ChineseStudy

29. Mooring at Xuyi County for the Night | Wei Yingwu

Contents

Text

English translation

The sail comes down and we moor at the Huai town; the boat halts beside a lone post station.

Both verbs mean to stop. The lone station sets the tone of the night at once: there is nobody where he stops.

A great wind lifts the waves; the sun goes down into a darkening sky.

One line takes the water, one the sky. The first doubled word is both sound and force, the second is failing visibility, and both are large.

People go home and the hillside town darkens; wild geese come down and the reed islets go white.

One line for dark and one for white. People return into the dark, geese settle onto the white, both of them going home, and only the poet stays on the boat.

In the lone night I think of the Qin passes, hearing the bell, a guest who is not sleeping.

The last line calls himself "the guest who is not sleeping". Speaking of himself in the third person steps back from the boat, and makes the night harder to bear.

赏析 · Commentary

一联一个方向 · One Couplet, One Direction

第三联两句很明显地分开：上句往岸上去，下句往水上去；上句是人的去处，下句是鸟的去处。韦应物不给它们加任何说明，只把归的动作一件一件摆出来。等到末句说「未眠」，前面那些归处就都成了回不去的地方。这首诗里没有一句直接说孤单，孤单是别人都安置好了，自己还在船上。

The two lines of the third couplet divide cleanly: one goes toward the shore, one toward the water; one is where people go, one where birds go. Wei Yingwu adds no explanation, only lays the homecomings out one by one. When the last line says he is not sleeping, every one of those destinations becomes somewhere he cannot be. Nowhere does the poem say he is lonely; the loneliness is that everyone else has been settled somewhere and he is still on the boat.

暗和白各占一句 · Dark and White, One to a Line

「山郭暗」「芦洲白」是一对颜色，一个往下沉，一个往上浮。韦应物用颜色代替感叹：天黑了，只有那片芦苇还亮着。两句之间没有连接词，读者的眼睛被从近处推到远处，又从人烟推到野地。这样的对举在诗里只用一次，不重复，也不解释。

The darkened town and the white islets make a pair of colours, one sinking and one rising. Wei Yingwu uses colour in place of an exclamation: the sky has gone dark and only the reeds are still bright. There is no connective between the lines; the eye is pushed from near to far and from habitation out to open country. The pairing is used once in the poem, not repeated and not explained.

「未眠客」三个字 · The Guest Who Is Not Sleeping

末句不说「我不眠」，说「听钟未眠客」。把自己叫作「客」，就等于承认在这里没有落脚的地方；用「未眠」作定语，等于把睡不着说成这个人此刻的属性。前面写雁写人都在归，末句这个没有归处的人就显出来了。诗到这里也没有交代心里在想什么，只交代了一件事：他在听钟。

The last line does not say "I cannot sleep" but "the guest who hears the bell and is not sleeping". Calling himself a guest amounts to admitting he has no place to settle here; making "not sleeping" a modifier turns the wakefulness into a quality of this man just now. The lines before had geese and people going home, and the man with nowhere to go stands out against them. The poem still does not say what is on his mind, only one thing: he is listening to the bell.

Feedback