Phoenix Pin
by Lu You, translated from Chinese by Wikisource

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_You editors, March 2008 edition.

191020Phoenix PinLu You

紅酥手,黃藤酒,滿城春色宮牆柳。

東風惡,歡情薄,一懷愁緒,幾年離索。錯、錯、錯!

春如舊,人空瘦,淚痕紅邑鮫綃透。

桃花落,閒池閣。山盟雖在,錦書難托。莫、莫、莫!

Lily hands, rippling wine,

The town is filled with Spring like willows waving by.

Biting east wind, happiness thin,

a chest full of sorrow, years of separation.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!

Spring is like before; the girl is pale and thin in vain.

Through the sheer silks, it’s the tearful eyes brimming.

Peach blossoms falling, glimmering pound freezing,

Paramount promise is still, glorious book hard to sustain.

Moan, moan, moan!

This poem is the tear of his real love story (see his marriage). In this poem, "Biting east wind" is a metaphor for traditional Chinese view about women. This view breaks his first marriage. "Glorious book" is another metaphor for his ambition of unifying China. But he doesn't seem to be successful in either of them (marriage and career). He also uses antithesis, which is very popular in Chinese poetry. It matches both sound and sense in two poetic lines, like "a chest of sorrow" pairing "years of separation" and "paramount promise" pairing "glorious book". The sounds are perfectly matching each other in Chinese. This poem falls in the first period of his works.

 This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.

Original:

This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.

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Translation:

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, which allows free use, distribution, and creation of derivatives, so long as the license is unchanged and clearly noted, and the original author is attributed.

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