James Chan's Cantonese Recital of the Tang Poem Chang Hen Ge by Bai Juyi
I am a native speaker of the Cantonese dialect, although I also speak Mandarin Chinese everyday to conduct business for my clients.
In the following, I'd like to recite the the T'ang Dynasty poem "Chang Hen Ge" ("Song of Endless Yearning for Lost Love" 长恨歌) by Bai Juyi in Cantonese.
The poem is about the tragic love affair between a Chinese emperor (T'ang Minghuang) and his favorite concubine (Yang Guifei) in eighth-century China. The poem was composed in the year 806 by Bai Juyi (772-824).
You can see the English translation of the poem by the American poet Witter Bynner below my video icon. Click on the "historical background" of the story in English provided by a writer of Chinese culture, Mr. Chung Yoon-Ngan. You can view the poem in Chinese (白居易 长恨歌).
I hope my recitation gives you a sense of what the poem would sound like when it was read some 1,200 years ago. Some scholars said that the Cantonese language preserves the original rhyme and feel of many Tang Dynasty poems because the Cantonese dialect has not changed greatly compared to Mandarin Chinese.
I felt a deep sense of beauty and pleasure when I first read the poem as a teenager in Hong Kong. I still feel that way whenever the words from the poem come to me in my dreams. I'd like to recite it in Cantonese because I am most comfortable doing it in the language in which I grew up. A number of native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, who are also accomplished actors and radio personalities, have already recited this poem in Mandarin. This is why I chose to recite it in Cantonese, especially no Cantonese-speaker, oddly enough, chose to do this.
For people who are new to East Asian languages, the "relationship" between Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese is similar to the "relationship" between Spanish (in Spain) and Catalan. Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese sound differently, even though the written Chinese characters remain the same.
Enjoy!
A Song of Unending Sorrow [Chang hen ge] by Bai Ju-yi (772-846) translated by Harold Witter Bynner (American poet, writer, and scholar 1881-1968).
China's Emperor, craving beauty that might shake an empire,
Was on the throne, for many years, searching, never finding,
Till a little child of the Yang clan, hardly even grown,
Bred in an inner chamber, with no one knowing her,
But with graces granted by heaven and not to be concealed,
At last one day was chosen for the imperial household.
If she but turned her head and smiled, they were cast a hundred spells,
And the powder and paint of the Six Palaces faded into nothing.
… It was early spring. They bathed her in the Flower-Pure Pool,
Which warmed and smoothed the creamy-tinted crystal of her skin,
And, because of her languor, a maid was lifting her
When first the Emperor noticed her and chose her for his bride.
The cloud of her hair, petal of her cheek, gold ripples of her crown when she moved,
Were sheltered on spring evenings by warm hibiscus-curtains;
But nights of spring were short and the sun arose too soon,
And the Emperor, from that time forth, forsook his early hearings
And lavished all his time on her with feasts and revelry,
His mistress of the spring, his despot of the night.
There were other ladies in his court, three thousand of rare beauty.
But his favors to three thousand were concentered in one body.
By the time she was dressed in her Golden Chamber, it would be almost evening;
And when tables were cleared in the Tower of Jade, she would loiter, slow with wine.
Her sisters and brothers all were given titles;
And, because she so illumined and glorified her clan,
She brought to every father, every mother through the empire,
Happiness when a girl was born rather than a boy.
… High rose Li Palace, entering blue clouds,
And far and wide the breezes carried magical notes
Of soft song and slow dance, of string and bamboo music,
The Emperor's eyes could never gaze on her enough --
Till war-drums, booming from Yu-yang, shocked the whole earth
And broke the tunes of The Rainbow Skirt and the Feathered Coat.
The Forbidden City, the nine-tiered palace, loomed in the dust
From thousands of horses and chariots headed southwest.
The imperial flag opened the way, now moving and now pausing --
But thirty miles from the capital, beyond the western gate,
The men of the army stopped, not one of them would stir
Till under their horses' hoofs they might trample those moth-eyebrows...
Flowery hairpins fell to the ground, no one picked them up,
And a green and white jade hair-tassel and a yellow-gold hair-bird.
The Emperor could not save her, he could only cover his face.
And later when he turned to look, the place of blood and tears
Was hidden in a yellow dust blown by a cold wind.
…At the cleft of the Dagger-Tower Trail they crisscrossed through a cloud-line
Under E-mei Mountain. The last few came.
Flags and banners lost their color in the fading sunlight …
But as waters of Shu are always green and its mountains always blue,
So changeless was his majesty's love and deeper than the days.
He stared at the desolate moon from his temporary palace.
He heard bell-notes in the evening rain, cutting at his breast.
And when heaven and earth resumed their round and the dragon-car faced home,
The Emperor clung to the spot and would not turn away
From the soil along the Ma-wei slope, under which was buried
That memory, that anguish. Where was her jade-white face?
Ruler and lords, when eyes would meet, wept upon their coats
As they rode, with loose rein, slowly eastward, back to the capital.
…The pools, the gardens, the palace, all were just as before,
The Lake Tai-yi hibiscus, the Wei-yang Palace willows;
But a petal was like her face and a willow-leaf her eyebrow--
And what could he do but cry whenever he looked at them?
… Peach-trees and Plum-trees blossomed, in the winds of spring;
Lakka-forage fell to the ground, after autumn rains;
The Western and Southern Palaces were littered with late grasses;
And the steps were mounded with red leaves that no one swept away.
Her Pear-Carden Players became white-haired
And the eunuchs thin-eyebrowed in her Court of Pepper-Trees;
Over the throne flew fireflies, while he brooded in the twilight.
He would lengthen the lamp-wick to its end and still could never sleep.
Bell and drum would slowly toll the dragging night-hours
And the River of Stars grow sharp in the sky, just before dawn,
And the porcelain mandarin-ducks on the roof grow thick with morning frost
And his covers of kingfisher-blue feel lonelier and colder
With the distance between life and death year after year;
And yet no beloved spirit ever visited his dreams.
… At Ling-ch’un lived a Taoist priest who was a guest of heaven,
Able to summon spirits by his concentrated mind.
And people were so moved by the Emperor's constant brooding
That they besought the Taoist priest to see if he could find her.
He opened his way in space and clove the ether like lightning
Up to heaven, under the earth, looking everywhere.
Above, he searched the Green Void, below, the Yellow Spring;
But he failed, in either place, to find the one he looked for.
And then he heard accounts of an enchanted isle at sea,
A part of the intangible and incorporeal world,
With pavilions and fine towers in the five-colored air,
And of exquisite immortals moving to and fro,
And of one among them -- whom they called The Ever True --
With a face of snow and flowers resembling hers he sought.
So he went to the West Hall's gate of gold and knocked at the jasper door
And asked a girl, called Morsel-of-Jade, to tell The Doubly-Perfect.
And the lady, at news of an envoy from the Emperor of China,
Was startled out of dreams in her nine-flowered canopy.
She pushed aside her pillow, dressed, shook away sleep,
And opened the pearly shade and then the silver screen.
Her cloudy hair-dress hung on one side because of her great haste,
And her flower-cap was loose when she came along the terrace,
While a light wind filled her cloak and fluttered with her motion
As though she danced The Rainbow Skirt and the Feathered Coat.
And the tear-drops drifting down her sad white face
Were like a rain in spring on the blossom of the pear.
But love glowed deep within her eyes when she bade him thank her liege,
Whose form and voice had been strange to her ever since their parting --
Since happiness had ended at the Court of the Bright Sun,
And moons and dawns had become long in Fairy-Mountain Palace.
But when she turned her face and looked down toward the earth
And tried to see the capital, there were only fog and dust.
So she took out, with emotion, the pledges he had given
And, through his envoy, sent him back a shell box and gold hairpin,
But kept one branch of the hairpin, and one side of the box,
Breaking the gold of the hairpin, breaking the shell of the box;
"Our souls belong together," she said, "like this gold and this shell --
Somewhere, sometime, on earth or in heaven, we shall surely meet."
And she sent him, by his messenger, a sentence reminding him
Of vows which had been known only to their two hearts:
"On the seventh day of the Seventh-month, in the Palace of Long Life,
We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world
That we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one,
And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree."
… Earth endures, heaven endures; sometime both shall end,
While this unending sorrow goes on and on for ever.
Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang Dynasty 618-906 translated by Witter Bynner with an Introduction by Dr. Kiang Kang-hu. Taipei, Taiwan: Wen Xiang Books Co. Ltd., 1994, pp. 115-122. ISBN 957-9203-95-4
James Chan's recitation of Chang Hen Ge by Bai Juyi in Cantonese Chinese
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