Ilaria

I need the Chinese version of this famous quote Here at the frontier there are falling leaves;
although my neighbors are all barbarians, and you, You are a thousand miles away. There are
always two cups at my table. Tang Dynasty 618-906 AD

The thing you posted sounds like a poem, but I could not find it. probably someone made it up. I
translate it with my own words. It takes a lot of my brain... hope it will help. 边塞秋来叶满地，胡人
兵马压境急。 与君虽隔千万里，置酒两杯待君临。

This supposed Chinese poem appears in John Fowles's novel, The Magus. It may or may not exist
as a Chinese poem in real life. It could be a fictional invention. Anyway, it has become something
of a well-known mystery.

Jeff
I strongly believe that this is a made up poem because there is already a problem with the first line
in trying to reverse translate back into the Tang format of either 5 or 7 characters. A direct
translation of the first line would be, 此地疆界葉落 XXX Where XXX is the additional information
e.g. 滿. At the same time, 此地 is redundant information and is too direct in a Chinese poem. Most
probably the first line may be something like 疆界葉落满地黃 (Leaves falling at the frontier
turning the ground yellow). The English version flavour is T'ang-like sentiment but certain word
usuage are too direct for a good T'ang poem. For example, "neighbors" most probably would not be
used in the original (if there is). Most probably it would be 鄉 (hometown) instead. Also the English
construct, "... and you, You are a thousand miles away" is totally English and definitely would not
be in the original Chinese.

Ben
It is possible that John Fowles, the English novelist, made it up, and that there is no Chinese
original.

王昌龄（Wang Changling) from the Tang dynasty wrote a two-poem series under the name 出塞
(beyond the border). The first poem was a classic-- it was even made into a song accompanied by
Chinese drums in the movie The Great Wall. This scene was particularly soul-touching. The poem
was written like:
秦时明月汉时关，万里长征人未还。
但使龙城飞将在，不教胡马度阴山。
I don't know how to translate it into English, nor did the movie. However, here it is, and really hope
you could meaningfully translate it. Btw, I deleted my previous post for I found a few typos.

宋 Between the Middle Kingdom and the Midwest

Monday, January 19, 2015

Mystery "Chinese" Poem in Fowles' "The Magus"

As part of my Chinese-Ravaged English Recovery Program, I have been reading John Fowles' The
Magus. According to the sequence of books on my original program schedule, George Eliot's
Middlemarch was supposed to have followed Moby Dick, but my best friend D recommended I read
The Magus, it sounded more intriguing, and so here I find myself.

I'm not going to write a review of the novel, I'm not sure I'm even partially qualified to do so, but I
would like to say that after one hundred pages or so, and with the deepening interaction with Mr.
Conchis, I am fully rapt. From my vantage point, the story seems to be about a well-to-do young
Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, with the typical artist's penchant for depression going off to a small
island in Greece to teach English as a second language, where he encounters a mysterious man, Mr.
Conchis, who may or may not have mystical powers. In many respects, not in the least the fact that
the story takes place on an island in Greece and involves an outsider (Nicholas) and an enlightened
(?) mentor (Mr. Conchis), The Magus (1965) reminds me of Nikos Kazantzakis' 1946 Zorba the
Greek, one of my favorite novels. In the latter, a young intellectual engages in a series of adventures
and dialogues with the earthy yet enigmatic Zorba. Real Fiction, a blog by Ron Pavellas, also
makes a connection between the two novels, with a bit of a spoiler for The Magus.

What inspired me to write a blog on The Magus was the sudden surprising quotation of an apparent
Tang Dynasty (618-907) poem in Chapter 13:
He looked out to sea. '"There is a poem of the T'ang dynasty." He sounded the precious
little glottal stop. 'Here at the frontier, there are falling leaves. Although my neighbors
are all barbarians, and you, you are a thousand miles away, there are always two cups on
my table.'"

As can be imagined, this was quite exciting for me. Since I wasn't sure from which poem it had
been translated, or if it had been translated from a poem at all, I did a quick Google search to see
what I could find out. The result was that I found out very little. The most interesting thing is that
the poem is included in many places as "a Chinese poem" with no attribution of author, or simply an
"unknown" written below the poem. One blog actually rants about Fowles' ignorance of Chinese
(Wade-Giles) pronunciation with his mistaken "precious little glottal stop" phrase. Aside from this,
no one seems to know anything about this poem, whether it was made up by Fowles or is the
translation of an actual Tang Dynasty poem.

I seemed to have stumbled onto a Chinese poetry mystery! Sleuth-like, I started to do more in-depth
research. Fowles apparently had done some translations of Chinese poetry, so it was conceivable
that this particular poem indeed originally was a Tang Dynasty poem. The content of the poem itself
strongly correlates to a genre of Tang Dynasty poetry known as 边塞诗 (bian1sai4 shi1 = frontier
poetry), which includes poems written about China's western frontier and the lives and sentiments
of the soldiers there fighting Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other enemies, or the longing distress of
women back on the home front, wondering when their men will return home.
 With this in mind, I decided to start searching for poems
which included the elements in the Fowles poem, searching for anything with 边疆 (bian1jiang1 =
frontier), 边塞 (bian1sai4 = frontier outpost), 千里 (qian1li3 = a thousand li, a Chinese unit of
distance which varied in different periods of time, often translated as "miles"), and/or 杯 (bei1 =
cup), etc. I came up with a lot of 边塞诗, but nothing really approximated the Fowles poem.

My next step was to go poem-by-poem through my own collection of Tang Dynasty poems, 唐诗三
百首 (Tang2shi1 san1bai3shou3 = Three Hundred Tang Poems), a compilation of Tang-era poems
by Heng Tang Tui Shi (蘅塘退士 = Heng2tang2 Tui4shi4), a Qing Dynasty scholar tasked by the
Qianlong Emperor (乾隆 = Qian1 Long2) with collecting the most famous Tang Dynasty poems.
My personal copy is a bit worn, as can be seen to the right here (yes, that is tie-dye duct tape).

After going through the entire Three Hundred Tang Poems, I didn't find a single poem that
indisputably could be said to be the source of the Fowles poem. One poem, however, could be a
candidate:

《送人东游》温庭筠

荒戍落黄叶，浩然离故关。
高风汉阳渡，初日郢门山。
江上几人在，天涯孤棹还。
何当重相见，樽杯慰离颜。

"Farewell East Along the Waters" Wen Tingyun

Trans. Aaron Gilkison

Yellow leaf-strewn dust-blown border fortress;

broad back now turned to that erstwhile hometown.
Winds will take you to the Yangtze crossing;
Dawn will greet you on eastern mountain crown.
How many on riverbanks are straining,
to spot your lonely Argo flowing down.
Oh, when will we see each other once more,
and raise our cups to drink away our frowns.

《送人东游》温庭筠；书法：黑土地
"Farewell East Along the Waters" Wen Tingyun
Calligraphy: Hei Tu Di

Here is the Fowles poem in verse form, for comparison:

Here at the frontier, there are falling leaves.

Although my neighbors are all barbarians,
and you, you are a thousand miles away,
there are always two cups on my table.

Comparing this to my translation, you can see where there are similarities: 1) Frontier and falling
leaves; 2) You are far away; 3) Cups for drinking. Granted, the similarities are primarily thematic,
but I still think "Farewell East Along the Waters" could have provided at least part of the inspiration
for Fowles' version. The line about "barbarians" is interesting, as descriptions of the non-Han
peoples on the periphery of Chinese civilization appear frequently in 边塞诗. Below are a few
examples, taken out of context:

匈奴草黄马正肥，金山西见烟尘飞...
Hun horses fat on golden grain, dust clouds prove hooves swarm western plains

山上望胡兵，胡马驰骤速。
Hun troops spied below, their horses ne'er slow
中军置酒饮归客，胡琴琵琶与羌笛。
General's tent wine-wet goodbyes, Hun lutes pipas Tibet fifes.

It is possible that Fowles just "made up" a "Tang poem" based on other translations and his own
translation experiments, piecing together elements of 边塞诗 that would better reflect the sense that
Mr. Conchis intended for Nicholas. Indeed, the content of the poem reflects all too closely Mr.
Conchis' strange isolation at the Bourani villa: Far from civilization, at the end of the world; all of
the villagers seem to despise and fear him and see him as an outsider; his guests come from far
away; and he always has a table ready with two cups on it.

Of course all of this is speculative. To do a really good job of solving this mystery with any bit of
certainty would probably require getting access to Fowles' papers and his notes from writing The
Magus, if he had any. Even then the investigation might not be conclusive. Maybe it will remain a
mystery forever, much as I imagine Mr. Conchis will remain a mystery to Nicholas, despite the
young man's best efforts to understand.