| 英譯： |
Once I sought the City of White Jade in heaven,
The five palaces and twelve lofty towers,
Where gods of felicity stroked me on the forehead,
And I bound my hair and received the everlasting life.
Woe to me, I turned to the pleasures of the world,
Pondering deep on peace and war,
And the reigns of the ninety-six illustrious kings,
Whose empty fame hangs on the drifting vapor!
I could not forget the tumultuous battles;
Fain would I try the empire-builder's art
Of staking heaven and earth in one throw,
And win me the car and cap of the mandarin.
But time ordained a dire disappointment,
I threw my hopes and went, wandering wide.
I learned swordsmanship and laughed at myself.
I wielded my pen—what did I achieve after all?
A sword could not fight a thousand foemen;
The pen did steal fame from the four seas,
Yet it is a child's play not worth talking about,
Five times I sighed; and went out of the western metrop-
olis.
At the time of my leaving
My hat-strings were wet with tears.
It was you,$(my friend,)$ excellent and wise,
The peerless flower of our race,
Who spread the mat and drew the curtains round
For a parting feast to comfort me journeying far.
You came to see me off, you and your company on horse-
back,
As far as the Inn of Cavaliers.
There amid songs and tinkling bells,
Ere our hearts were sated,
The garish sun fell beyond the Kun-ming Lake.
In October I arrived in the land of Yu Chow,
And saw the legions of star-beaming spears.
The northland by the sea, abandoned by our dear em-
peror,
And trusted to one like the monstrous whale,
That drinks up a hundred rivers at one draught,
Was crumbling fast to utter ruin.
Knowing this, I could not speak out,
And vainly wished I had lived in the fabled isle without
care.
I was like an archer who, cowed by the wolf,
Sets the arrow but dares not draw the bow-string.
At the Gold Pagoda I brushed my tears
And cried to heaven, lamenting King Chao.
There was none to prize the bones of a swift steed.
In vain the fleet Black Ears bounced lustily,
And futile it was, should another Yo-I appear.
I prodded on, a houseless exile—
All things went amiss;
I sped my horse and returned to your town.
I met you and listened to your song and twanging strings,
Sitting ceremoniously in your flower-painted room.
Your prefecture alone possessed the peace of antiquity
And the balmy ease that lulled the mystical king Hsi to
sleep.
You called for musicians, and the hall was gay:
Our banquet table laden with wine cups and jars,
And handsome files of men sitting with moth-eyebrowed
girls,
Our feast went on in the light of blazing cressets.
Drunken, we danced amid the confusion of silken stools,
And round the rafters hovered our clear song—
So our revelry lasted till even after the dawn.
But you returned to Hsing-yang, your official days over.
What a multitude that gathered for the farewell rites,
And those tents erected on the roadside near and far!
Once parted, we were divided by a thousand miles,
With our fortunes differing like summer and winter.
Summers and winters had come and gone—how many
times?—
And suddenly the empire was wrecked.
The imperial army met the barbarian foe,
The dust of the battlefield darkened sky and sea,
And the sun and moon were no longer bright
While the wind of death shook the grass and trees.
And the white bones were piled up in hills—
Ah, what had they done—the innocent people?
The pass of Han-ku guarded the imperial seat of splen-
dor,
And the fate of the empire hung on General Ku Shu.
He with his thirty thousand long-spear men
Surrendered, and opened the gate to the savage horde.
They tamed the courtiers like dogs and sheep,
And butchered the men who were loyal and true.
Both the sovereign and the heir fled from the palace,
And the twin imperial cities were laid to waste.
The imperial prince, given the supreme command,
Held his armies in the stronghold of Chu;
But there was no discipline of Huan and Wen.
His generals herded bears and tigers in the ranks,
And men wavered in doubts and fears
While the rebellion raged like tempest.
You were defending Fang-ling, I remembe,
With loyalty unsurpassed in all ages.
I lived then in the mountain of Incense Burner,
Eating the mist and washing my mouth in the crystal
fountain.
The house door opened on the winding Nine Rivers,
And beneath my pillow lay the five lakes, one linked to
another.
When the fleet came upstream in the midnight
And filled the city of Hsin-yang with flags and banners,
I, betrayed by my own empty name,
Was carried by force aboard the war-boat.
They gave me five hundred pieces of gold,
I brushed it away like a rack, and heeded not;
Spurned the gift and the proffered title—
For all that I was banished to the land of Yeh-lang.
Oh, the long road of a thousand miles to Yeh-lang!
The westward journey made me old.
Though the world was being put to order,
I was ignored like a stalk of frost-bitten grass.
The sun and the moon shine alike on all—
How could I complain of injustice to heaven?
You, good governor, adored like a god,
Took compassion on your old friend.
You invited me to be your guest of honor,
And we ascended three times the tower house of Yellow
Crane.
I blushed to think of Mi Hsien, the poet-recluse—
How he would sit, looking complacently at the Parrot
Isle.
No more heroes were born to the enchanted mountains of
Fan.
And the desolation of autumn covered the world.
0
But lo, the river swelling with the tides of Three Can-
yons,
And the thousands of junks that thronged these wa-
ters,
Jostling their white sails, gliding past to Yang-chow!
On looking out on these things, my grief melted away
in my heart.
We sat by the gauze-curtained window that opened to the
sky
And over the green trees that grew like hair by the
waterside,
Watching the sun with fear lest it be swallowed by the
mountains,
And merry at moonrise, drinking still more wine.
Those maids of Wu and pretty girls of Yueh,
How dainty their vermilioned faces!
They came up by the long flight of stairs; emerged,
From behind the bamboo screen, smiling;
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And danced, silken-robed, in the wind of spring.
The host was reluctant to pause
Though the guests knelt and asked for rest.
You showed me your poem of Ching-shan,
Rivaling the native beauty of the lotus,
That rises from the lucent water, unadorned.
Your joyous spirit swelling over in your heart,
You called for me ever at your residence,
Your mansion whose red gate was guarded by men,
Holding their spears in stately rows.
Amid quaintly cut stones and trimmed bamboos
A rivulet ran, brimming with limpid water.
We went up and sat in the waterside pavilion,
And poured forth our souls in heroic discourses.
A word between us is precious like white jade,
And a pledge of ours more than yellow gold.
I was not unworthy of you, I venture to say,
And swore by the Blue Bird on my fidelity.
The happy magpie among the five-colored clouds
Came, flying and crying, from heaven.
The mandate of my pardon arrived, I was told,
And I could return from banishment in Yeh-lang.
It was as if warmth enlivened the frozen vale,
Or fire and flame sprang from the dead ashes.
0
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Still the dogs of Chieh bark at Yao,
And the Tartar crew mock at the imperial command.
In the middle of the night I sigh four and five times,
Worrying ever over the great empire's affairs.
Still the war banners cover the sides of the two moun-
tains,
Between which flows the Yellow River.
Our generals like frightened fowls dare not advance,
But linger on, watering their idle horses.
Ah, where shall we find a Hu-I, the archer,
Who with the first arrow will shoot down the evil star?
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