水柔逐器知難定，
雲出無心肯再歸。
惆悵春風楚江暮，
鴛鴦一隻失羣飛。
Water, being soft, seeks holding;
But knows it won’t last.
Clouds disperse, and lack heart to return.
The spring day is over now, for this river;
And the rueful wind goads
A widowed duck, lost amidst the sky.
This is the second poem that Yu Xuan-Ji entitled ‘Farewell,’ the first was published in the previous post, where the motif of dispersing clouds also appeared.
This subsequent poem is less intensely personal, and more abstract and philosophical: Yu writing about the same relationship perhaps after the passage of time. ‘Water seeking a vessel’ is a very Daoist image, as the Dao will flow into any receptive container; but the flow of attraction is very similar, and similarly impermanent—unless there is a heart. The clouds which disperse in both poems show Yu’s perception that ‘a lover’ is not just a body, but a total ambient presence of ideas and feelings and fragrances and visuals and more; unless ‘clouds’ can coalesce around a ‘heart’, they must disperse, with no return.
At the ‘turn’ of the poem, where the images change, we get the feeling that Yu is the river here, flowing within the banks of herself; the word chŭ 楚 (translated here as ‘goad’) is usually left out of translations of this poem, as the modern definitions do not seem to fit. But in ancient Chinese 楚 meant ‘thistles’ or ‘a handful of thistles used as a whip’. So while in the first poem her ‘wild moth’ of desire still fluttered dangerously around the lamp of love, even as that lamp faded and failed, here the full painful effect of these feelings torture her, she who is also the lone duck, the bereaved survivor of a pair of mandarin ducks, who in legend mate for life. The spring wind, by the way, is that which breaks up ice, dissolving connections.
(translation and comments by Steve Clavey)
The Fat Monk 