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The Works of Li Qingzhao, Ci Poems 3.25 - 3.32
The fourth instalment of Li Qingzhao’s ci poetry. This 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 3.25 through 3.32, inclusive.
Four 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)
This week, we look at Chapter 13 as recommended additional reading.
It may interest you to know that if you’ve been doing the additional reading, you’re now more than 1/3 of the way through How to Read Chinese Poetry:
Ch 1 (Shi Jing)
Ch 5 (19 Old Poems)
Ch 8 (Du Fu
Ch 9 (Du Fu)
Ch 10 (Du Fu)
Ch 12 (Li Qingzhao)
Ch 18 (Du Fu)
These next two chapters related to ci poetry will see us to the halfway point.
In contrast, I’ve been neglecting Chinese Poetry in Context: I believe we've read only Ch 15. I hope to be more assiduous about recommending it in future, when we cover pertinent people. So far, we’ve been a bit misaligned (or I wasn’t yet recommending specific chapters for discussion, when something pertinent came up).
THIS WEEK, recall from the introduction that 3.24 - 3.28 may be misattributed.
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3.28 On the Red Plum
紅梅
紅酥肯放瓊苞碎。
探著南枝開遍未。
不知醞藉幾多時
但見包藏無限意。
道人憔悴春窗底。
悶損闌干愁不倚。
要來小看便來休
未必明朝風不起。
To the tune “Spring in the Jade Tower”
On the Red Plum
The red cream displays itself, the jeweled pod bursts. I look to see if the southern branch is fully in blossom yet. There’s no telling how long they were concealed in preparation,
all we see is the boundless feeling they contain.
The blossoms know the person beside the spring window is haggard, troubled beside the balcony railing, too sad to lean and gaze afar. If you want to come view them a while, please do!
There’s no guarantee wind will not rise in the morning.
Re: 3.28 On the Red Plum
Interesting that the subject in the second stanza slips from the speaker into ambiguity—probably just the translator trying to capture the fact that it’s not absolutely certain, in Chinese?
Re: 3.28 On the Red Plum
all we see is the boundless feeling they contain.
That is such a good line.
Re: 3.28 On the Red Plum
'red cream': Didn't make sense to me on first read bc the word being translated to cream now means 'flaky pastry, crunchy, limp, soft, silky', but baike clarifies that it means they have a moist luster.
'jeweled pod' ofc the original word is jade; baike says something about it having a tender / moist / glossy quality.
'southern branch' = the one that blossoms first as it's in the sun.
The first gloss on the 'person' in the 'person beside the spring window' is that it indicates (potentially LQZ referring to herself as, if she is the subject of the poem) a Daoist. The Baike gloss also offers an alternative interpretation that it could mean that "people are talking about her as [haggard]", since Dao also means 'to say'. The Baike vernacular translation just says 'a person'.