The Edge of the Sky
the spring sun is at the edge of the sky
at the edge of the sky it tilts once again
orioles sing as though they’ve got tears to shed
that wet only the highest flowers
天涯
李商隐
春日在天涯
天涯日又斜
莺啼如有泪
为湿最高花
Notes
a deceptively simple poem, only twenty syllables, and “sun” and “edge of the sky” are repeated. plain, almost empty verbs “is” and “have” are used instead of verbs that are poetically dense with meaning.
i realize that 天涯 tian ya is wonderfully untranslatable and in many cases you wouldn’t use “edge of the sky”, but please consider it here for the assonance, the number of stresses per line,1 and the parallelism with “the highest”. everything is extreme and nigh-unsayable with a li shangyin.
with thanks to “how long”, anaïs mitchell
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“the last line of a poem is often one foot short: this both adds a sense of finality and reflects the briefer content of the final lines of many Chinese poems.” (Translating Spring View, chinese-poems.com) in this poem, as in “Spring View”, the last couplet is one continuous sentence. ↩︎