Thoughts in the dead of night
Tang Dynasty: Li Bai
The foot of my bed is shining so brightly. Is there frost already?
I looked up at the moon and looked down, feeling nostalgic.
Translation and annotation
literal translation
The bright moonlight sprinkled on enough paper in front of the bed, as if the ground was frosted.
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 hometown in the distance.
Rhyme translation
The bright moonlight filled the bed like a hazy frost.
Look up at the moon and bow your head to teach people to miss home.
To annotate ...
(1) Silent Night Siwei: Thought produced in a quiet night.
⑵ Bed: There are five theories today.
One refers to the well platform. Some scholars have written an article to verify. Shi Cheng, director of China Educators Association, published the research results in a paper and created a poetic map with friends.
Finger well site. According to archaeological findings, the earliest well in China was a wooden well. The ancient well field is several meters high and surrounds the wellhead in a box shape.
Creation background
Li Bai's poem "Thinking about a Quiet Night" was written around September 15th of the lunar calendar in 726 AD (14th year of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty). Li Bai was 26 years old and was writing at Yangzhou Guest House. His poem "Walking in the Autumn Night" should be a sequel to "Thinking about a Quiet Night" and was written in the same place. Li Bai wrote this famous poem "Thinking about a Quiet Night".
References:
1, Textual research on Sun Hongliang Li Bai's thoughts on quiet night. Journal of Yan 'an University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition),1998,02.
Distinguish and appreciate
This is probably the most popular poem, and it may be the first poem that many people learn in their lives, but it tastes much worse than Wei Wendi's Long Autumn Night. Moreover, there are some unreasonable places in this poem. It stands to reason that this scene should be outdoors in order to lift myself up to see it. I found it was moonlight, not looking up at the house beam. Moonlight enters the room through the window, even if it is a glass window, or there is not enough paper, because of the shadow of the window, it is not so like frost on the ground. If you are outdoors, the bed is not an ordinary bed. It must be interpreted as something outdoor, such as a reckless well site. Moreover, it is said that this edition was revised in the Ming Dynasty, and 300 Tang poems were adopted earlier, which played a great role in its popularization.
This five-line poem with only 20 words is probably the shortest poem at home and abroad. But it is in these 20-word budget constraints that the word "bright moon" is repeated twice, accounting for 20% of the budget. Moreover, the whole poem is so straightforward, almost as simple as children's songs, but it does not affect its ranking in the pop poetry rankings at all. It can be seen that this change is still very successful.
Confucius' poems can arouse people's antipathy and praise elegance and charm. Generally speaking, the first three sentences of this poem can be regarded as xing, but they are certainly not typical xing, because the bright moon is still related to hometown. Xing is a common technique in children's songs, and the words are repetitive. In repetition, thimble repetition is also commonly used, such as "12345, shooting tigers up the mountain, tigers don't eat people, only eat Truman". The first three sentences are almost meaningless, and at most they can only be regarded as empty shakes.
The moon is a very suitable theme for poetry, and there are many moon poems at all times and in all countries. If you give an example of China's moon poems, I'm afraid it's more than half. This is the first poem that people think of. In the cultural background of China, the moon is usually used as a foil to express homesickness and homesickness. Aside from the symbolic meaning of the moon, there are roughly three kinds of moon poems, which are divided into two categories, one is the full moon, and the other is of course the waning moon.
There are two kinds of full moons. One is the most common in people's daily life, and it is also the most common in literary works. It is the moon in a limited space. This poem falls into this category. Others, such as Missing Women under the Moon in Han Yuefu, Bright Moon Shining on Snow in Jiang Zhai's Poems, Liu Guihua Tile appreciated by Wang Guowei and Lugou Xiaoyue in Yanjing Eight Scenes, are all moons in a limited space, which are suitable for local close-ups with telephoto lenses. But the full moon is not necessarily the bright moon, and the moonlight in Zhu Ziqing's lotus pond is very hazy.
The second full moon is the moon in the vast space, which is not common in life, because it needs to go to the wild, not in the courtyard, but it is the ideal situation to enjoy the moon. The so-called vast space is nothing more than mountains, seas, deserts, rivers, lakes and grasslands. The bright moon on the sea, the bright moon in the sky, Su Shi's "Fu on the Red Wall" and Zhang Xiaoxiang's "Nian Nujiao Crossing the Dongting" all belong to this situation, which is very infectious.
The third category is the waning moon. The waning moon is often used to foil negative emotions, so it is often accompanied by dead branches and fine stones, such as "or the soft calendar is loose and the moon arrives", "hanging a tree without a moon" and "the moon is faint and leaking".
Further reading
Version textual research
There are two versions of Silent Night Thinking. One version is: "There is such bright light at the foot of my bed. Could there be frost already?"? . Looking up, I found that it was moonlight, sinking again, and I suddenly thought of home. " From "Three Hundred Tang Poems", it is Amin's version, and it is a widely circulated version. Another version is the Song Dynasty version, which is contained in Li Taibai's Collected Works (Volume 6): "Looking at the moon in front of the bed, is there frost?" . Looking up at the mountains and the moon and sinking again, I suddenly thought of home. " Not widely circulated. There are two differences between the two versions.
Song people were much closer to the birth of Li Bai than to the birth of the editor of 300 Tang Poems. Therefore, it is generally believed that the Song version is closer to Li Bai's original work than the Ming version, but some scholars still believe that there may be an earlier version. In the Collected Works of Li Taibai published in the Song Dynasty, Yuefu Poems edited by Guo Maoqian and 10,000 Tang Poems edited by Hong Mai, the first sentence of Silent Night Thinking is "Looking at the moon before the bed" and the third sentence is "Looking at the mountains and the moon". The classification and supplement of Xiao Dui's collections in Yuan Dynasty, as well as the Collection of Tang Poems in Ming Dynasty. Song people have always admired Tang poetry, and its collection and editing are very large. In addition, close to the Tang Dynasty, there were relatively few misinformation errors. Therefore, the collection of Silent Night Thoughts in Song Dynasty and even Yuan Dynasty should be reliable and accurate. In the authoritative version of The Whole Tang Poetry, which was personally examined and approved by Michelle Ye, the Qing emperor, it was not influenced by different versions of the previous generation, and no changes were made to this poem.
Before that, Thoughts on a Quiet Night had been introduced to Japan (Collected Works of Li Taibai (volume 12) is stored in the Jingjiatang Library of Japan). Because the Japanese admired Tang poetry, they didn't make any changes to it in the later circulation. However, the situation in China is different. In the Ming Dynasty, Zhao Huanguang edited and deleted Ten Thousand Poems from the Tang Dynasty, and changed the third sentence of Silent Night Thinking to "Looking up, I found it was moonlight", but the first sentence "Looking at moonlight before going to bed" remained unchanged. The first sentence of Shen Deqian's poems "Tang Poetry" and "Thinking about a Quiet Night" is "The foot of my bed is so bright", but the third sentence is "Looking at the mountains and the moon". It was not until the 28th year of Qianlong reign in Qing Dynasty (1763) that Three Hundred Poems of Tang Dynasty compiled by the judges of Heng Tang Dynasty absorbed two changes in Ye Jingsi's Poems of Tang Dynasty and Tang Dynasty's poems of Kangxi reign in Qing Dynasty. Since then, Ye Jingsi has become a popular version in China: "The bright line at the foot of my bed, when I looked up, I found it was moonlight, and then sank back, and I suddenly remembered home." However, this is not the only popular version in the Qing Dynasty. In the forty-fourth year of Kangxi (1705), 58 years before the publication of Three Hundred Poems of Tang Dynasty, Emperor Kangxi's Thoughts on All Poems of Tang Dynasty are exactly the same as Li Taibai's Collected Works published in Song Dynasty. Looking at the mountains and the moon, then sinking back, suddenly thinking about my hometown ",and later the whole Tang poetry published by Zhonghua Book Company also followed this expression.
This expression was rewritten after the Ming Dynasty to popularize poetry. It is an indisputable fact that the revised version of Silent Night Thinking is more catchy than the original version, which also explains why the version of My Foot is so bright than the version of Watching Moonlight before Sleeping is more popular among Chinese people. Mr. Xue Tianwei, President of China Li Bai Research Association and Professor of Xinjiang Normal University, expressed the following views on the differences between the two versions in the article Man Shuo (Literature and History Knowledge, No.4, 1984): After careful appreciation, the first sentence, such as "Looking at the moon before going to bed", has a verb embedded in the middle, and its tone is slightly dull; Besides, "moonlight" is invisible, and it is not good to "look" on purpose. If you look at it on purpose, you won't mistake it for "frost". When we say "bright moonlight", it seems that the moonlight comes into our eyes inadvertently, and the next sentence evokes the word "doubt", which makes us feel natural; What's more, the word "Ming" also increases the bright color of the moonlit night. In the third sentence, "looking at the moon" is not only not limited by geographical environment, but also the word "mountain moon" is inevitably popular-in literati poetry, the moon is often divided into "mountain moon" and "sea moon", and "bright moon" is completely the moon in the eyes of ordinary people. The so-called "tampering theory" and "shanzhai theory" are really exaggerated. Some scholars believe that there are at least 50 different versions of the four poems of Silent Night Thinking, and it is difficult for you to know which one is closer to the original. The version of' Looking up, I found it was moonlight' was finalized in the Ming Dynasty.
Although the Ming version may not be entirely the original work of Li Bai, and some words may be revised later, it has a high degree of circulation and has been included in various versions of Chinese textbooks.