床前明月光
疑是地上霜
舉頭望明月
低頭思故鄉
And here is my translation:
A pool of bright moonlight before my bed--
I wonder: is it frost upon the ground?
To gaze at the bright moon I raise my head,
Then lower it with thoughts of my hometown.
Li Bai's poem is particularly appropriate for the Mid-Autumn/Moon Festival for a number of reasons. First--and perhaps most obviously--the poem refers to the moon, which is celebrated on this holiday. Second, in traditional Chinese culture the moon is often associated with the idea of family reunions, and that is one of the main purposes of the Mid-Autumn Festival--to reunite with family. Moreover, the poem implies that the poet is away from home, and his family--otherwise, why would he lower his head in sadness looking at the moon, which reminds him of his hometown? The sadness of being away from home and family seems to be a common theme in traditional Chinese poetry--much more than romantic love in fact! This gives us a sense of how important one's family and hometown are in Chinese culture.
Regarding my translation of the poem--I attempted in this translation to give the reader a sense of the fact that in the original Chinese the poem has a sort of meter (five characters per line) and rhyme. However, it proved impossible to duplicate the poem's original meter and rhyme scheme (aaba) in English, as classical Chinese (the language in which the poem is written) expresses ideas much more concisely than English does and the rhyme scheme used is not typical in English. Instead, I gave my translati0n a sort of meter (ten syllables per line, but perhaps not quite perfect iambic pentameter) and a rhyme scheme more typical in English poetry--abab (however, in fact, there is actually an assonance rather than a real rhyme between lines 2 and 4). I would hardly claim that my translation is the best translation of Li Bai's poem, but I hope it can at lease give any reader who is unfamiliar with Chinese some sense of its meaning. Happy Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhongqiujie)!
Image 0f Li Bai from Wikimedia Commons