Poems of April

Piffka..
Once one is accustomed to ideograms, they are very good meas of transmitting the sense of words. One may sometimes be able to grasp the whole correct meaning of several lines of sentences almost at a glance literally, without any association of the sound of pronouncing words.
Even if phonetics of modern chinese pronunciation are different from those of ancient chinese, it is known that there are linguistic or phonetic laws about changing words or pronunciation, and the rhyming is in the basic part of invariability. This implies that ancient poems are appreciated even in modern chinese pronunciation in rhyming. And they are written with ideograms which hardly changed these thousand years, they can be read in the forms in which they were written even now.

I can't wait til I have time to read the whole thread, and add to it. Thank you Piffka!! April is such a strange month, we just had 6 inches of snow dropped onto the daffodils, and it's been cold, damp and dark. Good poetry is just what I need to keep my spirits up until the weather changes. I'll be back.

I can't wait til I have time to read the whole thread, and add to it. Thank you Piffka!! April is such a strange month, we just had 6 inches of snow dropped onto the daffodils, and it's been cold, damp and dark. Good poetry is just what I need to keep my spirits up until the weather changes. I'll be back.

Thanks Dream, please come back!

I'd like to report that the cherry tree is beginning to drop her petals. Not many, but one or two, here and there. Soon it will look like snow underneath. This cherry is not a bright pink... this morning in the gray dawn it looked pale, silvery and barely pink at all. Gee I ought to take a photo. :wink:

More Poems by Li Po... I'm finding more poems of Spring written by Li Po than his friend, Du Fu. This one (1) is from a set of three called:


Drinking Alone in the Moonlight

1
A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For he, with my shadow, will make three men.

The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.

To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.

May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.(i)

(i) The Milky Way




PS -- Thanks, Satt, for the explanation. The ideograms sound fascinating: to explain a lot in one or two ideograms makes me think it could provide someone else with a truer version of one's thoughts. Less words, more mental pictures. Very interesting.

Piffka..
The following is an example of transliteration of the original of the poem you posted above, in modern chinese pronunciation. It has very particular rhythms when read loud.


Yue Xia Du Zhuo
Li Bai (Li Po)

Hua jian yi hu jiu
Du zhuo wu xiang qin

Ju bei yao ming yue
Dui ying cheng san ren

Yue ji bu jie yin
Ying tu sui wo shen

Zan bang yue jiang ying
Xing le xu ji chun

Wo ge yue pai huai
Wo wu ying ling luan

Xing shi tong jiao huan
Zui hou ge fen san

Ying jie wu qing you
Xian qi miao yun han.


(The pronunciation follows the modern standards, different forms might be possible for a few words.)


And the supposed ancient pronunciation of the first two lines might sound something like this:

"Gua kan iet guo tsiu
Duk tchjiak miu siang tchien
.."
(This is based on B. Karlgren's study, but modified for typewriting convenience, and cannot be taken as a strict transcription.)

That's interesting, Satt. I wish we could see the ideograms, but at least on my computer, they don't come up.

Here is another translation of the Li Po poem:

Drinking Alone with the Moon

From a pot of wine among the flowers
I drank alone.There was no one with me --
Till raising my cup, I ask the bright moon
To bring me my shadow and make us three.
Alas, the moon was unable to drink
And my shadow tagged me vacantly;
But still for a while I had these friends
To cheer me through the end of spring....
I sang. The moon encouraged me
I danced. My shadow tumbled after.
As long as I knew, we were born companions.
And then I was drunk, and we lost one another.
....Shall goodwill ever be secure?
I watch the long road of the River of Stars.

I think I prefer the first version.

This is a .gif image.
(These are written with simplified chinese characters in use for these 50 years, not with traditional chinese characters. If I could find the latter I would post.)

The first verse in the next link is the original of "Drinking Alone with the Moon" written with traditional chinese characters. I hope it can be displayed on your screen. If not let me know, I will search further.

http://hk.geocities.com/pclihk/verse/LiBai.htm

Those are amazing... so complicated. I wonder... is the ideogram that looks like two boxes atop each other and on top of stilts (it shows up four times in the first halves of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th) lines... could that refer to the moon? I notice that the shape is repeated on line 2, but in a slightly narrower variation, and again in the last half of the last line... again narrower, but with a different variation.

Hmmm, I love a puzzle. These seem like a puzzle to me.

The Moon.

Pronounced "yue" in modern chinese.

Spring

"Chun"

Satt! It is much easier to decipher these when they are big, like the moon ideogram. Thank you for finding that. I see it comes from a lesson... is that a good website, do you think, for learning Chinese? I've looked and looked, but I only see Chun in the poem once.

Some of the ideograms are so complicated, they must be the despair of any student trying to learn to draw them (For example... the third from the last. It looks to be a combination of two.) And thanks for putting up with my simplistic questions. It IS very interesting to me.

Piffka..
I have found a very convenient english-chinese character dictionary on line.

First click at "Character Dictionary" on the linked page. You will find "Chinese Character Dictionary" page. Try entering "spring", for example, in the "English Look-up" text box. You can find chinese characters.

http://www.mandarintools.com/



Studying the meaning of the original form and the composition of a chinese character is sometimes a challenging task for professionals. But if you ask me about the composition of a specific character, I will try to explain it as far as I can.
(I am studying "internationalization" of computer programming, and learning characters is an important part of it.)

The moon ideogram disappeared!

Thanks for the link, Satt... I've added it to my favorites so I can be sure and find it again. (I have had some trouble installing/reinstalling my Chinese characters from NT, but finally managed.) The main dictionary was temporarily offline but I was directed to another.

I did a search on Chun and found that the "spring" is chun1. There are 43 different entries and three different chuns (1,2,3) which I remember reading somewhere refers to the various inflections in speech. I think you may have piqued my interest in studying Chinese. I am amazed that this interpreting of characters for computers is a part of your avocation/vocation. Wonderful. I am thinking... while I could probably not learn all the spoken Chinese, maybe I could learn to read (and maybe write) some Chinese characters. That will keep me busy for the rest of my life! Look what you've done!

More Great Chinese Poetry including another version of 'Drinking in Moonlight'

I do like the Shakespeare Sonnet
that you included about April Piffka, naturally the
Bard would have much to say about Spring - I do
so enjoy : From you have I been absent in the spring
.............................................
Also, I found another site about April & Poetry Month
for anyone who is interested in looking up some more
songs of the sweet month, April.
Webpage Title
And just a bit of E E Cummings:

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.

I briefly followed lines of "Works and Days" by Hesiod, but I could scarecely find the part referring to April explicitly.
This is because it was about agricultural seasons?
I will read on for a while.

Now, I feel I could find it.

Works and Days
Hesiod

..

When Zeus has finished sixty wintry days after the solstice, then the star Arcturus leaves the holy stream of Ocean and first rises brilliant at dusk.
After him the shrilly wailing daughter of Pandion, the swallow, appears to men when spring is just beginning. Before she comes, prune the vines, for it is best so.

..

(The original in Greek, tr. by H.G.Evelyn-White, M.A.)

Apes will
but not in the spring time...
la de la

The messager of spring, the sweet voiced nightingale.

(A passage from Sappho (610~570 BCE) tr. by E.M. Cox)

Perhaps the most famous lines about April:


"APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. . . ."
( 'The Wasteland'', T.S. Eliot, L. 1-4)