52. Sheng Cha Zi (Yan Jidao)

上阕前两句各收在一个量字上：句尾一「长」一「少」。梦魂翻山，路没有尽头，「长」说梦的行程；「塞雁音书少」，少的是雁传来的音信，不是说雁本身稀少。两句合看是同一件事的两面：梦里走得过去的地方，音信却难以抵达，跋涉与消息，两头各自落空。「魂」字值得停：翻山的不是人，是魂；人走不了，便让魂先行——魂越得过山，音信空档却留在同一片关山里。分量不压在情感词上，压在「长」「少」两个度量上：念到句尾，才知道这两个度量合不到一起。

The first two lines close on measures: one on long, the other on few. The dreaming soul crosses the passes and the road does not finish; long describes the distance it covers. In “the frontier geese, few letters,” it is the tidings carried by the geese that are scarce, not the geese themselves. Set together, the lines show two sides of one distance: a dream can cross the ground, but news is slow to arrive. Also worth pausing on is hun, soul: the one crossing these mountains is not the person but a part of the self sent ahead. The soul can go where letters cannot, while the same passes leave a gap in communication. The weight sits on two measures, long and few, that refuse to balance.

三四句把青春写成可数的存货。「可怜青」先认下两鬓还挂着的这点颜色；「只为」把老去的责任推给相思，不推给关山的长，也不推给雁信的少。「老」的主语，原句没有说死：可读作人老，两鬓的青是凭据；也可读作那点青在老去——本稿译文取前一种。再一种读法看「相思」的「相」：它带双向的意味，词中只有一人开口，听这话的「人人」没答话；根由在上阕「音书少」。这些都是读法，不是原词写明的事实；到「老」字，上阕一笔账算完。

The third and fourth lines treat youth as a stock on hand. Ke lian qing, the pitiable black, first concedes that color still hangs at the temples; zhi wei, for longing alone, then hands the aging over to a single cause. Blame is not spread over the length of the passes or the scarcity of the letters. The text does not settle who stands under the verb old: one reading has the person growing old, the black at the temples serving as the evidence; another lets that patch of black itself age. This entry's translation takes the first. A further reading follows the compound xiang inside xiang si and its mutual lean: only one voice opens in the lyric, and ren ren, the hearer named by the lower stanza, gives no reply; the upper stanza has already counted where that silence comes from, in too few letters. These remain ways of reading, not facts the text states. At old, the upper stanza's account closes.

下片是一句话的场面：先给地方，「归傍碧纱窗」；再给听者，「说与人人道」；之后才让那句判断开口。「人人」是宋人对亲近之人的通称，不坐实某位有名姓的人物；称呼越顺手，人越显得亲近。联系上阕的「魂梦」，可以把「归傍」读作梦中归来、倚窗说话；但下片没有明写梦醒，也没有写屋空。这样读来，末句把离别之苦压过相逢之好，说得像亲近之人之间的一句家常话。梦中相见仿佛补上现实中稀少的音信，这层联系是全词前后照应带出的读法。

The lower stanza stages a single sentence: first a place, gui bang bi sha chuang, return and lean at the green gauze window; then a hearer, ren ren, a familiar term of address rather than one named person; only afterwards does the judgment come out. Read alongside hun meng in the upper stanza, gui bang can be taken as a return in a dream, though the lower stanza itself does not say that the speaker wakes or finds an empty room. On this reading, the final line weighs the pain of parting against the good of meeting, in the plain speech of people close to one another. The dream meeting seems to answer the scarcity of real-world tidings; that link is an interpretation drawn from the poem’s two stanzas.