Classical Chinese poetry is deeply loved by the Chinese people for its short and condensed, timeless meaning and beautiful rhythm. These poems are written in ancient chinese, usually word for word, intended to be outside the words, and rich in connotation.
Today's Chinese, since the May Fourth Movement, abandoned the vernacular language and switched to the vernacular language. There are many young people on the Internet who can't even read the "ancient vernacular" in "Water Margin" and "Journey to the West", let alone ancient poems without vernacular translations.
However, it is not a shameful thing that young people cannot read ancient poetry, after all, there are many experts who specialize in poetry research, and they may not be able to read and understand some ancient poetry.
These experts often have controversies over the interpretation of individual words in a poem, such as Bai Juyi's ancient famous "Twilight River Yin" mentioned below.
Appreciation of "Twilight River Yin"
"Twilight River Yin" - Don Bai Juyi
A remnant of the sun spreads in the water,
Half river and half river red.
Poor three nights in early September,
Dew-like pearl moon-like bow.
Although this poem is an ordinary landscape poem on the surface, in the eyes of experts, there are two major points of controversy.
The first sentence of the poem is well understood, and the author here first introduces the time of the event, which is the evening when the sunset goes down. By this time the sun had already set on the horizon, so the sunlight hit the river surface as if it were "paved" on the surface of the water.
The second sentence of the poem is mostly interpreted in mainstream books as a "color depiction" of the river. Thus we can see that in the language book, "Cersei" is interpreted as "turquoise".
The meaning of "half of the river is half red" is that half of the river that is not illuminated by the sun is turquoise, and the other half is red.
However, in modern Chinese dictionaries, whether it is the word "ser" or the word "seser", the dictionary interpretation has nothing to do with color. In the "Wang Li Ancient Chinese Dictionary", the word "ser" is used as "turquoise", and there is only one example, which happens to be the "Twilight River Yin" itself.
The 6th Edition of Cihai, published in August 2010, quotes from the New Book of Tang and the Biography of Khotan: "Emperor Dezong ascended the throne and sent Zhu Ruyuzhi anxi to the throne." Seek jade in Khotan, get... Cersei, and it treasures, etc.", to prove that "Cersei" means "green jewelry".
This explanation also seems very far-fetched, because the single word "Ser" has indeed been used to describe the smoothness and brightness of jade in literature such as the Book of Poetry, but jade is not only a kind of blue color.
It seems that scholars of ancient and modern times forcibly interpreted the "cersei" in "half a river and half a river red" as "turquoise", just to make it fight with the "red" character behind it.
In this way, from the perspective of literary description, it seems that this "Twilight River Yin" will appear more "neat". However, it is not consistent with the meaning that the author originally wanted to express.
"Ser" is an ancient Chinese plucked stringed instrument, "Seser" in ancient times, most of the time is used to describe some slightly shaky sounds, such as the sound of the wind. It can also be extended to "chill", such as "Thurso", because the cold will make people "shiver".
Because "Cersei" can pass "Sesso", the "Selected Poems of Chinese Dynasties" compiled by Lin Geng, Feng Yuanjun and others interprets "Cersei" as "cold" and "red" as "warm".
So the meaning of this sentence "half of the river is half red" has become: half of the river water is cold, and the other half of the river water is warm. This interpretation seems to be more in line with the author's original intention.
The speculation of Lin Geng and Feng Yuanjun can also be confirmed by the third sentence of the poem, "Poor Three Nights in the First Three Nights of September". Every year on the third day of the ninth month of the lunar calendar, it is the "cold dew" in the twenty-four solar terms.
At this time, it is the season when the cold air in the north is moving south on a large scale. In some areas of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the dew in the wild is frozen into "ice beads" due to cold air.
When Bai Juyi boarded the ship in the evening, the river surface he saw was originally cold, but the place where the sun shone was warm. Such an interpretation is also in line with our common sense of life.
"Ice beads" were mentioned earlier, and here is another point of controversy in the book, whether "true pearls" are "pearls". In many books, the "true pearl" at the end of the poem, "dew like a pearl and a bow like a bow", is directly interpreted as "pearl".
But everyone did not consider why Bai Juyi used the word "true" here. Bai Juyi was a realist poet, and although in his poems he also used metaphors and imagination, he was generally better at "realism".
The reason why Bai Juyi wrote "dew like a real pearl" is because he did see that the dew in the grass on the riverbank was condensed into ice beads due to the cold air from the south.
So "the moon is like a bow" is also an unexplained metaphor, because this is the beginning of the month, when the new moon is empty. The crescent moon is like a willow eyebrow, but also like a curved bow.
In order to help you correctly understand the original meaning of Bai Juyi's "Twilight River Yin", I will briefly introduce the background of the creation of this poem.
The poem was written in 822 AD, and before these seven years, Bai Juyi was still trusted by the emperor. However, because of The Incident of Wu Yuanheng, Bai Juyi was impeached by political enemies and demoted to Jiangzhou as Sima (司馬).
During these seven years, Bai Juyi was full of sorrow and remorse, always reminding himself that he would not be reused by the emperor again. But in the winter of 820 A.D., things suddenly took a turn for the worse.
Bai Juyi was transferred back to the capital to become a doctor of the dynasty, and he could wear the robes of officials with more than five pins. So Bai Juyi, as before, happily participated in major state affairs and offered advice to the emperor.
Once, Bai Juyi wrote a letter to discuss the military of Hebei, but the emperor did not adopt it. At this time, Bai Juyi suddenly felt the emperor's distrust of him.
At the same time, Bai Juyi was also tired of the party struggle in the court, so he took the initiative to write a letter requesting to be transferred to Hangzhou to be a assassin, so that he could show his fists and feet in the local area and do some practical things for the people.
What happened next, we all know. After Bai Juyi went to Hangzhou, he dredged through the West Lake, repaired the White Causeway, and wrote the famous "Spring Trip to Qiantang Lake":
Gushan Temple north of Jia Ting West, the water surface of the initial flat cloud foot low.
A few early warblers compete to warm the trees, and whose new swallows peck at the spring mud.
The flowers are becoming more and more attractive to the eye, and asakusa can have no horseshoes.
Favorite lake eastbound is insufficient, green poplar shade in the white sand embankment.
When Bai Juyi wrote "Twilight River Yin", he was no longer obsessed with making meritorious achievements in the court. Because he has found a new direction for his life, his mood is relaxed and happy, so it feels very wonderful to see the scenery along the way.
And "half of the river is half red", which is the true portrayal of Bai Juyi's mood at that time. In the season when "cold dew" came, the river was originally cold, just like the political situation in the Middle and Tang Dynasties. At this time, Bai Juyi's thoughts suddenly opened up.
It was like a ray of sunlight shining on the surface of the river, making half of the river warm. Because of this change in mood, he had the leisure to observe the dew along the coast and the bright moon in the sky, and write poems to praise them.
epilogue
The biggest controversy in the poem "Twilight River Yin" is mainly about the interpretation of the word "Cersei".
If you forcibly interpret "Cersei" as a turquoise jade according to the mainstream opinion, it will make the picture of the poem more beautiful. At the same time, it can also echo the picture created with "true pearls" in the last sentence.
Without a deep understanding of the original work, only these four poems are regarded as two dreamy landscape pictures, it is indeed easier for primary school students to understand. But such an interpretation is a certain distance from the author's true intentions.
I have seen others say that today's people read ancient Chinese and feel similar to reading foreign languages. Now it seems that today's people read ancient poems as much as they read foreign language poems. Experts who specialize in ancient poetry are still not sure of the exact meaning of some words and words in poetry, let alone ordinary people!