Here is one of Camilo Pessanha's Oito Elegias Chinesas, or Eight Chinese Elegies. My work, like Pessanha's, is the fruit of the "imperfect notions of a
simple amateur scholar, acquired at random in my spare time" ("imperfeitas noções de simples estudioso amador, adquiridas ao acaso das horas vagas"), so I'm going to use his translation and mine as tools to make a few general remarks on Pessanha and Chinese poetry. As much as I know you've been dying for one, this isn't a particularly in-depth study.
In his preface to the series, Pessanha tells us he bought the book of poems from which the eight elegies come for the princely sum of two patacas. The collection had been assembled as a gift from a high-ranking minister in Beijing to his protégé about a century before Pessanha's translations appeared in the newspaper O Progresso. It's not entirely clear why the minister included these particular poems—all of which date to the Ming dynasty, and none of which are by well-known poets—or why Pessanha decided to translate them, or even buy the book in the first place. In his Revista de Cultura article "Camilo Pessanha e Oito Elegias Chinesas", 姚京明 Yao Jingming attributes Pessanha's choice to curiosity and the "spiritual pleasure" of spending his idle time translating from Chinese, and/or the fact that the collection dealt with the "same traces of his life: solitude, sadness, exile, escape from the real world, and nostalgia for his abandoned homeland." Both of these reasons make sense to me.
In addition to the book I've been referencing, China: Estudos e Traduções, I've found the text of this poem in a couple places online, and there are some discrepancies. In the fourth line, Yao Jingming's article reads 烏 (crow) instead of 鳥 (bird), and in the sixth line, 松 (pine) sometimes appears instead of 春 (spring). In both cases I've gone with the latter character, as Pessanha did in his version, and because in the case of 松/春 the former doesn't make as much sense. Yao Jingming thinks Pessanha made a mistake by mentioning a "bird" instead of a "crow," but the text printed with Pessanha's translation looks to have used 鳥 instead of 烏 (Christ, they're hard to tell apart), so Yao's criticism strikes me as unfounded.
In Pessanha's footnotes, the location of 龍潭 Longtan (literally "dragon pool") can't be nailed down definitively, but he seems to think it's a spot along the 烏江 Wu River in 貴州 Guizhou, where the poem's author was posted. I kept the title pretty literal, which might be the wrong way to go, but it works, I think.
Chinese poetry usually doesn't bother providing an explicit subject, and
this poem is no exception. I find it interesting that Pessanha treats
the speaker as the object most of the time, but then briefly addresses a
second person. It's a valid approach, and I like the image of the poet speaking to his wife, or a friend, that it entails, but in my version I've kept the subject to the individual poet, since I didn't see the need to interrupt his thinking by interpreting the fifth and sixth lines as being directed at someone else.
Another point of difference that demonstrates the flexibility of classical Chinese poetry is the initial line, specifically the first two characters. 何處 can be read as a question, which is what Pessanha does, but it can also mean "somewhere" (thanks to Archie Barnes' fantastic Chinese Through Poetry for reminding me of this). Pessanha and I differ on a number of other points as well, but honestly I don't feel like breaking down, character by character, those points of divergence. If you want to know more, dear reader, drop me a line.
The original Chinese, Pessanha's Portuguese, and my English versions of the poem follow. Enjoy, caro leitor, and I hope to have another elegia chinesa for you soon.
微臣
史大偉
王守仁 (王陽明)
龍潭夜坐
何處花香入夜清
石林茅屋隔溪聲
幽人月出每孤往
棲鳥山空時一鳴
草露不辭芒履濕
春風偏與葛衣輕
臨流欲寫猗蘭意
江北江南無限情
Uang-Shau-Jen (Uang-Iang-Ming)
"À Noite, no Pego-Dragão"
De onde vem este perfume de flores, embalsamando a noite puríssima?
Entre bouças e fragas, uma cabana de ola, perto da qual um arroio murmura...
Como de costume, o eremita parte ao surgir a lua.
Em um covão do monte, um pássaro, poisado, ininterruptamente gorgeia.
Não lhe importa que as ervas, impregnadas do orvalho: lhe encharquem as alparcatas de junça.
As suas vestes de ligeiro cânhamo, soergue-as, enviezando, a brisa primaveril...
À borda da torrente, intento fazer versos ao viço das orquídeas.
Embargam-mo as saudades, violentas empolgando-me, do Kiang-Pei e do Kiang-Nan.
Wang Shouren (Wang Yangming)
"Sitting by the Dragon Pool at Night"
From somewhere, the scent of flowers fills the clear night
in the thatched house among the stones, I can't hear the brook
at every moonrise, the hermit turns inward
birds nesting in the empty hills sing unceasingly
my straw sandals get wet in the still-dewy grass
and the spring wind ruffles my hemp clothing
overlooking the stream, I want to write, recalling the orchids—
endless thoughts of Jiangbei and Jiangnan
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