Monday 11 February 2013

Maid in China

Given the precise, highly nuanced and specialised way in which language is used in poetry (see several previous posts, including this and that one), I am very dubious about translated verse being able to reflect meaningfully the original work.  My apologies are tendered to those whose entire professional  raison d'être I have just blithely dismissed.  As Twitter, however, was chirruping brightly with Chinese New Year greetings yesterday, and as I cannot claim entirely to shun poetry from other tongues, I thought I'd offer up this elegant piece from Helen Waddell's Lyrics from the Chinese:



VIII

Written B.C. 650.

' Other things,' says the 'Little Preface' solemnly, 'more difficult to overcome than Distance, may keep one from a Place.'

It is the yearning of a young wife for the home to which it was an indecorum that she should return.


HOW say they that the Ho is wide,
When I could ford it if I tried?
How say they Sung is far away,
When I can see it every day?

Yet must indeed the Ho be deep,
When I have never dared the leap;
And since I am content to stay,
Sung must indeed be far away.




And, to demonstrate further my lack of proper restraint, I leave you with a few choice literary titles appropriate to this theme:


The Dim Sum of All Fears
Sampan of Green Gables
Jade the Obscure
The Maoists of Avalon
The Manchu knew too much
Long Wok to Freedom.


新年快樂

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