Grass
The grass is back, it always comes back.
This grass you cannot get rid of, year after year after year.
Can’t pave over it, it’ll come back through the sidewalk.
I’ll see you when I see you. You don’t call, you don’t write.
The Bloom is not a Bloom
You call these flowers? You call this perfume?
I wasn’t expecting company.
How long are you in town? Next time then.
Sleeping on a Night of Autumn Rain
I knew the guy that lived there, an old man.
Owned the building. Beautiful home.
Last November, rainy night.
Went to sleep and never woke up.
I wonder what they’ll do with the building.
Remembering South of the River
I loved it across the river. They knew me over there.
Red, red flowers at sunrise. Green water in the spring.
You don’t forget that.
Four Poems
Bai Juyi
translated from the Chinese by Joey Schwartzman
Read the original in Chinese, Simplified
Listen to the original read by the translator:
The imperial examination system in which Bai Juyi excelled selected qualified candidates for civil service positions through anonymized standardized tests. It encouraged scholarship in the empire, while both lending legitimacy to and serving as a check on the hereditary aristocracy. As poetry constituted a large portion of the exam, a phenomenon akin to a “poetry-writing arms race” was triggered in Tang society (618–907). The four poems featured here are written in a formal style called regulated verse, but they were composed for a coterie of intellectuals that were accustomed to such language. In regulated verse, not only do lines rhyme, the tones of the characters do too as well as alternate in a melodic manner. Line length and the number of lines are also defined so that each poem can be divided internally into couplets featuring grammatical and thematic parallels.
While not true of all Tang Dynasty poets, Bai Juyi is alleged to have written with the common person in mind and was even known to rewrite passages deemed overly obscure. In translating these poems, I rendered them in plain English to reflect that intent. As a reader, Bai's sentimental and sometimes wistful voice, as well as his bittersweet relationship with the people in his life, remind me of a line from the movie Annie Hall: “The food at this place is really terrible [. . .] Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” I borrowed a New York sensibility to bring these thousand-plus-year-old poems to a contemporary audience, and to recreate hints of the lyrical, measured language and parallelism woven so deftly by Bai Juyi into the original works.
While not true of all Tang Dynasty poets, Bai Juyi is alleged to have written with the common person in mind and was even known to rewrite passages deemed overly obscure. In translating these poems, I rendered them in plain English to reflect that intent. As a reader, Bai's sentimental and sometimes wistful voice, as well as his bittersweet relationship with the people in his life, remind me of a line from the movie Annie Hall: “The food at this place is really terrible [. . .] Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” I borrowed a New York sensibility to bring these thousand-plus-year-old poems to a contemporary audience, and to recreate hints of the lyrical, measured language and parallelism woven so deftly by Bai Juyi into the original works.
Bai Juyi (772–846) was born to a Tang government official in Shanxi. After success in the imperial civil service exams, he joined the government workforce and eventually rose to the rank of provincial governor. His writing abounds with themes of nature, friendship, and satire. Although Bai’s political writing and Buddhist faith at a time when it was unpopular led to a few years in exile, he later reconciled with the ruling Tang Empire and was returned to power in southern China. Bai was buried at the Longmen Grottoes, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where his tomb is still maintained.
Joey Schwartzman (b. 1989) is a New York-based translator who studied translation at Vassar College and Qingdao University. Schwartzman recently served as a contributing editor on Naked Body, an anthology of comics by contemporary artists published in translation by Paradise Systems.
