(Translated from 退休後的晨昏)
By Tom Chung 鍾倫納
1. 退而難休 Morning After Retirement
夢舊扣漣紋, [pronunciation: mèng jiù kòu lián wén, ]
Unlike ripples fading away,
old dreams can’t be kept at bay.
錶輕巳幾斤. [ biǎo qīng yì jǐ jīn. ]
The watch now weighs lighter by pounds1,
雞鳴鐘不鬧, [ Jī míng zhōng bù nào, ]
No longer before the rooster, the alarm sounds.
何處獻辛勤. [ hé chù xiàn xīn qín. ]
No one knows where he is needed,
nor when again he will be greeted.
2. 現代天倫敘 Grand-Mom’s Dinner Nowadays
明窗伴靜几, [míng chuāng bàn jìng jǐ ]
Windows are bright, furniture is clean; 2
舐犢待晨曦. 3 [ shì dú dài chén xī ]
Dishes are plenty, soup is lean. 4
久盼同餐飯, [ jiǔ pàn tóng cān fàn, ]
It’s been quite a while having dinner together,
羹殘燕巳飛. 5 [gēng cán yán sì fēi. ]
Every child is gone, while the meal is barely over.
Notes
1. Inspired by Dali’s melting watch.
2 Everything was cleaned up the day before.
3 The translation uses a different metaphor to convey the anxious feeling of the grandmother who could not sleep while waiting to see the children. The original version contains a Chinese metaphor — “The cow woke up early, waiting to lick the calf, well before dawn.”
4 Serving lean instead of fatty soup is a healthy lifestyle promoted in the culture of traditional Chinese medicine, whether the soup contains meat or not.
5 Every swallow has flown away. The swallow in many Chinese poems is a symbol of birds leaving the nest upon growing up.
For Readers Who Are Curious About the Uniqueness of Classical Chinese Poems
These two poems follow a rigid style of the most popular format of Classical Chinese poems. There are four lines in each poem, five characters per line. Another major format is seven characters per line.
There is only one syllable for each Chinese character. One or more character/s (mostly two or a few) constitutes/constitute a word. The square shape of the characters, the fixed number of characters in each line, and the fixed number of lines (mostly four and eight) forms obvious visual rhythms.
The written version of the English translation obviously takes lots more words than the Chinese version.
Verbal presentation of a Classical Chinese poem takes a shorter span of time than poems in other languages.
Recitation of each 20-character poem takes about a third of the syllables and time than the English translation.
The Classical Style also requires that the pronunciation of each character share a certain tone, depending on the location of the character in each line. Moreover, the last character in each line must belong to a certain rhyme group. Such tone-and-rhyme-audio-patterns form very harmonic rhythms. You may try to read aloud the five syllables in English that following each line in Chinese to get an impression of reciting a Chinese poem.
While most Chinese writers think it is hard to follow such rigid requirements, they find the 4 x 5, 4 x 7, 8 x 5, and 8 x 7 audio-visual formats easy to remember, and helpful to condense/discipline their expression. Whether written with a rigid audio style or not, if the content is articulate, the expression is attractive or amusing, such poems would be widely accepted. Even illiterate people can memorize and recite some.
Among thousands of poems still popular today (many were written over a thousand years ago), most follow the rigid style because the rhythm, the rhymes and the order of the tones resonate well and are easy to remember.
Tom Chung, Ph.D., M.Phil., B.S.Sc., is a professor in the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health.
Tom has also maintained a life-long passion in the study of Chinese history, culture, and poetry. He is one of a few writers who has published in five Chinese societies and diasporas, despite their political differences.