A poem by the 5th century, CE, playwright and poet Kalidasa, known as India's Shakespeare, translated by Andrew Schelling.
Eyeing objects
crafted for pleasure,
hearing a strain of
sweet song,
even the satisfied
person grows restless,
taken by an inexplicable anguish --
perhaps
below the threshold of thought
traces of someone
loved then forgotten
lifetimes ago --
So there's still a little beauty in the world despite the madness. Dreamers' Circus, continuing to weave their magic.
When American expat Ernest Fenollosa passed away in London in September of 1908, he left behind notebooks containing word-for-word translations of 150 Chinese poems, done in concert with two Japanese scholars who specialized in Chinese poetry, as the Japanese long had done. Five years later, Fenollosa's widow gave those notebooks to the American poet Ezra Pound, who also had expatriated to Europe. Pound put an end to Victorian verse with his versions of those translations, like lobbing a verbal hand grenade into an effete nineteenth century parlor rife with intellectual affectation.
In Port Townsend, on the NE tip of the Olympic peninsula in Washington state, in America's Pacific Northwest, is an intrepid translator of our own, Bill Porter, or as he's also known, Red Pine. He has faithfully been doing translations of Chinese verse for nearly fifty years. Some time past, he put out a small volume of his own translations of a selection of the poems Pound did over one hundred years ago. This is one of them.
As I sit here in the rolling, snow-covered hills of the Palouse, this is my attempt to escape both the solitude and silence of my immediate environment, and the noise and madness of my national environment. Come on along. We'll sail down the river with some song and wine.
Originally by Li Po, circa 750 CE, or so.
In our magnolia-oared, apple-wood boat
gold flutes and jade pipes fore and aft
a thousand liters of fine wine on board
we drift with courtesans beside us
A Taoist is waiting to ride off on a crane
a fisherman ignores the gulls walking behind him
the songs of Ch'u Yuan are heard here night and day
the King of Ch'u's garden palace is a desolate hill
Inspired by wine, I write this and sacred mountains shake
the islands of immortality resound when I'm done
if fame and fortune could somehow last
the waters of the Han would flow upstream
