惠崇春江晚景（第二首）
原作: 苏轼（字子瞻, 号东坡居士; 11世纪北宋）
英译及赏析: 闵晓红(2025)
两两归鸿欲破群，依依还似北归人。
遥知朔漠多风雪，更待江南半月春。
On “A River Spring Dawn” （Poem two)
--an inscription for the painting by Monk Hui Chong
written by Su Shi (11th AC, social name 'Dongpo')
old En. trans. by G. Osing, J. Min & H. Huang (1990)
Revision+ annot. by Julia Min (2025)
A flock of wild ducks set off, heading north;
While two, lagging behind, left the formation.
The desolate desert is in snow and wind chill;
So better stay longer in River South spring.
Appreciation:
Hui Chong（965- 1017）was a Song Dynasty monk, and a painter particularly famous for his landscape paintings with mountains and water features often enriched with geese, ducks and birds – an expression of everyday life in the country, or in an academic word, humanism. It could be a collector seeking for an inscription from Su Shi on the painting. Unfortunately, like many artistic works lost to the invasion of the Jin and the Liao, or later in history, the painting is no longer found. Fortunately, the picture has lived through this poem, and has been very well-known ever since. Every school pupil in China can recite it. The 2nd line is often quoted in literature.
Indeed, Su Shi has successfully put into living words the moment when all of nature come to life where other dimensions of physical sensations are technically built into the one surface of a painting. The painting pleases the eye like poetry, whereas the poem presents the picture in rhyming motion. The Song people would say: you can paint poetry, and also, you may compose a painting with words.
For your interest, the western landscape paintings didn’t start as a genre until a few hundred years later, starting during the renaissance and peaked in industrial revolustion period.
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