The Monastery behind Pò Shān Temple

This poem is kind of like my experience this morning. I got up early and worked on Manchu poetry, with early morning sun shining through the windows, and a clear blue sky outside. Then my kids came downstairs and started playing video games.

破山寺後禪院 （常健）

清晨入古寺，初日照高林。
曲徑通幽處，禪房花木深。
山光悅鳥性，潭影空人心。
萬籟此俱寂，唯聞鐘磬音。

Po šaṇ juktehen-i amargi samadi hūwa		The Monastery behind Pò Shān Temple
erde julgei juktehen de dosikade,		When I entered the ancient temple early in the morning,
mukdeke šun-i fosoko bujan-i sihin,		the canopy of the woods was lit up by the rising sun.
mudanggai doko daniyan-i ici hafungga,		A winding path went through toward the refuge,
samadi hūwa-i ilha moo fisin.		and thick were the flowers and trees of the monastery.
alin eldepi cecikei banin selacuka,		Birds rejoiced that the mountain was illuminated,
juce helmešehei niyalmai mujilen kenggehun,		as the pond reflected it, the human mind became empty.
eiten asuki nerginde [e]lenggei ekisakai,		For a moment, as all the fainter sounds became quiet,
donjihangge damu jungken kingken-i urkin.		all I heard was the clamor of bells and chime stones.

You might notice in my transliteration of the title, I used a dot under the n of šaṇ instead of šan. This is to reflect the fact that the n has a dot on it in Manchu, as you can see in the image below.

The general rule is that syllable-final n does not have a dot. One of the Jesuits (probably either Verbiest or Amyot, I don’t remember) tells us that the n without a dot indicates nasalization of the previous vowel. In this case, Jakdan adds the dot because the Chinese word shān 山 ends in a consonant n, not a nasalized vowel. This is something that is easily overlooked, but can sometimes help you tell the difference between a reference to the khan (han) and the Hàn (haṇ).

What is the genitive marker on ekisakai doing? Normally it would make an adverb, like “quietly,” but there’s no verb here for it to modify. From the context here, I think maybe this structure is comparable to the converb -hAi, which conveys that as one action proceeds, a second action proceeds along with it. This form appears in Jakdan’s translation of Lǐ Bái’s “Sitting Alone on Jìngtíng Mountain,” where he says geren cecike deken-i deyehei wajiha, “as the birds flew higher, they disappeared.”

In this case, since we have an adjective, I think Jakdan’s use of this form means that as the fainter sounds (of birds) became quiet, all the poet could hear was the ringing of bells and chime stones. He reinforces this idea by using the noisy word urkin to contrast with the fainter asuki of the previous line.

G45.50 Something from the Liáozhài

Like much of the rest of the world, I’m stuck inside because of COVID-19, so I decided to use some of that time to skim through Grebenshchikov 45 and see what interesting bits I could spot.

Today I spotted the following passage:

giogiyan bethei weihuken-i toksifi besergen de nikeme uculerengge,	This is what she sang as she leaned against the bed, softly tapping with her bound feet:
moo-i ninggude bisire u gio gasha mimbe  hoššome dobori dulin de fakcabumbi,	“The black drongo bird atop the tree tricks me into leaving in the middle of the night.
siolehe sabu usihibuhe seme gasara ba akū, damu agu de simen ararangge akū ayoo sembi,	I have no reason to cry about having gotten my embroidered shoes wet, but I regret there will be no one to cavort with you.”
seme mudan jilgan narhūn ohongge sirgei gese arkan ilgame faksalaci ojoro adali, cibseme donjici šurdeme forgošoro getuken tomorhon-i šan jakade dosifi ele mujilen ašša[m]bi sehebi.	As she sang, her singing voice became as thin as a thread, so that he could barely pick it out, but when he listened quietly it fell on his ears, encircling and surrounding, distinct and clear, and his heart was all the more moved.

This passage, it turns out, is from the Liáozhāi zhìyì, from a story called “The Girl in Green” (綠衣女). The Chinese runs as follows:

遂以蓮鉤輕點足牀， 歌云：	Then she tapped the bed with her feet, with her lotus crescents, and sang:
「樹上烏臼鳥，賺奴中夜散。	“The black drongo bird atop the tree / tricks me into leaving in the middle of the night.
不怨繡鞋溼，祗恐郎無伴。」	I don’t complain that my embroidered shoes are wet / but respectfully fear my lord will have no partner.”
聲細如蠅，裁可辨認。	Her voice was thin, like that of a fly, scarcely recognizable.
而靜聽之， 宛轉滑烈， 動耳搖心。	But he quietly listened to it, and it moved about sinuously, slippery and ardent, touching his ears and moving his heart.

When we see “Manchu” and “Liáozhài” in the same sentence, we immediately think of Jakdan, but I can’t find this particular story in my copy of Jakdan’s translation of the Liáozhài.

More Handwriting

This morning I looked through 20 manuscripts that are part of the Staatsbibliothek digital Mandschurica collection, with the hopes of finding another manuscript in the same hand as SB 34981.

In my last post, I noted that the syllable be in SB 34981 usually has a small right-pointing tooth, and I believe that is a fairly distinctive feature. In all of the manuscripts I looked at this morning, I found that the left-pointing tooth is by far the most common way to write the syllables be and ba, as can be seen in these examples:

I only found one other manuscript in which the writer generally used the right-pointing tooth. The manuscript is titled Bithe hūlara doro, “The Way of Reading,” and the writer often (though not always) produces a be that is similar to the ones in SB 34981.

The similarity here is very striking, but there are other ways in which the script in “The Way of Reading” differs from that in SB 34981, so I don’t think they are by the same hand. A distinctive and consistent difference is the appearance of the syllable he in the word bithe:

In “The Way of Reading” there is a little right-pointing tooth that starts the left tail in the syllable he, but that tooth is entirely missing in SB 34981.

There are many more digitized manuscripts available through the Staatsbibliothek site, and perhaps one of them will match the SB 34981 handwriting and give us a fragment more of information about the author of that text.

Manchu Handwriting

The Staatsbibliothek manuscript is written in at least three distinctive but related styles. By comparing these with the handwriting of known authors, perhaps we could eventually make a guess at who the author(s) of the Staatsbibliothek manuscript might have been.

But what features can we reliably compare between different writers?

One that leaps out when looking at a page of Manchu text is the shape of the left and right tails in words like be and de. These can be written in quite different ways, as can be seen in these examples drawn from Jakdan and Mucihiyan:

Jakdan’s left tail usually goes out in a long, relatively straight line with a small hook at the end. His right tail is usually shaped like a fishhook. Mucihiyan, in contrast, makes his left and right tails quite short, and his right tail is consistently thick while his left tail is consistently thin.

In both Jakdan and Mucihiyan’s handwriting, the be has a small left-pointing tooth before the tail. Contrast that with the handwriting in the Staatsbibliothek, where there is usually a small right-pointing tooth before the tail in be:

Based on these examples, as well as my general feeling from spending many hours reading these texts, it seems unlikely that the Staatsbibliothek manuscript was written by either Jakdan or Mucihiyan. It is unclear, though, whether the SB was written by one hand or by three. Is the thick right tail of SB-B a stylistic flourish, or the work of a different writer? Is the flatter right tail of SB-C just a way to conserve space on the page?

Topic versus Subject

Cén Shēn [岑參] wrote the following lines to Dù Fǔ [杜甫] when the two of them were serving together in different departments of the imperial government:

白髮悲花落，
青雲羨鳥飛。

The meaning of these lines seems relatively clear in the original Chinese:

The white-haired one grieves that flowers fall,
the dark clouds envy that birds fly.

Knowing that Cén Shēn addressed these lines to his respected elder Dù Fǔ, we can assume that the “white-haired one” must be Dù Fǔ, and the “dark clouds” would refer to the dark-haired younger man Cén Shēn. The couplet contrasts the older man’s sadness over what has passed away with the younger man’s envies and aspirations.

While the original lines seem relatively clear, what Jakdan did with them is not straightforward. Here are his lines:

funiyehe šarapi sihaha ilhai okto,
yacin tugingge deyenere gashai hihan,

The first line begins with a perfect converb phrase, funiyehe šarapi, “hair having turned white,” followed by a noun phrase, sihaha ilhai okto, “the medicine of falling flowers.” I have not found many clear cases of enjambment in Manchu poetry, so we should assume that this line contains a complete idea, and therefore that the medicine is a predicate. Somehow, we also need to square it with the meaning of the original.

A noun phrase can definitely be a predicate in Manchu poetry, and we often see this in poems with N-rhymes, because no Manchu verb form ends in -n. When we find the syntax NP₁ NP₂, we can usually insert a copula, reading it as “NP₁ is/are NP₂.” If that is what is going on here, and we take the medicine to be NP₂, then we need to look back and find NP₁, and the only previous explicit noun phrase in this line is “hair.” That would suggest a reading like:

The hair, having turned white, is the medicine of falling flowers

With a little imagination you could see how that line might mean something, but not necessarily the same kind of thing as the original Chinese line. The strangeness of this reading begs a closer examination of the line.

As we know, the hair in question belongs to Dù Fǔ, to whom the poem is addressed. If we take the topic of the line to be an unspoken “you,” then a different reading could be possible because the relationship between a topic and a noun predicate is looser than that between a subject and noun predicate. An example of this is the type of structure you might use when ordering a beer in Japanese:

私はビールです

In this line, the topic is “I” [私] and the comment is “[it] is a beer” [ビールです]. The meaning is not “I am a beer,” but rather “As for me, it will be a beer.” Applying this structure to the first line, we get a more sensible reading:

Your hair has turned white, and for you there is the medicine of fallen flowers

The word “medicine” doesn’t really capture the meaning of okto, which can also mean “poison,” so a slightly better reading could be:

Your hair has turned white, and for you there is the potency of fallen flowers

The topic+comment structure also works well for the second line, where the poet identifies himself as yacin tugingge, “the one with the dark clouds.” Treating that as the topic, we get:

For me, the dark-clouded one, there is the preciousness of flying birds

As a minor note, Jakdan’s birds are “flying away” (deye-ne-re), not just “flying”  (deye-re).

Translated Weirdness

Sometimes, when you’re translating a text, you come across something that just doesn’t make sense. If your text is prosaic then you can usually assume the author meant something sensible, and you can hunt around for a rational way to interpret what you’re seeing.

That approach doesn’t work as well when you’re translating poetry, because things happen in poetry that don’t happen in prose. When you find something that doesn’t make normal sense in a poem, you need to figure out whether the poet intended it that way, or whether you’ve simply misunderstood the text. The work becomes even more difficult when you’re translating a translation of a poem by a clever writer like Jakdan, who sometimes inserts his own twists into the product.

Take, for example, Jakdan’s translation of the following line from Spending the Night at the Yamen of the Left Gate in Spring [春宿左省] by Dù Fǔ:

花隱掖垣暮，    gurung-ni fu-i ilha buruhun-i yamjiha,

It’s easy to see which words in Jakdan’s translation equate to which words in the original, but less easy to see how he intends his translation to be understood.

The simplest way to parse the line is as follows:

gurung-ni fu-i ilha, noun-phrase, subject of the sentence, “the flowers on the outside walls of the palace”

buruhun-i, noun marked with the genitive/instrumental case,  adverbial phrase, “dimly, in a shadowy way”

yamjiha, perfect tense, finite verb, “it [the sun] set”

Unfortunately, this simplest way of parsing the sentence gives us a weird line that is difficult to square with the original:

“The flowers on the outside walls of the palace dimly set.”

There’s a certain beauty to the nonsensical idea of flowers setting, but Dù Fǔ can’t possibly have meant “the flowers on the outside walls” in the original because the character 隱 (buruhun, dim) is interposed between the flowers 花 (ilha) and the outside wall 掖垣 (gurung-ni fu).

Another way to parse Jakdan’s line is to take ilha buruhun as a coordinate noun-phrase, “flowers and shadows.” This works better with the original because Dù Fǔ put the two corresponding characters together. If we set aside the palace walls for a moment, and let the genitive/instrumental -i at the end of ilha buruhun-i create an adverbial phrase, then the remainder of the line can be read as:

“Dusk fell in a flowery, shadowy way.”

Again, that’s pretty, but then what do we do about the palace walls, which also carry the genitive/instrumental case marker? It seems awkward and clumsy to suggest that the sun sets in a manner like the palace walls, or by means of the palace walls.

It would be better if we could read the case-marker -i on gurung-ni fu-i as marking an object behind which the sun sets. Semantically that isn’t as big of a stretch as it may seem, because we’re essentially saying that the sun makes evening by means of the thing it sets behind. That gives us:

“It [the sun] set behind the outside walls of the palace, bringing dusk in a flowery, shadowy way”

Or, to put it more concisely:

“Dusk fell flowery and shadowy within the palace walls” 

Bookworm

To the tune Drunk on the East Wind.

	nisiha umiyaha [蠧魚],		Bookworm
	Staatsbibliothek 11.57 (View Online)
	teku ai,		Where is its dwelling?
	bithei boode,		In the studio.
	jeku ai,		What is its food?
	hergen bete,		The written word is helpless before it.
5	umiyahai gebu,		It has an insect’s name,
	nisihai yangse,		but the appearance of a small fish.
	somitai,		Hiding away,
	hoošan tobo,		in a paper hut,
	me wang [脉望] ohakū seme,		it didn’t turn out to be a maiwang, so
10	naranggi,		in the end,
	bolgo gingge.		it’s clean and pure.

Notes:

teku ai, literally, “what is its dwelling?”

hergen bete, I don’t understand what bete is doing here. According to the Qianlong dictionary, a weak or inferior person is called bete. My best guess is that this is saying the written word is weak and inferior before the bookworm.

me wang, [脉望] mài wàng. This is a legendary type of bookworm that only eats the characters for “Immortal Being” [神仙], ignoring all others. By eating these characters, it can become an immortal being, and by eating such a bookworm a scholar can take the highest placement in the examinations.

bolgo gingge, maybe it is the page that is clean and pure, after the bookworm has eaten all the characters?