On Reading Zhang Ji's Old Lyric Poems
- Poetry of Bai Juyi

张君何为者？业文三十春。

尤工乐府诗，举代少其伦。

为诗意如何？六义互铺陈。

风雅比兴外，未尝著空文。

读君学仙诗，可讽放佚君。

读君董公诗，可诲贪暴臣。

读君商女诗，可感悍妇仁。

读君勤齐诗，可劝薄夫敦。

上可裨教化，舒之济万民。

下可理情性，卷之善一身。

始从青衿岁，迨此白发新。

日夜秉笔吟，心苦力亦勤。

时无采诗官，委弃如泥尘。

恐君百岁后，灭没人不闻。

愿藏中秘书，百代不湮沦。

愿播内乐府，时得闻至尊。

言者志之苗，行者文之根。

所以读君诗，亦知君为人。

如何欲五十，官小身贱贫。

病眼街西住，无人行到门。

Noble Zhang, what has become of you?

You worked at your poetry through thirty springs.

Masterful were your lyric poems,

Lifted above your peers by your new understanding.

For poetry, what did this mean?

A blossoming of meanings, which I will fully describe.

With elegance, which went beyond mere feelings,

You never wrote an empty word.

Reading your poems of studying immortality,

One intones the freeing of the gentleman in us.

Reading your poems of public service,

One learns the greed and corruption of state officers.

Reading your poems of working girls,

One feels the humanity of the purchased woman.

Reading your poems of industrious society,

One is urged to respond to the kind-heartedness in man.

At first, your poems are an aid to enlightenment:

Gently, they help all the myriad people.

Next, your poems bring order to the passions:

Like a broom, they sweep clean the whole body.

Then they yield the scholar's harvest

Until they have made his old age new.

Day and night, Zhang, your writing brush sang,

Your painstaking heart strong and constant.

Timeless, your opus, fit for noble offerings,

Now abandoned like so much clay and dust.

Zhang, I fear, one hundred years from now, for

Your destruction, when no man will hear you any more.

I wish you safety, within your mysterious pages

So that one hundred generations will not obscure you.

I hope that you spread, from within these lyric poems,

So that the future will bring you fame and reverence.

As wordsmith, you are the beginning of an ideal.

As journeyman, you are the root of culture.

Zhang, your poems, once known,

Endear themselves to us.

So why, now that you are almost fifty,

A minor official, poor and lowly,

Almost blind, and living along the Western Road,

Does no one make the journey to your door?