Since I'm kinda burned out with reading 莊子 Zhuangzi, which makes up a sizable part of the classical Chinese textbook I've been working through for the past two years, I recently picked up a different textbook, 古汉语入门, published by the Beijing Language and Culture University Press and given to me by Dr. Jianjun Zeng. One of the neat things about this book is that it comes with a CD of readings of all the texts, which in the case of poetry makes learning characters easier. Of course, since this is 文言文 classical Chinese we're talking about, "easier" is a relative term: the ancient meaning of a character is not guaranteed to parallel its modern meaning, and there are all kinds of invisible grammatical issues to deal with, not to mention the centuries (or millennia) of textual analysis, self-reference, and other things that come with the territory. As was pointed out in an essay on the difficulty of Chinese,
A passage in classical Chinese can be
understood only if you already know what the passage says in
the first place. This is because classical Chinese really
consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes
written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a
small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already
knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway.
It's a little hyperbolic, but only a little.
The poem below, 關雎 , is the first poem of the 詩經 Classic of Poetry, AKA the Book of Songs or Book of Odes, and its meaning has been the subject of debate for centuries. Yours truly, who is no 名士, has nothing to contribute in that respect, but I have produced an English rendition that I hope you, dear reader, enjoy. The more I read the original the more stark it feels, and I've tried to recreate that here.
微臣
史大偉
---
關雎
關關雎鳩 在河之洲
窈窕淑女 君子好逑
參差荇菜 左右流之
窈窕淑女 寤寐求之
求之不得 寤寐思服
悠哉悠哉 輾轉反側
參差荇菜 左右采之
窈窕淑女 琴瑟友之
參差荇菜 左右芼之
窈窕淑女 鍾鼓樂之
***
"The Ospreys"
"Guan guan"- the cry of ospreys on the river sandbar
The graceful, virtuous woman is a fine match for a gentleman
Here and there she picks water plants of different sizes
He seeks the graceful, virtuous woman night and day
Seeking but not finding, night and day he yearns for her
Endless nights of tossing and turning
Here and there she plucks water plants of different sizes
The graceful, virtuous woman, befriended by zither and harp
Here and there she chooses water plants of different sizes
The graceful, virtuous woman, pleased by bells and drums
