It's Spring Break, time for a little bit of extra pleasure reading. Just for fun, I'm reading translations of Chinese poetry that Arthur Waley did in the 1910s. For English readers of those days, it must have been like going your whole life without any knowledge of Chinese food and then suddenly getting a free pass to eat at a world-class restaurant featuring Western takes on Asian classics. Just read this one, it's outstanding:
Thank you, archive.org. How does this poem sound in Chinese? Since we have the internet nowadays, we should be able to compare Waley's translations directly with Chinese texts, even as we sit in
coffeeshops and sip our beers. The trouble with many of these particularly ancient poems is that "anon., 1st cent. B.C." is not the most helpful of citations. I'll be honest: I took over an hour to track this poem down. But it was a very interesting journey, a tour via Google through many odd corners of the web. I knew I was getting close when I located the phrase,
Runan ji 汝南雞, lit. "the cock of Ru'nan [Ju-nan]" which many dictionaries
online gloss as "In ancient times, a chicken that came from Runan, said to have a particularly good crow." From there I discovered that another common idiomatic phrase is
Runan chen ji 汝南晨雞, "the morning cock at Ju-nan." Aha! From there it was a simple matter to track the poem back to a 12th-century text called the
Yuefu shi ji 樂府詩集. This gigantic anthology of songs contains the
Ji ming ge 雞鳴歌 "Cock-Crow Song." Commentary in this entry tells us that back in the Han dynasty, there were "chicken men"
jiren 雞人, who were in charge of guarding the chickens on the palace grounds. When the roosters crowed just before dawn, the "chicken men" would also lift up their voices in song. The commentary does not explcitly say so, but I suppose this is what they sang.
Chinese Text: 東 方 欲 明 星 爛 爛 ， 汝 南 晨 雞 登 壇 喚 。 曲 終 漏 盡 嚴 具 陳 ， 月 沒 星 稀 天 下 旦 。 千 門 萬 戶 遞 魚 鑰 ， 宮 中 城 上 飛 烏 鵲 。
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