The grass of Yan is like emerald threads;
The mulberry of Qin lowers its green twigs.
Confronting the day you think of returning,
It is time for this girl’s intestines to get torn.
The spring breeze is no acquaintance of mine;
Why does it enter through the silk curtain?
燕草如碧絲
秦桑低綠枝
當君懷歸日
是妾斷腸時
春風不相識
何事入羅幃
From Hyun Woo:
In medieval East Asia, a lot of male poets wrote poems with female narrators. Such poetic narrators were often heartbroken young women. While many European languages would prefer to say ‘break the heart’, its equivalent expression in Chinese is ‘tear the intestines’.
The conventional understanding of the poem above is that the narrator and her lover are separated by distance and she misses him. Yan is a region in the North, and Qin is in its southwest. I do not want to get into explaining Classical Chinese grammar and vocabulary, but I do not agree with such reading. My view is that the girl and her lover are still physically together, yet he has decided to leave her.
Though at the same time of the year, spring, Yan is still cold and its grass is thin like threads. In contrast, the mulberry of Qin is already lowering its twigs: it is so warm in Qin that the tree limbs have already grown enough to become heavy. I like to imagine that the first two lines were what the girl’s lover told her, instead of plainly saying ‘you and I are so different, and I do not love you like you love me. This can’t work,’ for better or for worse.
Thus comes the day when she has to face that he has made up his mind to go back home and her intestines are torn. At that moment, the spring breeze enters through the silk curtain. Spring is usually associated with erotic love in East Asia, as in many other parts of the world. It should also be noted that in traditional East Asian mansions, silk curtains are frequently used to separate a rich woman’s private space from other spaces. To sum up, the erotic love that she has known becomes unfamiliar to her all of a sudden. It is no longer her acquaintance.
If you enjoyed my work, you can buy me a cup of tea. I am not a coffee person, by the way.
Welp, I was completely wrong. I guess the Chinese took their intestines seriously. It's cool to learn this poem. Perhaps I should read more from you, never read Chinese poems before
That bit about intestines being torn took me back. Thanks for explaining it as I started to wonder if this was a horror poem! LOL