The last Plum Blossom poems (for now)

These are the last of the plum blossom poems that I have found so far. Over the last few weeks I have learned that the plum blossoms symbolizes hope for Spring in the dark months of Winter, as well as the harmonizing influence of sweetness that balances salt.

The first is a poem in seven-syllable couplets, with one extra non-rhyming line at the end. The second is to the tune of Black-Naped Oriole.

	nenden ilha be kidurengge [憶梅],		Longing for Plum Blossoms
	Staatsbibliothek 11.41 (View Online)
	nenden ilha atanggi,		When will there be plum blossoms?
	emu tolgin kidumbi,		I long for them in a dream.
	bolori fon manaha,		The Autumn season is worn out,
	tuweri yasai juleri,		Winter is before me.
5	ilarangge jing teisu,		Anything blooming just now,
	sitahangge ainu ni,		how could it hang on?
	dergi edun talihūn,		The east wind is uncertain,
	buyan yafan simeli,		humble is my garden, and wretched.
	fon toloci erin giyan,		If I count the seasons, the time is right,
10	biya bodoci esi bi,		if I calculate the months, it is certain.
	ho ging [和靖] sargan aibide,		Where is the wife of Hé Jìng?
	hoo žan [浩然] gucu absi,		Whither the friend of Hàorán?
	ilha geren secibe,		Though one may speak of many flowers,
	gecen fonde ya beki,		which ones are strong enough for the icy season?
15	jiki jiki jiki bai.		Come, come, come, please!

	nenden ilha		Plum Flower
	Staatsbibliothek 11.79 (View Online)
	tuweri alin de,		In the winter mountains,
	eiten moo,		all the trees,
	tuheke,		have lost their leaves.
	juhe gecen edede,		Frozen is the ice, (shivers)
5	šeyen boco,		White in color,
	nenden bonggo,		the plum is first,
	nimanggi de sur sere,		laughing on the snow.
	biyai dolo,		From within the moon,
	ebunjiheo,		has it descended?
10	endurin gege.		Goddess.

Translation Notes

tuweri yasai juleri. The text actually has tuwari, which looks like it could be some form of tuwa-, so I’m not sure if this is a play on words or just a misspelling.

buyan yafan simeli. The use of buyan instead of buya is interesting because it is not motivated by requirements of meter or rhyme. If the author had intended to say “the humble garden is wretched” it would have been fine to say buya hafan simeli. Instead, it seems the writer used the predicate form of the adjective, which you might expect to see in a sentence like hafan buyan “the garden is a humble one,” and lifted it up to the head of the line. I tried to recreate this effect in my translation.

ho ging sargan. Hé Jìng [和靖] was another name for the poet Lín Bū [林逋], who lived the life of a recluse, and was famously said to have taken “the plum tree as his wife and the crane as his son” [以梅为妻，以鹤为子]. Compare the allusion in Jakdan’s poem to gu šan alin where this poet was buried.

hoo žan gucu. Mèng Hàorán [孟浩然] wrote a poem about an early-blooming plum tree in his garden [早梅].