River Snow by Liu Zongyuan

Through a Window with Raindrops

千山鳥飛絕，
萬徑人蹤滅。
孤舟簑笠翁，
獨釣寒江雪。

No flights of birds past mountains,
No footprints will paths show.
An old man only from his boat
Is fishing through the snow.

Linked to dVerse Pub Talk. Bjorn is hosting and the theme is translation. The above is my translation of Liu Zongyuan’s Tang dynasty poem, “River Snow”. It is number 244 in the 300 Tang Poems anthology.

Photos: “Through a Window with Rain Drops”, above, and “River White with Blooms”, below.

River White with Blooms

Author: Frank Hubeny

I enjoy walking, poetry and short prose as well as taking pictures with my phone.

20 thoughts on “River Snow by Liu Zongyuan”

        1. Only when relatives are around, but I may start those translations again. My goal was to translate all 300 of those Tang poems from that anthology. Having a goal like that would help me learn the language better.

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      1. I’m impressed, Frank! Chinese is a difficult language to learn – spoken or written. I forgot quite a bit. When my dad was alive and when I wrote to him. I would draw a little picture or wrote something but put a question mark, he understood what I wanted to say. I learned the traditional Chinese, as you have in your poem. Now the younger generation all write the simplified Chinese. I had no idea what they are!

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        1. I mainly learned the simplified Chinese except for these traditional poems. It does add some confusion to have two different ways to write a character, but after I figure out what the poem means (at least to me) then I think of how I might say that in English. I wouldn’t try writing a poem in Chinese.

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