Climbing high
Author Du Fu Tang Dynasty
The wind is strong, the sky is high, the apes are screaming in mourning, and the white birds are flying back from the clear sand in Zhugong.
Boundless falling trees rustle, and the endless Yangtze River rolls by.
Wanli is always a guest in the sad autumn, and he has been sick for hundreds of years and only appears on the stage.
Hard and bitter, I hate the frost on my temples, and my new wine glass becomes muddy.
Notes:
⑴ Climbing: The 9th day of the ninth lunar month is the Double Ninth Festival, and there has always been a custom of climbing.
⑵Ape Howl: Refers to the shrill cry of the apes in the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River. "Shui Jing Zhu·Jiang Shui" quotes a folk song: "The Badong Three Gorges and the Wu Gorge are long, and the apes cry three times and shed tears on their clothes."
⑶渚 (zhǔ): a small island in the water; a small piece in the water land. Birds flying back: Birds flying and circling in the strong wind. Back: roundabout.
⑷Falling wood: refers to the leaves falling in autumn. Xiao Xiao: The sound of fallen leaves blown by the wind.
⑸ Wanli: refers to being far away from home. Frequent guest: Wandering in a foreign country for a long time.
⑹A hundred years: It still refers to a lifetime, here it refers to the old age.
⑺Difficulty: refers to both the national destiny and one's own destiny. Bitter hatred: Extreme hatred, extreme regret. Bitter, extremely. Frosty temples: Increased white hair, like frost and snow on the temples. Fan, used as a verb here, means to increase.
⑻Down and out: decadent, frustrated. This refers to aging, sickness, and lack of ambition. New Stop: Recently stopped. Climbing high on the Double Ninth Festival is a good time to drink alcohol. Du Fu gave up drinking due to lung disease in his later years, so he said "new stop".
Translation:
The wind is strong, the sky is high, and the cries of apes are very sad. There are birds circling on the riverbank with clear water and white sand.
The endless trees are slowly dropping their fallen leaves, and the endless Yangtze River is rolling in.
Sad to the autumn scenery, I have been wandering thousands of miles and have been a guest all year round. I have been plagued by illnesses throughout my life and now I am alone on the high platform.
After going through all kinds of hardships and regrets, my gray hair has grown all over my temples, and my heart is full of decadence and I have stopped drinking wine to drink my sorrow.
"Deng Gao" is a seven-rhyme poem written by Du Fu, a great poet of the Tang Dynasty, in the autumn of the second year of Dali (767) in Kuizhou. The first four sentences describe the scenery, recount the experiences of climbing high, closely follow the seasonal characteristics of autumn, and depict the empty and lonely scenery of the river. The first couplet is a partial close-up view, and the chin couplet is an overall distant view. The last four sentences are lyrical, describing the feelings of climbing high. They revolve around the author's own life experience and express the sadness of being poor, old and sick, and living in a foreign country. The neck couplet is self-inflicted, revealing the metaphorical, symbolic, and suggestive meanings contained in the description of the scene in the first four sentences; the last couplet makes another statement and ends with the self-image of decline and illness. The language of this poem is concise, with parallelism throughout, and even one or two sentences that are paired within a sentence, which fully demonstrates that Du Fu's grasp of the rhythm and rhythm of poetic language has reached a state of perfection in his later years.