Recently I’ve come up with a translation of my favorite Chinese poem. Written by Ming dynasty scholar Yang Shen, during the period in which he was banished to the border province of Yunnan, the poem often prefaces editions of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Before I say any more, let’s have a fresh read:

The rolling Yangtze river, eastward do its waters flow, The flowers ‘top its waves ebb as do heroes go. Right or wrong, gain or loss, all give way to emptiness. The green mountain still remains, through the many red sunsets. The white haired fisherman, woodcutter by riverbend, Oft regard the autumn moon and spring wind. ‘round a kettle of wine do old friends rejoice, From then to now what comes to pass, all just talk and laughs.

When I first read this poem it was quite cryptic, and I never actually did figure out what the first two lines meant on my own, though I did get a sense of what it was trying to say in some of the following lines. It also didn’t help that this was written in somewhat ‘literary’ Chinese and so parsing even the literal meaning of the words was a little of a challenge, which fortunately (or unfortunately) in translation becomes a non-issue.

The first two lines paint a picture of a flowing river - the Yangtze, or Changjiang river, to be precise. Changjiang, which quite literally means the “Great” or “Long” river, is one of the two central rivers which runs through the heart of China (the Yellow River being the other). The mention of the river’s eastward flow is in fact a common trope among many other poems and essays by great Chinese writers, including Su Shi, who in his Ode to the Red Cliff begins, “The great river flows east…”. Flowers fall onto the waves of the river and get washed away. Like heroes, it says. Indeed, the poem likens the flow of the river to the flow of history itself, and the flowers to the people who, caught in the times, commit great deeds before being washed away in the river of time. Both the use of the river as an allusion to past great works, and as a metaphor for the flow of history serve to introduce the poem’s central theme – the ruthless, emotionless, ever marching force of history.

The second line serves to color this point in by juxtaposing man and nature. In the first, the deeds of man, the right and the wrong, the successes and the failures, all of which eventually fade to nothingness. As for nature itself, it just keeps on going. The mountains remain, and the sun rises and sets without implicitly fail every day.