Quiet Evening Thoughts and Traveler's Poem

My 3 year-old daughter has started taking Chinese classes on the weekends. To fend off the inevitable question, "Why do I have to learn it if you don't know it?", I'm making a concerted effort to learn Chinese. I can speak it at a somewhat limited conversational level, understand enough to watch Chinese movies without the subtitles, and can recognize the odd character here and there, but I am in no means fluent. After spending a little under two months memorizing about 38 nursery rhymes, I could read and write about 450 characters, but this is only about 1/5 of the way to being considered literate.

I tried using a textbook that teaches a seemingly random collection of  words and sentences in each chapter, but found that I simply can't remember the characters in this manner. Even short children stories were not conducive to my goal of learning the characters well enough to be able to read and write them. There is something about the short and rhythmic pattern of rhymes that allows me to better remember the characters and words.

Instead of memorizing more nursery rhymes, I decided to pick up "Poems of the Masters", translated by Red Pine. These 224 poems from the Tang and Sung Dynasty were taught from grade school onwards as a means to learning the characters and the rhythm of the language. My father had to memorize these when he was going through school. Although each poem is accompanied by a translation, I find that I'm not always completely satisfied with Red Pine's translations.

I never really understood poetry even in English so I'm only offering my attempts at translating the words in my attempt to learn Chinese. There will be no clever insights into any subtext, or at least not many. And I will not be attempting to make English rhymes. I mainly use apps on my iPod Touch for looking up words (Pleco, DianHua, KTdict C-E, and ChineseIdiom) and also purpleculture.net when I'm on my desktop. When I can't locate the word or phrase or make sense of the dictionary entries, I ask my father and friends. I also go to them to confirm my understanding of the words. I also use http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/vp/index.php to keep a running tally of how many characters I can recognize.

I'll be going through the book in order, except for these first two because they popped up in my daughter's class amongst such rhymes as "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and "Two Tigers".

With my lengthy introduction out of the way, here is the first classic poem that I learned through my daughter's Chinese classes.

靜夜思 (李白)
床前明月光
疑是地上霜
舉頭望明月
低頭思故鄉

Quiet Evening Thoughts (Li Bai)
At the front of my bed the moon light is bright
I suspect on the ground there is frost
I raise my head and look at the bright moon
I lower my head and think of home

思故鄉: This could also be interpreted as the person being homesick.

I'm not sure if this next poem is in Red Pine's book. I had trouble translating this because the previous rhyme from my daughter's school was "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands" so I was not in the right mindset. Also, I was being much too literal in translating and not looking for the meaning behind the words.

遊子吟 (孟郊)
慈母手中線
遊子身上衣
臨行密密縫
意恐遲遲歸
誰言寸草心
報得三春暉

Traveler's Poem (Meng Jiao)
The thread in the caring mother's hand
Becomes the clothes on the traveler's body
Upon his leaving she sews the thread closely
She fears that he will return late
Who says that a humble heart
Can payback a mother's love

寸草春暉: This is a Chinese idiom that translates to "one-inch grass spring sunshine". It means, "Children owe to parents what young grass owes to the spring sunshine" or "Parents give to their children far beyond what the children can or is expected to repay".

寸草心: A one-inch grass heart is a small or humble heart.

得: This is a particle linking a verb to the following phrase indicating effect (I'm not sure how to explain this better. I grew up speaking the language :-p ).