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This week we continue working with Li Qingzhao’s ci poetry. As usual, the book is freely available via De Gruyter's Library of Chinese Humanities in Mandarin and English and via several publication formats, including two open access options (the pdf appears to be better formatted than the ebook). We're reading the poems 3.9 through 3.16 inclusive.
Three of this week’s poems have endnotes, but these offer only small points of Chinese language exegesis.
How to Read Chinese Poetry has three chapters on the ci forms Li Qingzhao uses here:
Chapter 12, Ci Poetry: Short Song Lyrics (Xiaoling)
Chapter 13, Ci Poetry: Long Song Lyrics (Manci)
Chapter 14, Ci Poetry: Long Song Lyrics on Objects (Yongwu Ci)
From next week, we’ll be looking at these as recommended reading.
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3.12
香冷金猊
被翻紅浪
起來慵自梳頭。
任寶奩塵滿 日上簾鉤。 生怕離懷別苦 多少事
欲說還休。
新來瘦
非干病酒
不是悲秋。
休休。 這回去也
千萬遍陽關
也則難留。
念武陵人遠 煙鎖秦樓。
唯有樓前流水
應念我 終日凝眸。
凝眸處
從今又添
一段新愁。
To the tune “On Top of Phoenix Tower, Recalling Flute Music”
Incense lies cold in the golden lion, the bedcover is tossed crimson waves, she arises, too languid to comb her hair.
The jeweled make-up case gathers dust, as the sun climbs to the curtain hook. She dreads now this longing for a distant one and parting pain, How many things have happened!
About to speak, she stops.
She’s grown thin of late, not from sickness over wine, nor from sadness over autumn.
No more, no more! When he left this time a thousand verses of “Yang Pass” would not have detained him.
The Wuling man is distant now, clouds lock shut the tower in Qin.
There’s only the flowing river before the tower that should remember me
staring transfixed, all day long. To the spot I stand and stare, from today on will be added a layer of new sorrow.
Re: 3.12
“as the sun climbs to the curtain hook.” So a hook on the side of the window to secure the curtains when they’re pulled back?
“She dreads now this longing for a distant one and parting pain, How many things have happened!” This is interestingly ambiguous, at least in English, re: whether the longing encompasses parting pain as well as distant one, whether she dreads the longing as a painful sensation or because the situation’s changed (how many things have happened) since she and the distant one were parted.
The last line is evocative. Presumably she wants to address some comment to the distant one, but is alone.
“that should remember me” does this idea take the reflection in the water and imbue it with a sense of permanence?
“from today on will be added a layer of new sorrow.” Paralleling the accretive power of her emotional response to alter the landscape (even as these stories have made Wuling and Qin more, culturally, than they are in and of themselves)
Re: 3.12
Baike's vernacular tl simplifies it to merely the parting pain, but I think the original reads more ambiguously.
The vernacular tl for 'should remember me' is 'should pity me', which is very different to me? No gloss though.