漁家傲·天接雲濤連曉霧
宋代:李清照
天接雲濤連曉霧。星河欲轉千帆舞。彷彿夢魂歸帝所。聞天語。殷勤問我歸何處。
我報路長嗟日暮。學詩謾有驚人句。九萬里風鵬正舉。風休住。蓬舟吹取三山去。
The sky merges billowing clouds into morning mists
The river of stars rotates, a thousand dancing sails
My dreaming cloud-soul is carried to heaven
And hearing heaven speak:
Honoring me by asking: "Where are you going?"
I respond that the road is long, the hour late
I’ve learned to astonish with my poetry-- but what use has it been?
A mythical bird is taking flight, raising a vast wind
Oh, wind, don’t stop blowing
Blow this tiny boat to the Isles of the Immortals
❤️❤️
Wei Djao writes that Lady Li was following the Song emperor by sea around the time this ci was written. I wanted to preserve the repeated use of "I" in lines 6 and 7, while also trying to retain the allusion to Li Bai about "hearing heaven speak." Thanks to Ronald Egan's translation, I realized something that I never would have noticed. The use of cloud-soul. A multiplicity of souls, she had her cloud-souls (魂) and white-souls (魄). I LOVED Robert Campany's book on the Chinese Dreamscape. He writes so beautifully about dreaming in ancient Chinese and our "dividual, multipartite, and fissiparous" selves.
I loved Wendy Chen's translation--and, of course, Wei Djao.
Art by Daniel Kelly
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