Bing Chuh Shing
Ballad of the Army Carts
by Du Fu (trans - David Lunde)
the voice of Wenwei Guan
Shing jen kung jien guh jai yow
conscripts marching, each with bow & arrows at his hip,
Dye nyung chitsu cho syung sohn
fathers and mothers, wives & children, running to see them off,
Chin-ai boojyen chiyen yung chyow
so much dust kicked up you can't see Xian-yang Bridge!
Chyen yi twin-cho lan tao ku
And the families pulling at their clothes,stamping feet in anger, blocking the way and weeping,
Ku shung jeh shuhn cahn yu-en shyow
the sound of their wailing rises straight up to assault heaven.
Pyen ting lyu shyeh chung hai shway
The frontier posts run with blood enough to fill an ocean,
Woo hwung kai pyen i way i
and the war-loving Emperor's dreams of conquest have still not ended.
Chün bo-wen Han jya shan dohng ar bai jo
Hasn't he heard that in Han, east of the mountains,
Chien tsun wan loh suhng chin chi
there are two hundred prefectures, thousands and thousands of villages, growing nothing but thorns?
Jung yo jyen fu bah cho-li
And even where there is a sturdy wife to handle hoe and plough,
Huh shung lohng mo wu dohng shi
the poor crops grow raggedly in haphazard fields.
Kwung fu ching bing nai ku-jahn
It's even worse for the men of Qin; they are such good fighters
Pe chu bu-yi chün üchi
they're driven from battle to battle like dogs or chickens.
Shin ju shung nahn wu
Truly, it is an evil thing to bear a son these days,
Fahn ju shung nway how
it is much better to have daughters;
Shung nü yo duh jya pi-lin
at least you can marry a daughter to the neighbor,
Shung nahn-mai mo shway pai tsow
but a son is born only to die, his body lost in the wild grass.
Chwin bu-tyen ching hai to
Has my lord seen the shores of the Kokonor?*
Gu lai pai gu u-jen sho
The white bones lie there in drifts, uncollected.
Shing gway fahn yuen jyo gway ku
New ghosts complain and old ghosts weep,
Tyen ying yu-shuh shung tyo tyo
under the lowering sky their voices cry out in the rain.
For your interest:
Read the complete poem translation: here
View the poem: with PINYIN pronunciation guide here
View the Chinese text: http://www.chinapage.org/dufu1.html#TAJ
*KOKO-NOR (or KuKu-Non.) (Tsing-hai of the Chinese, and Tso-ngombo of the Tanguts), a lake of Central Asia, situated at an altitude of 9975 ft., in the extreme N.E. of Tibet, 30 m. from the W. frontier of the Chinese province of Kan-suh, in 100 E. and 37 N. It lies amongst the eastern ranges of the Kuen-lunf having the Nan-shan Mountains to the north, and the southern Kokonor range (f 0,000 ft.) on the south. It measures 66 m. by 40 m., and contains half a dozen islands, on one of which is a Buddhist (i.e. Lamaist) monastery, to which pilgrims resort. The water is salt, though an abundance of fish live in it, and it often remains frozen for three months together in winter. The surface is at times subject to considerable variations of level. The lake is entered on the west by the river Buhain-gol. The nomads who dwell round its shores are Tanguts.
Biography of Du Fu
Du Fu (b. 712, Hsiang-yang, now in Honan province, China--d. 770, Hunan), Chinese poet, considered by many literary critics to be the greatest of all time.
Born into a scholarly family, Tu Fu received a traditional Confucian education but failed in the imperial examinations of 736. As a result, he spent much of his youth traveling, during which he won renown as a poet and met the other poets of the period, including the great Li Po. After a brief flirtation with Taoism while traveling with Li Po, Tu Fu returned to the capital and the conventional Confucianism of his youth. He never again met Li Po, despite his strong admiration for his older, freewheeling contemporary.
During the 740s Tu Fu was a well-regarded member of a group of high officials, even though he was without money and official position himself and failed a second time in an imperial examination. Between 751 and 755 he tried to attract imperial attention by submitting a succession of literary products in which political advice was offered, couched in a language of ornamental flattery, a device that eventually resulted in a nominal position at court. He married, probably in 752, and acquired some farmland; but by then he showed signs of a lung affliction. In 755 during the An Lu-shan Rebellion, he experienced extreme personal hardships. He escaped, however, and in 757 joined the exiled court, being given the position of censor. His memoranda to the emperor do not appear to have been particularly welcome, and he was relieved of his post. Undergoing another period of poverty and hunger, the poet lived to see several of his children die of starvation. Wandering about until the mid-760s, he served a local warlord, a position that enabled him to acquire some landed property and to become a gentleman farmer at Kuei-chou. In 768 he again started traveling aimlessly toward the south. He died in 770, probably at Tan-chou. Popular legend attributes his death to overindulgence in food and wine after a 10-day fast.
Tu Fu's early poetry celebrated the beauties of the natural world and bemoaned the passage of time. He soon began to write bitingly of war, as in "The Army Carts," a poem about conscription, and with hidden satire, as in "The Beautiful Woman," which speaks of the conspicuous luxury of the court. As he matured, and especially during the years of extreme personal and national turmoil of 755 to 759, his verse began to sound a note of profound compassion for humanity caught in the toils of senseless war.
Tu Fu's paramount position in the history of Chinese literature rests, finally, on his superb classicism. He was highly erudite, and his intimate acquaintance with the literary tradition of the past was equaled only by his complete ease in handling the rules of prosody. His dense, compressed language makes use of all the connotative overtones of a phrase and of all the intonational potentials of the individual word, qualities that no translation can ever reveal. He was an expert in all poetic genres current in his day, but his mastery was at its height in the lü shih, or "regulated verse," which he refined to a point of glowing intensity.
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