This poem uses many different words for “beautiful,” and in teasing out the different nuances I benefited enormously from being able to look up these terms in Hu Zengyi and Qianlong through the online dictionary at buleku.org.
The first stanza talks about the fresh blooming of a flower, and the second stanza talks about the flower’s decline, a powerful contrast reminiscent of the Moon. This flower was young and shapely once, the center of attention for a cloud of butterflies, but then fades, and longs for that former desire when all the admirers have gone away.
All of the SB poems are anonymous, and perhaps we will never know who wrote them, but the SB 11 poems to the tune of Wind in the Pines seem very sympathetic to the emotional lives of women, and I wonder if we will ever learn that the poet was a woman.
| ilha [花], | A Flower | |||
| Staatsbibliothek 11.18 (View Online) | ||||
| ice icebuhengge, | A new thing stained, | |||
| boconggo boco, | with colorful colors, | |||
| fiyangga fiyan fiyen, wangga wa, | a flush blush and rouge, a fragrant scent, | |||
| yangsanggai yaya yangse, | every shape is shapely, | |||
| 5 | hojo kai hocikon, | lovely, indeed, and beautiful, | ||
| yebken ni yebcungge. | fine, oh, and striking. | |||
| geren gemu gefehe, | All settled and thick | |||
| noroko noho, | with butterflies. | |||
| fayangga ai farapi, | But alas, the spirit faints away, | |||
| 10 | buyenin buyecuke, | the desire is longed for, | ||
| tuhen tuhekede, | when what falls has fallen, | |||
| gegese genehe. | and the ladies have gone. | |||
Translation Notes
boconggo boco and fiyangga fiyan fiyen. While boconggo and fiyangga may seem to be nearly the same in meaning, in poetry it seems like the latter is used more often to describe bright pink, orange and red colors, like autumn trees, sunsets and a person’s complexion, while the former is used more broadly. The Qianlong Manchu dictionary gives cira boco sain, beye ambalinggū be fiyangga sembi, “A good color of the face, or a stalwart body, are called fiyangga.” I chose “flush blush” as my translation for fiyangga fiyan to reflect this nuance.hojo kai hocikon and yebken ni yebcungge. For these words Norman gives a set of overlapping meanings in the range of cute, attractive, likable, beautiful. A look at the Qianlong dictionary suggests that the former represents a specifically feminine type of beauty, as hehesi umesi hocikon be hojo sembi, “when women are very beautiful (hocikon) it is called hojo.” It is tempting to assume the latter is a more masculine type of beauty, but that is almost certainly not the case. Hu Zengyi gives an example sargan jui i arbun yebken saikan bisire fon i adali, “like the time when a girl’s appearance is yebken and saikan.” QL gives us getuken dacun niyalma be yebken sembi, “a lucid and shrewd person is called yebken.”
Thank you for another great translation!
ReplyDeleteThe question of the authorship of the Berlin manuscript interests me a lot. My first impression was that we could have there Jakdan's own notebooks (or those of someone living in the same circles). Of course this impression may simply be based on the fact that Jakdan is now kind of a 'towering figure' in the field of Manchu poetry ('only the rich get richer'), but there are nevertheless some things that push me in this direction:
- the general closeness of the Berlin and Harvard poems as far as style is concerned but also their sharing whole verse(s?) like yaya ai ai okini. eiten je je wajiha. (p. 1385 in SB)
- the fact that there is a large amount of translations from Chinese texts in the SB, which would fit the activity of a Manchu professional translator
- the mention of DG 22 (1842) at the end of fasc. 5 of the SB manuscript
I initially thought Jakdan might have been the author of the Berlin poems too, because they adhere to the same ideas of rhyme and meter as his poems do, but I am no longer so convinced. There are some stylistic differences between the Harvard and Berlin poems that lead me to this conclusion.
DeleteFirst--at least half of the Berlin poems make use of cí-style meter and rhyme schemes, but the Harvard poems never use these schemes, relying only on couplets and quatrains.
Second--almost half of the Harvard poems use a distinctive type of variable-length couplet, an example which can be seen in In Praise of Fire, which grows from three syllables per line up to 16 in the course of a very short poem. There are some poems in the Berlin set that do not adhere to a strict number of syllables per line, but I have not yet found any clear examples of this type of variable couplet.
Of course none of that precludes Jakdan from being the sole author of all of the poems, but it is suggestive (to me, at least) of different authorship.
Very interesting, thanks!
Delete