User Comments - darylk

Posted on: The Brocade Zither -- 锦瑟

Thank you, Pete, for a lovely lesson. Li Shang yin is also my favorite Tang poet. My interpretation is slightly different, although perhaps ultimately complementary to yours. Put crudely, I think the poem is about the inability of language and thought (which depends on language) to capture the evanescent essence of life (if evanescence can even have an essence!).  Language has a kind of fixity to it, yet we live at the border, in transitions. The zither has “50 strings”—or it once upon a time it had fifty. Already the first image suggests change.  Perhaps the poet himself as a youth saw the 50 strings but now the instrument has only 25.  The noun “zither” sounds fixed but the instrument changes.  The change coupled with the potential/actual vibrating of the resonant strings evokes the changes in his own life—from a youth (of 25 year-strings (perhaps an echo of “nian” in “xian”?)) to a middle aged man (of 50 perhaps?).  Are we dreaming/awake or in a shadowland that is neither one or the other? Zhuangzi wasn’t sure; and what about the emperor—man or bird; historical leader or figure of legends?  Our lives are like the wavering reflection of the moon in the water—indeed, our bright moon and pearl-like eyes brim up, filling as we think back on youth, dreams, loves lost and found. Our eyes themselves seem a strange mixture of solid flesh and liquid tears.  We become ever more like the reflected image.  Language that seems so certain and fixed—as hard as a piece of jade—is revealed to be as insubstantial as smoke as the poem progresses, akin to  the many echoes of a vibrating string playing a tune we seem to know but can’t quite recall or place.  We go from beginning to end (of life, memory, the poem, all things) only to find we have always been already baffled.  Time itself becomes so confused that we don’t know which tense applies—past, present, past perfect, present perfect.  We have arrived only to be nowhere in particular.

Posted on: Depression, Awards and Menu Theft

Gong xi, gong xi! What's your next big win? Eurovision 2009???

Posted on: Watching the Sun Go Down -- 登乐游原

I love this feature.  Classical Chinese culture is so rich and relevant--sometimes we in America feel that we are watching the sun go down on our regime, if not on our system. It's helpful to keep these changes in perspective.

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 10: Lao Wang Plans to Sue

I love the lawyer's voice. I think the same actor was the lead gangster in the ninja episode, no? Is there some subtle equating of lawyers with gangsters?  Maybe the lawyers will draw the case out so long (a la Dickens' Bleak House) that Bill will just ask Lao Wang to come back to the firm--cheaper that way!

Posted on: GPS Fail

This lesson reminds me about that poor couple whose seatbelt warning system malfunctioned in their rental car. They had to listen to "fasten your seat belt" for 6 hours as they drove up an Hawaiian mountain and then came back down.

Posted on: Two Poems about Music -- 弹琴 and 听筝

Qiu Xiaolong's new mystery novel The Mao Case has some striking insights into Mao's poetry--it seems Mao's poems were heavily coded.  Today's scholars are reading them in new ways. Qiu himself is an extremely accomplished translator of Tang poetry. Some of the lines of translated poetry in his novel took my breath away.

Posted on: Two Poems about Music -- 弹琴 and 听筝

Thanks for your response Pete. I really loved the comments you made about the characters in the Qing Ming poem. Your glosses helped tremendously with the memorization --eg., the people on the road are "cut off"--duan--from their spirit.  Keep those etymological insights coming.

I agree with Holt's point--the more poetry one memorizes, the easier it becomes to memorize poems.  Still, length matters. Context helps & etymology (for me) is king (or queen).

Posted on: Two Poems about Music -- 弹琴 and 听筝

I love this shorter poems. I've been trying to memorize them and the shorter ones are far easier than the longer ones. I appreciate Pete that you've been speaking slower when interpreting the poem. Before you went so fast that I couldn't really take in what you were saying--as far as I am concerned, you could even speak a bit more slowly than you did in this lesson. Don't worry about the length. People can pause the lesson or come back to it later if they are short on time.

Posted on: Which Finger?

Wa! Hard to listen to this lesson.  I guess all we can hope is that they were looking at his left, rather than right, hand.

Posted on: Gone Fishing

Boy, I feel deprived. All we caught in Kansas were June bugs, stink bugs, and caterpillars.