A seasonal poem? A meditation on death? What does one do with Bai Juyi’s poem Autumn Thoughts (秋思)? Rob and Lee hash it out as they watch the leaves fall on two different continents.
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Hello there
I’m a student from Germany that recently discovered this marvellous podcast. I’m actually majoring in “Modern China”, so I have to admit that I’m not really familiar with Classical Chinese (yet!).
I’m quiet embarrassed to ask this, but I simply can’t find the Chinese original of the poem, or at least not one that seems to match (?) the translation discussed during the episode. Could someone help me out here a bit? I would really enjoy taking a look at the Chinese text myself.
Thanks a lot in advance.
Hey Luisa, this is Lee, thanks for reaching out to us and thanks even more for your kind words.
Here is a link to Bai Juyi’s poem, “Autumn Thoughts.” Here is a different link.
Also, I should apologize. We try to put the original poem along with our translation up on the website when we do a podcast on a poem. But it looks like we did not. I think that is because this podcast aired as I was defending my dissertation.
In general, Baidu often has websites for many of the poems you will encounter in an Intro to Chinese Literature textbook. I like using them as a resource because they often have a translation of the poem into 白話, which is really helpful if your 文言文 is still very 馬馬虎虎. I use Baidu to help me check my translations into English. I would however recommend the Hong Kong version of Baidu, which usually has the poem in 繁體字, though I am having trouble finding the Hong Kong version of the baidu page for this poem.
Thanks for reaching out, let us know if we can help out further. Shoot us an email at chineseliteraturepodcast at gmail.com.