Thoughts on a Quiet Night
Li Bai
Introduction to Jack
Children's songs: Poetry
Suitable age:? -12 years old;
difficulty of lyrics:?
key words:? Eleven?
This is a bilingual nursery rhyme adapted from China's ancient poem "Thinking of a Quiet Night".
Thinking about a Quiet Night is a poem written by Li Bai, a poet in the Tang Dynasty. Li Bai is a great romantic poet in Tang Dynasty, and he has the reputation of "Poet Fairy".
? Li Bai is cheerful and generous, and likes drinking, writing poems and making friends.
In history, it has always been controversial where Li Bai's hometown is. There is a saying that the broken leaves, which is now Kyrgyzstan, are now foreign borders, but in the Tang Dynasty, the broken leaves belonged to China. There is also a saying that it is in Jiangyou, which is now Jiangyou County, Sichuan Province.
so what is the background of the poem "thinking about a quiet night"? In the process of learning and growing up, Li Bai attached great importance to breaking thousands of books and taking Wan Li Road. He traveled all over China and was very familiar with the customs and social situation in China at that time. He traveled around as a teenager, and left his hometown at the age of 24.
The time to write this song "Thinking about a Quiet Night" was about 26 years old, when he had been away from home for more than two years and wrote it in an inn in Yangzhou. At that time, the traffic and communication were very inconvenient, so Li Bai could only send his feelings to the moon to express his thoughts about his hometown.
so bright a gleam on the foot of my bed,
could there have been a frost already?.
lifting myself to look, I found that it was moonlight,
sinking back again, I thought suddenly of home.
the bright moonlight sprinkled on the enough paper in front of the bed, as if the ground was covered with frost. I couldn't help looking up at the bright moon in the sky outside the window that day, and I couldn't help but bow my head and think of my distant hometown.
The first two sentences in the poem are "so bright a gleam on the foot of my bed, could there have been a frost already?." The controversial word in these two sentences is "bed". There are many explanations about "bed". Some people say it refers to "well platform". In ancient times, people drank water without running water. They often dug a well and then fished water from it.
In many rural areas of China, it is also the case at present. Therefore, the word "well" in ancient times represented hometown. People in ancient times wanted to travel far away, and it was often said that they had left their hometown.
? Other explanations for "bed" are that it opens to the window of "window". Of course, some people directly interpret it as a bed for sleeping. There is no unified statement about which is correct.
But in English translation, the vast majority of people directly translate the bed into a "sleeping bed", which is also possible.
The typical writing technique in this poem is the use of metaphor. Could there have been a frost already?, compare the moonlight to silver frost sprinkled on the ground. Metaphors about the moon often appear in poems.
For example, in the poem A Journey to the Moon by Gulang written by Li Bai, he compared the moon to a jade plate. "When I was young, I didn't know the moon, so I called it a white jade plate."
There are also many metaphors about the moon in English poetry. For example, in A mid-summer Night's Dream written by Shakespeare, a great British playwright, he compares the moon to a silver bow and arrow:
Four days will quickly steer them in the night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
and then the moon, like to a silver bow
new-bent in heaven, shall bear the night of our solitude.
Four days will soon become night,
Four nights will soon pass away in a dream,
At that time, the moon will be like a newly curved silver bow,
watching in the sky.
Ok, that's all for the Chinese part of this poem. Now let's look at its English lyrics.
nightly thoughts
ere my bed moonlight mountain,
like me on the ground.
head up, the moonlight,
head down, home I'm found.
This lyric was translated by Xu Jingcheng, a young scholar and poet from the School of Arts of Bangor University.
On the whole, this is a rare translation masterpiece.
The endings of the first sentence, the second sentence and the fourth sentence in the poem all rhyme, namely, mount, ground and found, which is consistent with the rhyme pattern of the original poem.
mound, which means "accumulation", is used vividly, and readers can feel that the invisible moonlight seems to be accumulating slowly.
and the use of the word "rime" in the second sentence means "silver frost", which emphasizes the gradual transition of moonlight from intangible to tangible, from liquid state like water to white solid.
In addition, the rhymes of the following poems "Head up" and "head down" are parallel, corresponding to the movements of "raising head" and "bowing head" in the original poem, and the different movements of the same body organ reflect that the poet's thoughts are changing.
and finally, in the quiet night, only the moon is with the poet. homesick I'm found connects the author's homesickness and loneliness. No one finds the poet Li Bai's homesickness, only the moon finds the poet's mind.
From a musical point of view, I borrowed a little tune from the legendary swordsman in my personal composition.
? In the first two sentences, it shows that people who leave their hometown are often philosophical people, because the purpose of leaving Wan Li is nothing more than seeking fame and gain, pursuing education and seeking liberation, which requires that all wanderers who leave home need an open-minded and optimistic spirit, an adventurous spirit and an attitude of laughing at the pain of the world.
At the end of the third sentence, it is necessary to show the feeling of meditating on the moon and returning to my hometown. Therefore, the tune of the whole poem reflects both strong and soft emotions.
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