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I am, by no means, adept at translating Classical Chinese literature – much less classical Chinese poetry. However, I can’t help but try anyway. I was thinking about Li Bo the other day, and a poem that I read in my undergrad Mandarin classes with Jonathan Pease. I couldn’t remember the exact name of the poem, only that it was four lines long and he talked about the moon in every one of them. I saw the poem as simplistic after reading it, but Professor Pease talked for over an hour about the use of the moon to represent the woman that Li Bo was admiring in the poem. While 靜夜思 is not the poem that we read back then, it is still beautiful, and I had some fun trying to translate it this week.

In Chinese medicine, we talk often about Yin and Yang, the moon and the earth, etc… and I think that one of the best ways we can understand what these concepts mean is through reading classical Chinese poetry.

靜夜思

床前明月光。
疑是地上霜。
舉頭望明月。
低頭思故鄉。

Jìng yè sī
Chuáng qián míng yuè guāng.
Yí shì dì shang shuāng.
Jǔ tóu wàng míng yuè.
Dī tóu sī gù xiāng.

Still Night Considerations
Before the bed shine the beams of the moon.
Doubtfully is there frost atop the earth.
Raising my head to gaze longingly upon the moon.
Lowering my head in consideration of my homeland.

The way I have translated this poem makes it seem so completely simplistic that I don’t know what to do. Even so, I went to bed thinking about this, and in the only way that I know how – I started to think about the moon as a woman. This character, 前, shows the foot radical over the character for ‘boat,’ and can be thought of as someone standing at the prow of a boat. It does mean “in front,” “ahead,” “formerly,” “preceeding,” etc. And I can see so many meanings in this, one of which could actually point towards something like, “before I took the moon to bed,” or, from a vantage point of the bed, he is looking at the moon.

明月 means not only the moon, but a beautiful type of pearl. I don’t doubt that it could also serve as a name, or pet name. 光 has the meaning of “brightness,” but can also denote nakedness or smoothness. It was originally made from the fire radical 火 over the person radical 人. Given this, another way to translate the line might be: “Before bed Luna with fiery nakedness,” or something like that…

In the second line, 疑 tells us something about “suspect,” or “doubt.” This could be taken as a verb or noun (or maybe even something else). 是 is the » Continue Reading