Traveling by night I record my thoughts
Thin grass in a slight wind on the riverbank,
a high mast on the lone night boat.
The stars hang down over the vast wild plain,
the moon surges up from the great river flowing.
How can I make a name for myself by writing?
I’ve had to retire from office, sick and old.
Drifting, drifting—what is this like?
A seagull between heaven and earth
— Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770) translated by Julie Sullivan
旅夜書懷
細草微風岸，危檣獨夜舟；
星垂平野闊，月湧大江流。
名豈文章著？官應老病休；
飄飄何所似？天地一沙鷗。
Julie Sullivan: This is one of the best-known poems of one of the great poets of China, Du Fu. He was born in a privileged family and grew up wearing fur, riding horses, and touring famous sites. Despite or because of his precocious literary brilliance, he never passed the imperial exams and could therefore not attain high office, but he had a happy life with his family until the An Lushan Rebellion broke out, one of the ten bloodiest conflicts in all of human history. The emperor fled, most of the royal family was massacred in horrendous ways, the capital was sacked, and millions of people died of war and famine in the next eight years. Du Fu and his family fled north on foot with other refugees. He was pressed into service as a laborer by the rebels and by the time he returned to his family, two of his children had died of starvation. When the empire was restored, he was briefly rewarded with a post for his loyalty, but he soon lost it again for siding with a disgraced friend. He spent the rest of his life moving his family from place to place, in Sichuan province far from home, dependent on the patronage of his highly placed friends to survive. At the time this was written, he had given up all hope of another government position and was living out his days resigned to poverty and ill health.
I love this poem because of the images, especially of the stars hanging down over the vast wilderness, as they do every night here in western Colorado. These are some of the most famous lines in Chinese poetry.
Du Fu makes us feel the simple humanity of everyone he writes about, including himself. David Hawkes compared Du Fu’s writing about himself to the tiny, unimportant human figure you often see in the corner of a Chinese landscape painting. He doesn’t ever take himself too seriously. I love him so much.
I translated this myself, but there are many, many translations of this famous poem. Here are some more.
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