"Memories of the Past at Red Cliff" ["Nian Nu Jiao" by Su Shi]

East flows the mighty river,
Sweeping away the heroes of time past;
This ancient rampart on its western shore
Is Zhou Yu's Red Cliff of three Kingdoms' fame;
Here jagged boulders pound the clouds,
Huge waves tear banks apart,
And foam piles up a thousand drifts of snow;
A scene fair as a painting,
Countless the brave men here in time gone by!
I dream of Marshal Zhou Yu in his day
With his new bride, the Lord Qiao's younger daughter,
Dashing and debonair,
Silk-capped, with feather fan,
He laughed and jested
While the dread enemy fleet was burned to ashes!
In fancy through those scenes of old I range.
My heart overflowing, surely a figure of fun.
A man gray before his time.
Ah, this life is a dream,
Let me drink to the moon on the river!

-- Nian Nu Jiao           

Translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Taylor

With thanks to Chang Yao, who informs us that this is her favorite of the various translations of the poem she has read. "Yang Xianyi was a Chinese translator who translated many ancient and a few modern Chinese classics into English, including Dream of the Red Chamber (my favorite novel of all time), and he was also the first one to translate The Odyssey into Chinese from the ancient Greek original. Glady Taylor was a British translator, and wife of Yang Xianyi (the couple met at Oxford, where they studied together)."

Comments

[Alex Toh KAR TEK]

Nice work. I believe this is translated from the famous novel 红楼梦。 I have been looking for translation article and doing research on English to Chinese to help me for my work in making a translation learning platform. So far this is the first article that I came across doing translation for novel like this. It is indeed an eye opening how a Chinese novel can be translated into English like that. I can say it is a good job done!

I would like to offer a brief intro about my self. I do translation for website for English to Chinese. I hope to get some valuable opinion about how I can make a good translation learning platform. I have been using software and plugins to do auto translation and I can say that although Auto translation may not be able to get 100% accuracy, it can help us to cover a very large part of our job and save us a lot of our time. I am very grateful that google came up with it's google translate. However It will be good to touch up some of the translated words manually so as to perfect the translation by correcting errors
at had been arises caused by auto translation.

As such I had put up learning video guide for people who are interested to learn manually translation. And this will cover the missing puzzle for language translation. The video guide is made in such a way that it is very straight forward and don't cover too many explain-logy that
cause too much load for easy learning. They learner will need to go through a simple video guide explaining how to use Hanyu Pinyin. And after which every words are taught base on Hanyu Pinyin. The learner will be able to learn and pick up new words independently after he master
how to use Hanyu Pinyin.

[ye_yf]

Actually it is not from 红楼梦（Dream of the red chamber）.红楼梦 is a Qing Dynasty novel, while this poem is from the famous Song Dynasty poet Su Shi.There are about 5 centuries in between.

[Angela Castro]

Dear Alex, As pointed out by another viewer, this poem was not taken from the Dream of the Red Chamber, it was written by SU Shi or SU DongPo, and translated by the famous husband and wife team of Xianyi and Gladys YANG a long time ago. On the PoemHunter.com web site, you can find other attempts to translate the same poem, but somehow the translations just do not convey the same feeling as when we read the Chinese original.