Fallen Leaves, to the tune of The Black-Naped Oriole

Thirteen of the poems in Staatsbibliothek 34981 are set to a tune called The Black-Naped Oriole (黃鶯兒). There is a Chinese cí tune by the same name, but it is different in structure from the Manchu version, which is much shorter and allows for fewer words per line.

Chinese Black-Naped Oriole		Manchu Black-Naped Oriole
(First Stanza)		(All Stanzas)
平平平仄平平仄 (Rhyme)		5 syllables (Rhyme)
仄仄平平		3 syllables
平仄平平		3 syllables (Rhyme)
平平平平		7 syllables (Rhyme)
仄平平仄 (Rhyme)		5 syllables (Rhyme)
平仄仄仄平平		5 syllables (Rhyme)
仄仄平平仄 (Rhyme)		7 syllables (Rhyme)
仄平平仄平平		3 syllables (Rhyme)
仄仄平平平仄平仄 (Rhyme)		4 syllables
		caesura
(Second Stanza)		5 syllables (Rhyme)
平仄 (Rhyme)
仄仄仄平平
仄仄平平仄 (Rhyme)
仄平平仄
仄仄平平
平平仄平平仄 (Rhyme)
平仄仄仄平平
仄仄平平仄 (Rhyme)
仄仄仄仄平平
平仄平平仄 (Rhyme)

The caesura in the Manchu version stands before the last line of the poem, and is marked in the Staatsbibliothek manuscript by either a small dot (instead of a circle) or a long line, as in the example to the right. The last line of this type of poem usually carries a kind of surprise or punch-line that clarifies an image at the end. The Manchu Black-Naped Oriole challenges the poet with extremely short lines, and when combined with an N-rhyme it must have been very difficult to achieve. Below I have shared another take on autumn leaves, composed according to this strict form. The reference to the Sunggari river places this poem in the far Northeast, but it is difficult to imagine it being crossed by a fallen tree anywhere except in its upper reaches in the Long White Mountains. Perhaps the poet intends to invoke the memory of this legendary Manchu homeland, or perhaps it is intended to be reminiscent of one of the Odes of Wei, which asks: “Who says the river is broad? A reed crosses it.” (誰謂河廣，一葦杭之, we bira be onco sembi? ulgū-i dombi).

sigaha abdaha	Fallen Leaves
aimaka dondon,	Seeming like butterflies,
jing tui tui,	always overlapping,
hūi son son,	and freely scattered,
pita piti-i yangšan,	with a drip-dripping sound.
moo ci gorokon,	Farther from the trees
non de hancikan,	and nearer to you, little sister,
hamirakū ya toron,	I am unable to reach. Alas, the way
mukei on,	is a stretch of water
emgi kamni –	with a narrow passage –
sunggari tuhan.	a tree fallen over the Sunggari.

Translation Difficulties:

Many of my difficulties arose from how I understood the first line. I visualized leaves in the air looking like butterflies in flight, but the title of the poem in fact refers to leaves that have already fallen (sigaha), and once I realized that it was easier to make sense of the rest.

tui tui, Norman: “from mouth to mouth; from hand to hand.” I initially thought that tui tui must mean something like “fluttering,” but after standing in the rain looking at fallen leaves I decided it must refer to the way that fallen leaves overlap each other on the ground.

pita piti, Norman has pata piti, “the sound of fruit falling from a tree.” Initially I thought this must somehow refer to the sound of leaves falling, but later decided it must refer to the sound of drops falling on wet leaves, either dripping from the branches of the trees or of rain.

non, “little sister”. Though there is no explicit reason to read this as a direct address to the intended recipient of the poem, I decided to treat it as an analog of agu, which can be used in that way.

Poems about feelings

My first impression of the Verses on Red Leaves is that it is too sentimental for my taste. But if I look past my own personal preferences and ask why this poem exists and what it is trying to say, I find that it has an interesting kind of depth. It is not really about autumn leaves, but about the feeling of seeing autumn leaves.

Like the Lament on the State of the Times, this poem is written in a way that is completely divorced from any particular era, place and person. We don't know where it is that red leaves are falling, or what kind of trees they are falling from, and we don't know who sees them. All we know, by the end of the poem, is how the narrator felt. Each couplet expresses some aspect of that feeling in a semi-independent way.

The first two couplets introduce the theme. Like many introductory couplets, both lines of the first couplet rhyme, and the rhyme of the poem reflects the theme (fulgiyan, “red”, is an an-rhyme). The mongniohon of the second line means “gasping for breath” (according to Norman) and describes the narrator’s physiological response to the scene.

Part of the experience of surprise is confusion, which begins with the narrator not being able to identify the source of the brilliant color. In lines 5-12, the narrator walks in slow-motion through a pantomime of confusion, mis-identifying the brilliance as lighting, rainbows, a forest fire, or morning clouds illuminated by the sun.

At line 13 the confusion is resolved, the narrator looks closely, and understands that the source of these brilliant colors is a pink autumn wood. From the tension of surprise we move to a more relaxed enjoyment of the experience. The colors are compared to peaches and apricots, and even the biting frost is compared to the flush of wine.

In the final couplet, the narrator departs the scene in a carriage, which he hopes will bring him to a halt in the springtime.

One of the interesting features of the poem is that the couplets can really stand on their own as self-contained expressions of feeling. This could make the poem ripe for allusion, because you could pull out a single couplet and re-use it somewhere else. It will be interesting to see how often one Manchu poem alludes to another in this way.

Poetic departures

Manchu grammar is usually fairly structured and predictable. In poetry, many departures from the usual rules appear to be permissible.

In my last post I translated an anonymous Lament on the State of the Times, and here I want to look at two of the cases of poetic usage I had to deal with.

Missing genitive marker

It is not normally permissible to drop the genitive marker in Manchu, except under specific circumstances. In Old Manchu, for example, it was permissible to drop the genitive marker -i after words ending in -i, but not in other cases.

In the Lament, there are at least three clear cases where the genitive appears to have been dropped after a word ending in -n, and some other cases that could be read that way. This was probably metrically motivated, since the genitive marker would have added an extra syllable after a word ending in -n.

The clearest cases are the following phrases:

taifin fon, "season of peace", for taifin-i fon
irgen ergen, "the spirit of the people", for irgen-i ergen

irgen banin, "the state of the people", for irgen-i banin

Wistful ya

The word ya can be found in ordinary literary Manchu, where it has the meaning of “which? what?”. However, this reading is often awkward in poetry, where the word ya occurs much more frequently.

The Lament uses it twice, and based on this usage I am inclined to understand it as a wistful or despondent exclamation.

1) dasarangge weke ya

Norman defines weke as “hey you! (word used for calling people whose name is unknown or forgotten)”. Presumably this is somehow related to the word we, “who?”. I suppose we could read dasarangge weke as “Hey you, repairer!” But then what do we do with the ya?

The line occurs in a context describing how the country is in disorder, and the feeling of the poem suggests that the speaker longs for a repairer who is not there. A despondent exclamation would fit the feeling of this line.

2) mergen jiyanggiyūn ya waci

The heart of this phrase is mergen jiyanggiyūn waci, “if the heroes and generals kill’, but normally that expression cannot stand on its own in Manchu because the conditional -ci is a converb, not a finite form.

I think the poet is using ellipsis here, and leaving the remainder of the phrase unspoken. “If the heroes and generals would kill [them, then we wouldn't have so much trouble].” We do the same thing in English when we say “If only the heroes and generals would kill them!” I think the ya in this phrase serves a similar adverbial function to the “only” in the English phrase, expressing a wish that the proposition of the sentence were true.

Jakdan's Wordplay

I've been thinking about how Jakdan translated 自去自來 in Du Fu's poem. He could have translated it literally, cihai genere cihai jiderengge, but instead he wrote cihai deyenere cihai donjirengge.

What has he done here, and why?

Most obviously, Jakdan has told us that the swallows are flying (deyene-). Du Fu, in his elegant concision, did not say that they were flying. But then he didn't need to, because everyone knows that swallows fly. Indeed, the constraints of regulated verse may have made it difficult or impossible Du Fu to say "freely flying to and fro" (*自飛去來).

Jakdan, however, was not working under the same constraints as Du Fu. He imposed on himself the restriction that each line of his translation should have seven Manchu words, but was able to make use of the fact that Manchu can combine the meaning of "flying" (deye-) and "going" (-ne-) into a single word to embellish the translation without breaking the poetic form.

Perhaps more interesting, though less obvious, is what at first appears to be a transcription error in the word donjirengge. Just as Manchu can inject the meaning of "going" using the derivational suffix -ne-, it can likewise inject the meaning of "coming" using -nji-. If Jakdan meant to parallel Du Fu's 自去自來, we would expect cihai deyenere cihai deyenjirengge. However, instead of "come flying" (deyenji-), Jakdan gave us "listen, hear" (donji-).

The simplest explanation here is that Jakdan (or a copyist) made a mistake, and this is really meant to be deyenjirengge. However, I am entertaining the idea that Jakdan intended to embellish his translation again by telling us that people can hear the swallows, and he was poetically licensed to do this by the similarity between the words deyenji- and donji-.