The grammar and sense of a poetic line
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Randy Alexander is not a professional Sinologist, but when it comes to reading Chinese poetry, he's as serious as one can be. The following poem is by Du Fu (712-770), said by some to be "China's greatest poet". In the presentation below, I will first give the text with its transcription, and then Randy's translation. After that we will delve deeply into the grammatical exegesis of one line of the poem, the last.
Dù Fǔ “Zèng Wèi Bā chǔshì"
—–
Rénshēng bù xiāng jiàn, dòng rú cān yù shāng.
Jīnxī fù hé xī, gòng cǐ dēngzhú guāng.
Shàozhuàng néng jǐshí, bìnfà gè yǐ cāng.
Fǎng jiù bàn wéi guǐ, jīng hū rè zhòng cháng.
Yān zhī èrshí zài, zhòng shàng jūnzǐ táng.
Xī bié jūn wèi hūn, érnǚ hū chéngxíng.
Yírán jìng fùzhí, wèn wǒ lái héfāng.
Wèndá wèi jí yǐ, érnǚ luó jiǔjiāng.
Yè yǔ jiǎn chūn jiǔ, xīn chuī jiān huáng liáng.
Zhǔ chēng huìmiàn nán, yī jǔ lèi shí shāng.
Shí shāng yì bù zuì, gǎn zǐ gùyì zhǎng.
Míngrì gé shānyuè, shìshì liǎng mángmán
杜甫《赠卫八处士》
—–
人生不相见，动如参与商。
今夕复何夕，共此灯烛光。
少壮能几时，鬓发各已苍。
访旧半为鬼，惊呼热中肠。
焉知二十载，重上君子堂。
昔别君未婚，儿女忽成行。
怡然敬父执，问我来何方。
问答未及已，儿女罗酒浆。
夜雨剪春韭，新炊间黄粱。
主称会面难，一举累十觞。
十觞亦不醉，感子故意长。
明日隔山岳，世事两茫茫。
Presented to Wei Ba, an Unofficed Scholar
——-
In life we don't meet each other.
We move like The Belt of Orion and Antares.
Tonight again, is what kind of night?
Together here the lights glow.
The young and strong are able — for how long?
Their sideburns each will also turn grey.
When visiting old friends who half became ghosts,
I cry out in pangs of emotion.
Who knew that in twenty years,
You would be taking up a post at a lord's manor?
Long ago when we parted, you weren't yet married.
Now your children suddenly line up in front of me.
Happily they salute their father's friend,
And ask me where I came from.
The questioning and answering hadn't had time to finish
when the children laid out the wine and juice.
In the night rain you cut the spring chives;
in the fresh-cooked rice there is millet.
Our host speaks of our meeting's difficulty;
With one motion he lifts ten cups.
Ten cups and you aren't even drunk;
I'm moved that your old friendship is growing.
As the bright sun separates the mountains,
the world and its affairs both are far away.
Here are Randy's principles for translating from Literary Sinitic to English:
My general rules for translation are:
I don't read anyone else's translation first, but after I translate I will check some on the web to see if there are any major discrepancies. Here, the last line seems to be traditionally translated as something like "Tomorrow we will be separated by mountains, the world's affairs are unclear", but I see some problems with this (I don't think it's impossible, but there are some problems).
明日隔山岳，世事两茫茫。
First is the inanimate agency/cause of the passive gé 隔. I can't find anything in Hànyǔ dà cídiǎn 汉语大词典 (Unabridged dictionary of Sinitic) that has a similar structure for 隔. In a big grammar I have, Gǔ Hànyǔ yǔfǎ jí qí fāzhǎn 古汉语语法及其发展 (Ancient Chinese Grammar and Its Development) by Yáng Bójùn 杨伯峻 and Hé Lèshì 何乐士, I found a very small mention (p. 693 I think):
2.1.3 “(受事主语)·动·工具宾语”
宾语表示动作行为的工具。如:
(1)不夭斤斧。(庄子·逍遥游)30
“不夭(于)斤斧”。意谓不被斧子之类的器物所天折或天伤。
OK, so I guess it's "legal" to have a usage interpretation like that in this poem, but given its apparent rarity in Classical Chinese (I'm judging by the fact that I have only been able to find this one mention of this kind of usage and that it's quite old) I think it would be stretching it to say the mountains are separating them. The examples in HDC all seem to be X隔 (X separates (us/them), or 隔X (separates X).
Another problem is liǎng 两 ("two"). This is pretty clearly "two/both" which can only point to shì 世 ("world") and shì 事 ("affair[s]") as separate entities. If they are separate, then parallelism would strongly suggest (dictate?) that míng 明 and rì 日 ("day") are also separate. Despite the fact that 明日 ("bright day / sun") almost always means "tomorrow", if we can say míngyuè 明月 ("bright moon") then of course it's not ungrammatical at all to say 明日 ("bright sun / day"); perhaps Du Fu 杜甫 was mindfully using this as a kind of garden path sentence (similar to "The old man the boat."). This would shift the meaning to what I wrote above: "As the bright sun separates the mountains, the world and its affairs both are far away."
Du Fu 杜甫 lived through some difficulties and wrote (as I have so far seen) some dark stuff "Jiārén《佳人》("beautiful woman")、"Mèng Lǐ Bái《梦李白》("Dreaming of Li Bo"), but he also wrote "Wàng yuè 《望岳》("Gazing at the mountain"), which is not dark at all. Would it be inconceivable for "Zèng Wèi Bā chǔshì" 《赠卫八处士》 ("Presented to Wei Ba, an Unofficed Scholar") to have a happy-ish "screw-the-world" ending in the drunken spirit of Lǐ Bái 李白? He finally visits his friend after 20 years and they stay up until the sunrise, by that time forgetting the world and its affairs. He obviously dearly loved Lǐ Bái 李白 who we know knew how to use alcohol to forget the world and its affairs; wouldn't it be reasonable that he could do likewise? Also, if he had traveled so far after so long, wouldn't tomorrow be much too early for him to be already gone and on the other side of the mountains?
I eagerly await your response.
Randy several times asked for my critique of his interpretation of the last line, so I will give it, prefaced by my declaration that I think that context, content, sentiment, sense, drift, flow, and so forth outweigh strict grammatical rules, especially in poetry, and especially in the hands of a master like Du Fu. Also, the English version should not be jarring, should make sense, and convey what the poet was aiming to express. Here, in this last line, I think what Du Fu is trying to say is "Tomorrow we will be separated by mountains; both of us immersed in the boundless affairs of the world".
Back in the days of the towering Berkeley savant sinologues, Peter Alexis Boodberg (1903-1972) and Edward Hetzel Schafer (1913-1991), there were monumental disputes over whether Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic (CC/LS) had grammar, and, if so, whether it were absolutely strict and inalterably fixed. See, for example, Schafer's (in)famous "Supposed 'Inversions' in T'ang Poetry", Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 96, No. 1 (Jan. – Mar., 1976), pp. 119-121 (3 pages).
Of course, CC/LS had/has grammar, elsewise an author wouldn't be able to write anything that makes sense (without grammar, writing would just be a jumble of words). That is why I always felt comfortable and confident in teaching CC/LS to generations of students. A good presentation of Chinese grammar may be found in the three-volume A First Course in Literary Chinese (Cornell, 1968) by Harold Shadick. On the other hand, as you will see from my closing comment to this post, context trumps grammar. To read poetry and make elegant sense of it, one has to understand what the poet is trying to say, and that takes learning / knowledge and intuition. The only way to develop learning / knowledge and intuition is through vast amounts of reading / exposure to history and literature of all sorts.
Steve Owen translated the complete poems of Du Fu. Here's how he handled the last couplet of the one under discussion:
Tomorrow we will be divided by mountains,
for both the world’s affairs are a vast blur.
Xiuyuan Mi comments:
隔 is divide; 兩 simply introduces that the two would henceforth live different lives and rarely hear from the other person—quite difficult to parse out the syntax though.
Notice that Xiuyuan recognizes the difficulty of parsing the syntax, but still strives to grasp the poet's underlying intent.
Here are Denis Mair's observations:
Owen is right, but I think there's an additional level of meaning, the poignant sense that both of them will not know what happens to each other. In this moment of strong feelings about friendship, the wish of each to know what will befall each other is very strong.
Denis is a published poet, both in Chinese and in English, and has translated thousands of poems from and to Chinese.
Go with the flow, Randy.
Selected readings
- "The (alleged) untranslatability of Chinese poetry" (9/26/20)
- "The importance of translation for learning Literary Sinitic" (6/27/21)
- "Wattle gate" (11/10/20)
wgj said,
June 11, 2025 @ 4:07 am
What (if anything) is the distinction between liang3 in the last couplet and ge4 in the third one? Is the author simply trying to avoid repetition? Or is there a meaningful difference in the sense and/or sentiment of the two terms? I agree that liang3 in this case harbors multiple layers of meaning, one of which being a "couple", as in a romantic (in this case bro-mantic) relationship (cf. terms like 两厢情愿 两不相见 两地分居 etc). And my preferred translation is therefore also "the two of us".
Dan said,
June 11, 2025 @ 12:03 pm
In Chinese, 明日 (tomorrow) has never been used to mean "bright sun" or "shining sun," though 明 does mean "bright" in 明月（bright moon）。
So mis-translating 明日 into "bright sun" is a typical case of 望文生义。
As for 世事，it is definitely a character combination bearing multiple meanings depending on the context.
In this poem by Du Fu, this term can refer to a person's fate or future. 世事两茫茫 means that neither of the two personae is clear or certain about their own fate or future.
Personally, I do not prefer "the world's affairs" or "worldly affairs." Simply using "things in this world" sounds much better and more faithful to the original.
世事茫茫 is also used by the Tang poem Wei Yingwu (韦应物) in his following poem:
《寄李儋元锡》：去年花里逢君别，今日花开又一年。世事茫茫难自料，春愁黯黯独成眠。
BTW, in Du's poem, 山岳 is not used for general reference but rather refers specifically to Mt. Hua (西岳华山）。One more thing to point out: the phrase "动如“ in Du's line 动如参与商 ("We move like The Belt of Orion and Antares." — Randy) does not mean “move like” literally but simply means "often like" or "are often positioned (or, related) like". 动如参商 is commonly used as a 成语。
wgj said,
June 11, 2025 @ 1:39 pm
To dive deeper on 明日: The original sense of 明 is dawn/daybreak, a time when the sun and the moon are both visible, therefore the composition of the character in oracle script. The term 明日 for tomorrow is directly derived from this sense: tomorrow = when the day breaks (again). The sense "bright" is derived from the brightening nature of dawn, but note that dawn isn't *that* bright – it's only bright in comparison to the darkness of the night. Therefore 明 is only used to describe things that are "somewhat bright", like the moon (明月), but not "blendingly bright", like the sun (曜日 艳阳 etc.).
Daniel said,
June 11, 2025 @ 3:27 pm
Just to clarify further, in Du Fu's line 动如参与商, the character 动 is not used as a verb but as an adverb meaning "often" (常常，经常，往往）。 This is a special usage of 动 in classical Chinese. So, it is incorrect to translate 动如参与商 into "We move like The Belt of Orion and Antares."
Jonathan Smith said,
June 11, 2025 @ 3:54 pm
Re: Mand. gé 隔 and its relative in this poem, it's not a question of waffling on the grammar; this *is* the grammar — 心隔千里 'hearts a thousand miles apart', etc., etc., are properly formed and attested back to Tang. Modern Mand. (相)隔, (相)離 work similarly…
But generally Randy Alexander is correct to consider the words on their face seriously. E.g. "(the asterisms) Shen and Shang" 參商 indeed figure in "estrangement" metaphors from early times, but the formulation "動如參商" is due (apparently) to Du Fu here and thus one should not dodge literal translations like 'move' (if one likes them): "everyone knows what this means so don't mind the words" is the Cardinal Sin of Chinese translators in particular since they "know what this means" way more… errors by we less-culturally-immersed generally being more random and (way) more egregious.
Outside of the last couplet, "重(adverb!)上(verb!)君子堂" is the most serious problem in this version. Also not 'grow' but 'last / be long' in penultimate couplet.
Jonathan Smith said,
June 11, 2025 @ 3:55 pm
Missed the above comment — if so, I defer to Daniel on this point naturally
katarina said,
June 12, 2025 @ 1:35 pm
Regarding the line
焉知二十载，重上君子堂。
I think 重 here means "again".
So the line would be
"Who would have known that in twenty years
I would again visit your home?"
(literally, "I would again ascend to my lord's hall?")
君子 "lord, (here) my lord" , a courteous way of saying "you".
Also the line:
少壮能几时，鬓发各已苍。
This line, like almost all the other lines are
in the pattern of two five, two five
少壮 能几时， 鬓发 各已苍。
.
Thus literally "young strong, can (能) how much time,…"
or "how long can (能) we be young and strong,
少壮 能几时
Before our temples are already grey? "
鬓发 各已苍。
Also:
感子故意长。
"长" does not mean "grow" here。It means "long, long-lasting", describing the host's friendship as long-lasting, meaning a friendship that goes back so many years.
katarina said,
June 13, 2025 @ 9:15 am
Correction:
I meant to say the lines are in the pattern of two three, two three (below), not two five two five. And ALL the lines are in this pattern, not "most of the lines":
人生 不相见，动如 参与商。
今夕 复何夕，共此 灯烛光。
少壮 能几时，鬓发. 各已苍。
访旧. 半为鬼，惊呼. 热中肠。
….
Randy Alexander said,
June 16, 2025 @ 4:08 am
Thanks to everyone who has commented so far, there are some very good things that have been brought up. Especially the idea that in the second half of the last line the subject is an implied "we" (though ironically no one explicitly said this). When I first looked I hadn't seriously considered 两 as referring to 杜甫 and 卫八, but actually that fits with the parallelism very well by putting the invisible pronomial subject in the same place.
明日/世事 (topic)
[ ] (subject: we)
隔/两 (predicate head)
山岳/茫茫 (complement)
That makes the only difficult part the instrument of 隔 in post position, but well, that just might be a rare usage.
wgj —
• My interpretation for the difference in 各 and 两 is that 各 is men in general and 两 is specifically Du Fu and Wei Ba, because 各 is indefinite and 两 is defnite.
• I think you'll need stronger evidence to support your idea about 明; HDC's first entry says 指日月的光亮 (indicates the brightess of the sun and/or moon).
Dan —
• No 望文生义 going on here, just open-minded exploration of possibilities.
• I saw the reference to Mt Hua, but was hesitant to put it in the translation without stronger evidence. I couldn't find anything about Wei Ba that would suggest when this meeting might have taken place and where Du Fu was at the time, so I went with the general reference. Now, after further searching I see that the meeting was in 758 near Huazhou (close to Mt Hua).
Daniel —
• As for 动, I lean much more toward "move" because from our earthly perspective the stars do, and that sense of 动 is attested strongly. 动如参商 is a chengyu, but its origin is this very poem, and it couldn't be called common. I couldn't find any others with 动如 except 动如脱兔, which is much more modern (and of course means "move"). Searching ctext for "动如" in Pre-Qin and Han, all of the results mean "move like…" or "movement like…" and couldn't really be interpreted as "often like".
Jonathan Smith —
• That might *be* the grammar (I did give the one example I could find), but 心隔千里 doesn't support this idea because that's from《金瓶梅》which is quite a few (8.5) centuries later. Grammatical patterns are very difficult to search for; I'll just have to keep this in the back of my mind and hope that someday I come across another example.
• 重 as "again": yes, agreed. I was caught up with an earlier sense of 君子 perhaps suggesting "officed" and therefore not referring to 卫八.
Katarina —
• 重 See above.
• I believe 能 here is the lexical "able" and not the modal "can". Literally: (As for) the young and strong, (they are) able for how long?
• 各 See above.
• 长 I think zhǎng works much better here because Du Fu is being emotionally moved by this. It makes more sense to be moved by their friendship growing (a change) rather than its length (a state). I see Victor must agree because his pinyin has zhǎng.
Victor —
• A few corrections to the pinyin:
Line 1: shēn yǔ shāng
Line 4: zhōngcháng
Line 5: chóng
Daniel said,
June 17, 2025 @ 2:37 pm
Hi, Randy,
Your clarification is much appreciated. The dictionary definition of 明 (as an independent character) does not apply to 明日 as a character combination. So semantic reference does not work here. In Chinese, a bright sun is described in various terms such as 丽日 （中天）； 艳阳 （天）；骄阳 （似火）； 赤日 （炎炎）， all of which imply "brightness." A relevant case for your info is that someone reverses the character order of the character combination 天明 (daybreak) and thinks 明天 (tomorrow) means “daylight."
Dan said,
June 17, 2025 @ 6:14 pm
The translation of the line 感子故意长 seems to deserve further "open-minded exploration," as Randy puts it. The character 感 should not be interpreted in a modern sense (meaning be moved or touched, or be thankful or grateful). Rather, Du Fu simply meant (I) feel. And the character 长 actually means "deep(ly)" or "profound(ly)" here. Hence:
Having emptied ten cups yet remaining sober,
I feel how deeply you cherish our friendship.