after B A I J U Y I (772-846)
Violet
Just why she should have mattered I can’t say.
Only a daughter, after all, and far too young
to revel in the sort of verbal play
my friends enjoy. Yet even while among
those wits I’d find myself recalling her
small arms around my neck, and how, at three,
she lisped a kind of music I prefer
to their sophisticated repartee.
And when she died I struggled to recall
my old self, to forget – and I’d rehearse
the duties facing me, to keep the black
ox from my foot. Three times, in calm, the fall
leaves turned. But then this morning her old nurse
appeared – and all my grief came flooding back.
Jan Schreiber
This is not really a translation, but an adaptation based on poems by this Tang-dynasty poet,
originally rendered into English by Arthur Waley.
Violet
Just why she should have mattered I can’t say.
Only a daughter, after all, and far too young
to revel in the sort of verbal play
my friends enjoy. Yet even while among
those wits I’d find myself recalling her
small arms around my neck, and how, at three,
she lisped a kind of music I prefer
to their sophisticated repartee.
And when she died I struggled to recall
my old self, to forget – and I’d rehearse
the duties facing me, to keep the black
ox from my foot. Three times, in calm, the fall
leaves turned. But then this morning her old nurse
appeared – and all my grief came flooding back.
Jan Schreiber
This is not really a translation, but an adaptation based on poems by this Tang-dynasty poet,
originally rendered into English by Arthur Waley.
