Feliz Dia de Macau! To celebrate, I'm cooking porco balichão tamarindo, and I've taken a very hasty stab at translating a poem from 澳門記略, AKA the Breve Monografia de Macau, or the Short Monograph on Macau (a misleading name, since it's not particularly short.) Compiled in the 1750s by 印光任 Yin Guangren and 張汝霖 Zhang Rulin, two Chinese officials who'd held Macau-releated posts, the book is a pretty fascinating study in Chinese perceptions of the Portuguese. I haven't come close to finishing it, but there's something about the work and its authors that's held my imagination for a while.
As poetry was a requisite skill of Chinese officialdom, the text is interspersed with plenty of poems. Below is one I copied from the really nice Fundação Macau edition, which reproduces the Chinese text from what I believe is a 19th-century edition. (I've also got the 2009 Portuguese edition translated by Jin Guo Ping, which is the one I can read without taking forever, and which I referenced in making my translation.)
I'm not sure that the poem is written in five-syllable lines, since the original text is printed vertically and without any punctuation, so I apologize if the transcription (and thus my translation) is wrong. I aim to one day understand Chinese poetic structures well enough to be able to tell five- and seven- and x-syllable styles apart without much trouble, but as an off-the-cuff rendering, this will have to suffice for now.
Enjoy, caro leitor! 澳門萬歲!
微臣
史大偉
-----
三巴曉鍾詩
印光任
疎鍾來遠寺
籟靜一聲閒
帶月清沉海
和雲冷度山
五更昏曉際
萬象有無間
試向蕃僧問
會能識此關
Bells of São Paulo at Dawn
From a distant temple, the sparse ringing of bells:
a comforting sound in the stillness.
A glint of moonlight sinks into the sea
in harmony with chill clouds crossing the mountains.
In the fifth watch, between darkness and dawn,
all things are without distinction.
I try asking among the foreign priests
if they have insight into this crucial matter.
Notes:
大三巴 is the Chinese name for the (ruined) church of São Paulo in Macau. Jin Guo Ping doesn't translate it, choosing to render it as Sanba; maybe the poet isn't talking about São Paulo, but in this context it seems to me that he is.
I've used the characters as they appear in the original text, even if they were used in place of another character (e.g., 蕃 instead of 藩).
