Mookoo's Home (木咕子的家): 雪的懷念： When I Read Liu Zongyuan's "River Snow"

2016年6月1日星期三

雪的懷念： When I Read Liu Zongyuan's "River Snow"

#2016-0601

千山鳥飛絕，

萬徑人蹤滅：

孤舟簑笠翁，

獨釣寒江雪。

= = = = =

江釣蹤人徑，

翁蓑絕雪寒；

千舟滅孤獨，

萬鳥飛笠山。

Compare the two poems above, if you read and write in Chinese.

The poem on the top, which starts with 千山鳥飛絕 (meaning "No bird is flying in the thousands of mountains"), was written by Liu Zongyuan (柳宗元), who lived (AD 773-819) during the Tang Dynasty. It was one of his most famous poems, written about 1200 years ago!

From the English Wikipedia you may see an English translation of it, "Jiangxue" (江雪), or "River Snow":

"A thousand mountains, no sign of birds in flight;
Ten thousand paths, no trace of human tracks.
In a lone boat, an old man, in rain hat and straw raincoat,
Fishing alone, in the cold river snow."

I like this poem. It is like an attractive Chinese painting. But the "old man" in the picture is alone -- Is he feeling lonely? I myself like to be alone sometimes, yet I hate loneliness. So, as you've seen at the top of the page, I'd like to change the lonely situation into a brand-new picture of "Who, What, When, Where, and How."

To create a completely new picture in my mind, I've used the same Chinese characters, 20 in total (in Liu's poem Jiangxue), by rearranging the order of the twenty words. Look! This can be a very different poem -- or picture, isn't it? It seems that I've had "a change of scenery" as follows:

Fishing along the river, tracing where a lot of people go;
In a special straw coat, the old man, away from the cold snow.
A thousand boats there, making loneliness disappear;
A ten thousand birds, flying in the hat-shaped mountains here.

As for the photos below, they were all taken in Japan in 2005, when my principal Mr. Lee and I were there in October preparing for a Students' Education Trip Abroad (SETA) and then in December when we and another fellow teacher (Wan Hsuan WU) were leading the SETA group of 35 students.

Ah, time flies! But there is a voice echoing in my heart: 距離是一種詩意的美！-- A distance (in time and place) can make a kind of poetic beauty. How true it is! Absence makes the heart grow fonder.