Fall begins when
no one’s listening
Night lengthens
imperceptibly
The breeze first freshens but
Persists until it
brings a chill
As daytime's warmth fades away
It leaves the grass wan and still
Beneath the steps
the crickets trill
Wet with dew and
glistening
初秋
孟浩然
不觉初秋夜渐长
清风习习重凄凉
炎炎暑退茅斋静
阶下丛莎有露光
Rhyme matters so
much in classical Chinese poetry – it contributes mightily to a poem’s loveliness
and meaning. Many but not all Tang poems
use formal rhyme schemes that are similar to the rhyming couplets we are
familiar with in various forms of the western sonnet. In a Tang poem these formal schemes sound completely natural
or unstilted (even to a modern ear) because rhyming choices are so much more
abundant in Chinese than they are in English; the relative paucity of rhyme
choice in English no doubt explains our contemporary preference for more
non-schematic free verse.
A Tang poem that
uses a formal rhyme is much closer in its sound value to what we associate with
popular music, where we readily accept rhyme as both natural and apt. Often we anticipate and look for rhyme in a
lyric to give a song coherence. As Bob
Dylan once said – all words that rhyme
mean the same thing -- a comment that I completely understand without being
able to explain fully. A rhyme conveys a
sense of equivalence (in sound if nothing else) even between words and ideas
that otherwise strike us as incongruous.
In translating Tang
poetry I often steer a middle course, using rhyme liberally but not adhering to
any strict scheme. This, I hope, allows the translation to carry some of the original poem’s song-like quality without
ending up sounding overly contrived to our jaundiced modern ears. At least that’s the idea.
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