Du Fu goes on a boat trip with some noblemen and courtesans, and the weather turns.
陪諸貴公子丈八溝攜妓納涼晚際遇雨二首
落日放船好，輕風生浪遲。
竹深留客處，荷淨納涼時。
公子調冰水，佳人雪藕絲。
片雲頭上黑，應是雨催詩。
雨來沾席上，風急打船頭。
越女紅裙濕，燕姬翠黛愁。
纜侵堤柳系，幔宛浪花浮。
歸路翻蕭颯，陂塘五月秋。
Accompanying some young gentlemen to Zhangba Pond bringing courtesans to take in the cool evening, when suddenly we encountered rain: two verses
In setting sun, unmooring the boats is pleasant,
A gentle breeze creates slow waves.
Amid deep bamboo a place to rest with guests,
Pure lotuses, a moment to enjoy the cool.
Young gentlemen prepare iced water,
Beautiful women slice snow-white lotus roots.
A wisp of cloud overhead darkens,
It seems the rain hastens our poetry.
Rain comes soaking the mats,
Gusts of wind strike the boat’s bow.
The girl from Yue’s red skirt is drenched,
The lady from Yan’s iridescent eyebrows are sorrowful.
Ropes stretch to willows on the embankment fastened down,
The boat’s canopy drifts like the froth of breaking waves.
The journey home turns to the mournful sound of wind,
Water’s edge in May becomes autumn.
Translation notes
There are some mind-boggling translation challenges in this poem. However, one character in this poem has been notorious for decades. Cui 翠 is the Chinese word for kingfisher. However, in our poem it refers to the colour of eyebrows. Indeed, some published translations of this poem (which I am indebted to for finding a short and creative poem title to use in blog posts) simply translate this phrase as ‘kingfisher eyebrows’. Orientalism alert! I won’t link to it, but I think this type of (mis-)translation has directly led to one art gallery online stating:
It is likely no surprise that the kingfisher is a symbol of beauty, and in China apparently it is a compliment for women to have “kingfisher eyebrows”.
A translation in a book of Du Fu’s poetry has ‘azure kohl’ (I then had to look up ‘kohl’ - it’s a type of chemical used in old Chinese make-up). Another word that appears in my dictionary is ‘alcedine’ (which I also had to look up, apparently it is derived from the Latin word for kingfisher).
As Professor Stephen Owen at Harvard wrote in a riposte to Professor Paul W. Kroll at Colorado Boulder on this subject:
It is time for someone to present the counter-argument - why “azure” can be a better translation for cui 翠 than “halcyon”…
Implicit in Kroll’s comments is a belief… that words refer directly to some clearly defineable entity or event, and that translation consists of finding the corresponding word in another language. Erudition means having a full store of such correspondences, and the failure to use the “correct” corresponding word will seem shockingly imprecise. This view of language is adequate for acts of naming: “What kind of bird is that?” - “It’s a cui.” - “We call it a halcyon kingfisher.”
Cui is a halycon kingfisher; it is also one of the more common “poetic” words to describe the color of vegetation. Its use as a color is in fact so common that the seme ”bird” recedes into the background [‘seme’ is short for semanteme: a linguistic term meaning ‘a minimal distinctive unit of meaning’]. If we speak of the “emerald sea” in an English poem, the dominant seme is a quality of color and not a stone.”
Here, I agree with Professor Owen on the nature of translation. Du Fu is not referring to kingfishers here, because there isn’t anything obviously kingfisher-like that can be applied to eyebrows. Du Fu is rather referring to a quality associated with kingfishers. However, I don’t agree that ‘azure’ is an appropriate translation. Rather, a guy called Matt runs a blog called no-sword where he references a piece that Professor Peter A. Boodberg wrote in the 1950s on chromatonyms, or words that describe colours:
The rich spectrum of Chinese chromatonymy, multilined and multibanded, has not received the attention it deserves. Most chromatonyms are not too well defined in our dictionaries, and translation equivalents are chosen haphazardly according to context, with little consideration paid to semantic nuances. Among the many Chinese color-terms crying for simple and effective rendering is the adjective cui, ‘vivid green-blue-purple-black’, originally descriptive of the glossy iridescent plumage of the kingfisher… ‘Kingfisher-green’ (-blue, -black, -brown) is an awkward polysyllabic way to translate cui which may describe women’s penciled eyebrows as well as foliage…
Is there any reason why we should not use the term alcedine (from Latin alcedo, ‘kingfisher’) to designate exactly what cui connotated to the Chinese? Alcedine is a handsomely tailored word, sonorous and precise, yet broad enough to be safely applicable as a color-epithet to a variety of things.
So, here lies the origin story of the word ‘alcedine’. But within this description, we have a word that I think works as the an even better translation: ‘iridescent’. It doesn’t matter what the colour is, what matters is that it is a beautiful kingfisher-like quality of a colour, or combination of colours, that we can’t easily reach for in English.
This isn’t the only dazzling description of beauty in the poem. In the first verse, the English ‘slice’ in my translation doesn’t exist in the original description of lotus roots, where the ladies are performing an action that seems to turn the snow-white lotus roots into strands of silk. It’s beyond my ability to accurately condense this idea into three or four words.
Finally, in case you were wondering about the motives of Du Fu and his pals, my dictionary was very keen to tell me that 妓 ji (translated to ‘courtesans’ in the title) gives other translations such as ‘artiste, performer, geisha…’ before stating ‘NOT a prostitute’ (no emphasis added by me).