城春草木深

 As a Hindutva fanatic, I have done more than my share when it comes to shitting on Urdu poetry. But what of Chinese? 

Consider the following extract from 'the excellent Language Log' website-

Du Fu’s “Spring Landscape” appears to non-Chinese readers like a block of ice, outwardly even and unified:

guó pò shānhé zài
chéng chūn cǎomù shēn
gǎn shí huā jiàn lèi
hèn bié niǎo jīng xīn
fēnghuǒ lián sān yuè
jiāshū dǐ wàn jīn
báitóu sāo gèng duǎn
hún yù bùshèng zān

国破山河在
城春草木深
感时花溅泪
恨别鸟惊心
烽火连三月
家书抵万金
白头搔更短
浑欲不胜簪

The poem is an experience; it’s trippy. Meaning is generated across its various planes—across couplets and images, vertically and horizontally. Hinton’s translation maintains the couplets that are the basic unit of Tang poetic forms, and he creates his ice-cube shape by enjambing the lines:

The country in ruins, rivers and mountains
continue. The city grows lush with spring.

Blossoms scatter tears for us, and all these
separations in a bird’s cry startle the heart.

Beacon-fires three months ablaze: by now
a mere letter’s worth ten thousand in gold,

and worry’s thinned my hair to such white
confusion I can’t even keep this hairpin in.

In an essay that follows, Hinton notes that the opening is “possibly the most famous line in Chinese poetry” and that the poem is a sharp and unexpectedly wry observation of man-made tragedies overrun by the endless coming-into-being of the ten thousand things (all that exists, in the idiom of Chinese philosophy). Du Fu tells us that birds seem to cry for us, and blossoms weep. Of course, this is a fairy-tale view, and “in the knowledge of its falsity, heartbreaking.” Du Fu’s discomfiting joke at the end both overturns and accepts his fear and anxiety.

The idea that one must know that Du Fu’s metaphors are false to get the emotional point of the poem strikes me as bizarre.

Smarty-pants fuckers wot rite fur 'Language Log' don't know from bizarre. 

Shite like this- 

Our Civic Sorrow, by icy peaks, caged  & Yellow floods broken

 East Wind enraged: we Sinned against its Ji Li token

All tha'ts green weeps that our meadows are dust

While City walls & streets crack to foliage's lust

Ai! My mind is one with birds, dismayed, departing

Startled by but what Nature is re-starting

For letters from home, a hungry ghost

Tho' our Wars last months at most.

Guarding hoarded treasure

Is leisure without pleasure.

I am old. My hair grows thin

How fasten a Mandarin pin?

I know. The above is truly horrible. What is sad is that it isn't purely Hindutva bile & bigotry . I am indebted to Urdu- a language successive Hindu Prime Ministers have failed to exile to fucking Pakistan. 

Thus, my worthless response to 

城春草木深

“In spring, the city is overgrown with dense vegetation.”

was dictated by 

उग रहा है दर ओ दीवार से सब्ज़ा ग़ालिब

हम बयाबान में हैं और घर में बाहार आयी है.

Ug raha hai dar o deevar me sabza Ghalib

Ham bayaban me hain aur ghar me bahar aayi hai

Which may not be by Ghalib at all. 

But, if Fran Pritchett says the following is kosher, then it must be totes halal. 

{129,1}

hai sabzah-zār har dar-o-dīvār-e ġham-kadah

jis kī bahār yih ho phir us kī ḳhizāñ nah pūchh

1) it's a verdant meadow, every door and wall of the grief-chamber

2) the one whose springtime/flourishing would be this-- then/afterwards/again, his/its autumn-- don't ask!

Is there a purely Hindu 'locus classicus' for this 'mazmun'? Sure. But, so far as I know, it is late Avestan & thus ab ovo Tocharian or otherwise Tarim Basin based. 

Correct my ignorance, if you can be bothered.

Don't. The only reason my blog has recieved 3.5 million visitors is because 'bots' think me hilarious. I got news for them. I have a very low IQ. My stupidity isn't representative of my species. 

Except politically or in a non-STEM academic context. There, even my neighbour's cat (quondam President of the Institute of Socioproctology till I retraced my own allegations of sexual abuse against myself) is smarter than fuckers who have tenure at Ivy League.

Incidentally, this is how current AI translates my poem

Your Poem Rendered in Du Fu–Style Classical Chinese

國破山河在， 春深草木繁。 感時花自淚， 念別鳥驚魂。

烽火連三月， 家書值萬金。 白頭添更短， 衰髮不勝簪。