by Shenzhan/申展
In the winter of 2021, I was desperately looking for something to get lost into. This time I find myself rediscover the power of written languages through poetry.
And here are my selections and notes.
次北固山下 A Mooring Under North Fort Hill
王灣 Wang Wan（693–751）
客路青山外，Under blue mountains we wound our way,
行舟綠水前。My boat and I, along green water;
潮平兩岸闊，Until the banks at low tide widened,
風正一帆懸。With no wind stirring my lone sail.
海日生殘夜，...Night now yields to a sea of sun,
江春入舊年。And the old year melts in freshets.
鄉書何處達，At last I can send my messengers –
歸雁洛陽邊。Wild geese, homing to Loyang.
(Translated by Witter Bynner , 1881 – 1968)
The Year
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850 – 1919)
What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of a year.
A Personal Note for January/February
We hug the world until it stings.
Thank you, Ella.
The beginning of the year is the best time to reset. It is still deep in winter; the world is bleak, cold and lifeless. And yet, we tell ourselves to rise from the darkness of the winter, to be hopeful, and get ready to hug this world once again.
We’ve been through the past year, and we can do it again. Only that we can do it better, because we have one more year under our human experiences. And of course, we forget, get carried away by the same old fear, and find ourselves in the same agony at some point, just like the year before, and the year before last year... But the beginning of a year, unfailingly gives us hope, exactly as we choose to believe.
Just ask any person in the Times Square on New Year’s Eve, waiting for the Big Apple to drop in freezing coldness, hugging each other like penguins huddling to fence against the gusty snow storm in the South Pole, only to see the giant neon billboards above their heads and others flashing commercials on things to buy, places to visit, or Broadway shows to watch, while keeping casual conversations with the unfortunate people stuck next to them as the waiting hours are long, miserable, and exhausting……all of the effort for the hope in one’s heart for the new year. Unbelievable!
Probably no one will talk about the despair, the sadness and the helplessness one may feel when facing the irreversibly passing of time. For whatever time we as a tiny being have in this vast universe, there is one less year left. In today’s fast-paced, forward-looking and superficially cheering materialized culture, we turn a blind eye on our deepest fear: our time is limited.
But who wants to dive too deep into it? In the end, it’s an act of balance – we admit the passing of time yet keep being hopeful for the new year.
Wang Wan, a Tang Dynasty poet from more than a thousand years ago in China, captured the balance so well in “A Mooring Under North Fort Hill” that he made his name for this very poem at a time when so many great poets were shining like the brightest stars in the universe of Chinese classical poetry. By 18th Century, a complete anthology of Tang poetry collected close to 50,000 poems by over 2,200 poets, how could one mark his own literary existence that is to be remembered after more than one thousand years with one single poem?
I couldn’t find a better translation of this poem than Bynner’s, knowing the English version fails to unveil its greatness. Take the two most-known lines among Chinese today as an example:
海日生殘夜，...Night now yields to a sea of sun,
江春入舊年。And the old year melts in freshets.
As a pentasyllabic regulated verse (五言律诗), these two lines are perfectly paralleled: not only each line consists of 5 characters, the paralleling characters also share exactly the same part of speech, opposite pitch, and carry meanings complimentary to each other. “海” （ ocean）with a falling tone (hǎi) in the first line is paired with “江” ( river) with a rising tone “jiāng”. Both characters, with radicals (the three dots on the left-hand side) mean something related to water, the most fundamental element of life. “日”（sun）with a falling tone “rì” following “海” corresponds “春” (chūn, spring) with a rising tone. In spring, the sun shines with warmth, temperature rises and life comes back to earth. While “日” and “春” reinforce each other by meaning, the written characters visually display such reinforcement too: look carefully, there is literally a “日“ component as part of the character “春” ! The third character in the first line, “生” (shēng, to be born) is magic. Followed by “殘夜” （cán yè, the lingering darkness of the night）, it reads as if the bright sun is conceived and born into the ocean by the darkness. The paralleling characters in the second line, “入舊年”（rù jiù nián, entering the old year), in perfect juxtaposition of “生殘夜” in that “入” (to enter, to go back in), with a falling tone, also directionally opposite to that of “生”（ born out), and “舊” (old) is similar to “殘” (incomplete, lingering, residual) as both refere to something worn out with time passing and hence less desirable, associated to feelings of sorrow, melancholy, even despair. The last character in both lines, “夜” (night) and “年” (year) are related to time. Chinese New Year’s Eve is literally 年夜.
All characters pieced together, besides describing the scene that the night yields to the new sun, and the old year gives way to the new and the fresh, Wang Wan expresses his own feelings as a human being at the crossing hour of the old and the new year, the most sensitive time one could feel of the time passing as non-stoppable water. Helpless as it is, it is also where new life comes from: water is, by all means, naturing and cultivating. There is a lingering feeling of melancholy about the old and darkness, and yet, there is more to hope for than to feel sad about.
All that is lost in translation.
And yet, it is those who rise from such complex feelings about the old and the new, can say to the new year:
We hug the world until it stings.
Thank you, Wang Wan and Ella.
Astoria, New York
2/14/2022