Meng Haoran’s poem takes place after a sleepless night, and may have once been the most famous poem in China. It was one of the first poems that generations of educated Chinese children would memorise owing to its place on the first page of the anthology Qianjia Shi 千家詩 (A Thousand Family Poems). Evidenced by many of his other poems, Meng Haoran liked to drink. Rather than reading this as a children’s poem, I like to imagine him with a hangover.
春曉
春眠不覺曉，
處處聞啼鳥。
夜來風雨聲，
花落知多少。
Spring Dawn
Springtime, half-asleep, unaware of daybreak,
All around I hear birdsong.
Night brought noise, wind and rain,
Blossoms fell, who knows how many?
Translation notes
Although the characters are quite easy to understand in this poem, a translation isn’t quite so straightforward. It’s a challenge to translate each character in an order that is faithful to the original. Imagining the poet half-awake and articulating one thought after another helped me retain as much of the original structure as possible. I have attempted to create this effect by adding in punctuation to ensure that, similar to Chinese characters, each thought is self-contained. The only major deviation from the original word order is sheng 聲 (‘noise’), which has moved from its original position at the end of the third line.
A tool many translators use to get around this word order problem is to introduce a subject to most lines such as ‘I’ (for example, the first line would read as something like ‘In springtime I am half-asleep, unaware of daybreak’). I have tried to avoid this work-around, because it provides the reader with extra assumptions, or noise, not present in the original.