There is a beautiful woman like none other, | Copyright Kalany 2024
Residing in seclusion in an empty valley. | Originally hosted on kalany.org
She told me herself she was from a good family, | For reprint and reproduction licensing
Left out to dry and fall, dependent on wild plants. | contact Kalany via email: translation
"In the old bloodshed in the land between the passes, | at kalany.org
My brothers all met misfortune and were slaughtered.
Why hold high offices in such fawning esteem,
When they are forbidden to aid their own flesh and blood?
Noble passions and hatred both decay and rest.
The candle burns down; all things must change.
My husband is a soft, small son;
His new wife pleases him like jade.
The golden hour passes. Enamoured, I still knew,
A mandarin duck is not alone in the night.
Watching the new wife laugh before him,
Why listen to news of the old one weeping?
On the mountain, the stream water is clear.
Leaving the mountain, the stream water is muddy.
My servant girl returns from selling pearls,
And brings radishes to help with the thatched cottage.
A flower plucked without pinning the hair,
Is a cypress that will fill your hands with sympathy.
The heavens shiver, my jade arms are weak.
Sunset drapes gilding on the bamboo."
Line 7b: mandarin ducks (鸳鸯) are symbols of a happy marriage, believed to always be in mated pairs.
Line 11a: picking flowers (摘花) is slang for a man having sex with a woman, usually under circumstances that he shouldn't, either because she's a virgin or because he's coercing her.
In later use it particularly means entering a woman's rooms to rape her, but in Tang Dynasty poetry, it seems to be any form of "bad" sex, something we'd say in English that "deflowers" her.
Line 11a: pinning the woman's hair (插髮) is part of getting married
Line 11b: cypress (柏) is associated with chaste widowhood
Line 11b: the image of cupped hands (掬) is associated with handfuls of tears
Usually the whole thing is understood to be in the narrator's voice, but there's things here that make way more sense if it's instead narrating what she's saying to him. The "small soft son" makes so much more sense if she's throwing shade on his sexual ability as well as calling him a coward, for example.
I also think the end of the poem is hinting that she's sick and expects to die, or at least that she wants the narrator to think she is. This might be dramatics for sympathy, but it also might be true.
Writing poems from the point of view of women was a popular activity in the Tang Dynasty, and men often got praised for it. There are surviving poems by actual women, so ngl, I'm kind of judging them for it.