seeing off Yuaner on his mission to Anxi
in Weichang morning rain moistens the light dust:
the inn turns green so green with the fresh willows—
please dear friend drain one more cup of ale: once
west of Yang Pass, you will know no one
Jack Hayes
© 2016
based on Wang Wei: 送元二使安西
sòng Yuán'èr shĭ Ānxī
In the video below, guqin master Yuan Jung-Ping performs a setting of this poem dating to the Song Dynasty. It can’t be stressed often enough that Classical Chinese lyric poetry—like poetry in the Classical & Medieval European traditions—was composed for recital/singing with musical accompaniment. The qin (these days referred to as qugin) was the preferred instrument for this.
Image links to its source on Wiki Commons:
阳关烽火台遗址 (Ruins of a signal tower at Yang Pass) by Wiki user 張骐, who makes the image available under the following licenses:
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
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