I don’t know what role this poem will play in the story, but since I didn’t understand the translation here at all, I looked up a few professional translations of Moonlit Night by Du Fu: 1 & 2,3.
EDIT: Also, apparently there’s a Lady of Yue in Chinese history and mythology.
Thanks for those links! It actually makes me appreciate what lsusr is doing here more – those translations give me a better sense of the meaning and intention behind the poem, but lsusr’s highly literal word-to-word translation gives me a better sense of how Chinese poetry is structured and how it feels to read it natively. That’s actually really really cool, wow.
Also, not relevant, but one of those translations is by Vikram Seth, who was my mom’s friend when they were both expats in China in the early 1980s. I always feel sort of warm when I see his work in the wild, even though I’ve never met him.
I don’t know what role this poem will play in the story, but since I didn’t understand the translation here at all, I looked up a few professional translations of Moonlit Night by Du Fu: 1 & 2, 3.
EDIT: Also, apparently there’s a Lady of Yue in Chinese history and mythology.
Thanks for those links! It actually makes me appreciate what lsusr is doing here more – those translations give me a better sense of the meaning and intention behind the poem, but lsusr’s highly literal word-to-word translation gives me a better sense of how Chinese poetry is structured and how it feels to read it natively. That’s actually really really cool, wow.
Also, not relevant, but one of those translations is by Vikram Seth, who was my mom’s friend when they were both expats in China in the early 1980s. I always feel sort of warm when I see his work in the wild, even though I’ve never met him.