67 Followers
39 Following
Leopard

Leopard

Currently reading

Taiga?s True Views: The Language of Landscape Painting in Eighteenth-Century Japan by Melinda Takeuchi (1994-06-01)
Melinda Takeuchi
The History of England, Vol 2
David Hume
The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle
Richard H. Popkin
Cicero: On Moral Ends (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Raphael Woolf, Julia Annas
Das Goldene Vlies: Dramatisches Gedicht in Drei Abteilungen
Franz Grillparzer
Euripides IV: Rhesus / The Suppliant Women / Orestes / Iphigenia in Aulis
Charles R. Walker, Frank William Jones, William Arrowsmith, David Grene, Euripides, Richmond Lattimore
Notes from Underground & The Double
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jesse Coulson
The World of Thought in Ancient China
Benjamin I. Schwartz
The Last Generation of the Roman Republic
Erich S. Gruen
The Legend of Gold and Other Stories
William J. Tyler, Jun Ishikawa, Ishikawa Jun

Poem by Fan Chengda (1126-1193)

                              Composed Ten Days Before Spring

 

 

Spring's almost on us, but we still owe winter ten days;

Busy with paperwork, I regret how quickly life passes.

My poems are too weak to fetch me some snow,

And wine has lost its magic to dispel my sorrows.

Yet the season would never bully a sick man like me;

We scholars just like to gripe about our problems all the time.

Why do we fret and worry so much during the short span we're allotted?

After all that fuss and bother, we end up in a dirt hole anyway!

 

 

Translated by J.D. Schmidt in the excellent Stone Lake: The Poetry of Fan Chengda, 1126-1193 (1992).