Status Updates From Sunflower Splendor: Three T...

Enjoying this so far. For perhaps obvious reasons much of the subtlety of the poetry is lost in translation, but otherwise the translations are good. I've reached Wang Chi-yu in Part III (Tang Dynasty) but feel I must return the book to the library for a time. As is typical of a scholarly volume, the front matter is numbered separately, consisting of 64 pages in addition to the 630 numbered pages.

Tune: “Prelude to Water Music”
The bright moon, when will she appear?
Wine cup in hand, I ask the blue sky.
I don’t know inside the gates of heaven
What time of year it would be tonight.
I was just about to ride there on the wind,
But feared the heaven’s crystalline palaces and towers
So high, would be for me too cold.
Instead, I dance and cavort here with my shadow
And know what it is to be among men…

To the Waters of the Chia-Ling - Yuan Chen
Long ago you were perhaps
a river flowing down a mountain!
Since then you've been flowing,
deepening your bed;
If I could make a river current
understand human feeling,
Then you might know my mind
on coming from so far.