have to struggle to make sense of five characters. In recent poems, it has often been that case that I know all the characters and nothing English rises up out of them. Then I have to fall back on the inherent parallelism of the form to create something that makes sense. And then hope that it makes sense.

This poem could have been written any time after Meng Jiao was thirty. In his life, his solitude could be metaphoric or real. He could be writing this in a comfortable house in a city or in the midst of the wilderness. I suspect this poem comes from his fifties, after he has become an official. But that's just a feeling I have.


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