We've been getting a lot of rain here lately, and I mean a lot. Houston's northern and northwestern suburbs are flooding seemingly every other week, and the city itself is perpetually waterlogged. The combination of El Niño, a local culture with a boundless appetite for more suburbs and their attendant oceans of concrete, and a city government that bends over backward for property developers has made Houston more prone to flooding than ever. The shortsightedness of it all is appalling, but, alas, not surprising.
Anyway, the recent rain inspired me to translate the following poem by 杜甫 Du Fu, the famous Tang dynasty poet. I've been trying to improve my classical Chinese lately so I can read 澳門記略 (AKA "the monograph on Macau", an 18th-century account of the city written by two Qing mandarins). The "brocade city" mentioned in the poem's last line is a reference to the city of Chengdu. None of the translations I've read, such as this one by Brendan O'Kane or Mark Alexander's use 重 quite the way I've chosen to, but I think it works.
Enjoy the poem, stay dry, and demand better flood control and city planning from your elected representatives. May the flowers bloom riotously after the rain, wherever you may live.
微臣
史大衛
春夜喜雨
杜甫
好雨知時節 當春乃發生
隨風潛入夜 潤物細無聲
野徑雲俱黑 江船火獨明
曉看紅濕處 花重錦官城
"Enjoying the Rain on a Spring Night"
Du Fu
Good rain knows its time
It starts to fall when spring comes
Following the wind, it slips into the night
Making things damp with hardly a sound
Black clouds all along the back roads
A lone boat's lamp bright on the river
Dawn finds this place red and wet
And the brocade city heavy with flowers
