四块玉•别情 / Sadness at Parting

BY Guan Hanqing
TRANSLATED BY David Lunde
Chinese

自送别，心难舍，一点相思几时绝？凭阑袖拂杨花雪。溪又斜，山又遮，人去也！

English Translation

Ever since we said farewell
my heart has been wrenched by longing.
This lingering need,
when will it end?
Leaning against the railing
my sleeves sweep off
a snowfall of willow catkins.
The stream winds away;
the hill blocks my view.
My love is gone!

 

Biography

关汉卿（约1220年－1300年），元代杂剧作家，中国代戏曲创作的代表人物。也位为 “元曲四大家” 之首。

GUAN HANQING (c. 1220-1300 CE) lived in Ta-tu (now Peking), capital of the Yuan dynasty when the Mongols ruled China. He wrote poetry and operatic drama. His poems — or songs, as poems were always sung — were mostly on romantic subjects. He wrote more than sixty dramas, of which only fourteen have survived. A noted critic of the period judged him the best dramatist of his time.

DAVID LUNDE‘s poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Triquarterly, Kansas Quarterly, Northwest Review, and others. His work has been included in forty anthologies. He is the author of eleven books of poems and translations, including Nightfishing in Great Sky River (Anamnesis Press, 1999); The Carving of Insects: Brian Zhilin’s Collected Poems (Renditions, 2006, co-translated with Mary M.Y. Fung, winner of the 2007 PEN USA Translation Award); Instead (Mayapple Press, 2007); Breaking the Willow (White Pine Press, 2008), and 300 Tang Poems (White Pine Press, 2011).

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