34. On Climbing the Youzhou Terrace | Chen Zi'ang
Text
English translation
Original Chinese text
前不见古人，后不见来者。
English translation
No men of old are left for me to look back on, and none of those to come can I yet see.
Before and after mark time here, not direction. The view from the terrace is wide, but what he looks at is not scenery — it is time running out at both ends.
Original Chinese text
念天地之悠悠，独怆然而涕下。
English translation
Then I think how endless and how wide heaven and earth are, and alone, with no cause I can name, the tears come.
Two blanks held him in the first couplet; this line stretches the measure out to the sky. The bigger the frame, the heavier the single word alone.
赏析 · Commentary
「前」「后」说的是时间 · Before and After Point to Time
幽州台是燕昭王筑黄金台招贤的地方，登上去本该怀古。陈子昂却先不写景。前、后两个字摆在句首，像在量方位，量的其实是时间——往前是古人，往后是来者，两端都不站着一个能对话的具体的人。台高野阔，人本来的小，先被这一句说了出来。
The Youzhou Terrace was where King Zhao of Yan raised his golden platform to summon talent, and a poet who climbs it is expected to think of the past. Chen Zi'ang begins without a single line of scenery. The words for before and after sit at the head of the sentence as if measuring direction, and what they measure is time — back to the ancients, forward to those not yet born, with no one at either end he could actually speak to. The terrace is high, the plain is broad; how small a man is gets said here before anything else.
天地撑开，人往里缩 · Heaven and Earth Open, the Man Draws In
第三句把尺度推到最大：悠悠两字拖长了天地的长度，也把时间拉成没有尽头的一条线。前面已说过前和后，这里再说天地，等于从时间换到空间，两个维度都填满。四句里没有一处景物，没有风没有云，人站在空处，什么都不给他遮挡。
The third line pushes the scale to its limit: the doubled word meaning far and long stretches heaven and earth and pulls time out into a line with no end. Before and after had already been named; now heaven and earth come in, trading time for space, so that both dimensions stand filled. Not one detail of scenery appears in the four lines, no wind, no cloud. The man stands in an emptiness where nothing screens him.
眼泪为什么落下来 · Why the Tears Fall
末句只写一个动作：怆然，然后涕下。他没说想到哪件事，也没交代自己的遭遇。该解释的地方空着，正是这首诗的重量所在——不给理由，也不讨理由。读到这一句，人接下去想到的，常是自己站过的某个高处。
The last line gives only a movement: a stab of grief, and then the tears. He does not say which thing he thought of, does not lay out his own troubles. The gap where an explanation should be is exactly where this poem's weight sits — no reason offered, none asked for. Reading that line, what a reader thinks of next is usually some high place of their own.