The Wandering Poet
Translating the song 诗人的旅途
Intro
Have you ever gotten a years-long earworm? For me, it started a few years ago when I watched season 1 of the Chinese singing show 我们的歌 (Our Songs). One episode had a particular song 诗人的旅途 (lit. “The Poet’s Journey”) that I didn’t understand very much at all, but the melody was absolutely gorgeous.
Fast forward to today, and I am stuck in bed for the third day in a row recovering from a particularly nasty illness. Surrounded by tissues and creature comforts, I was scrolling YouTube for a good distraction when I stumbled upon same episode. So 诗人的旅途 has now been playing on repeat for a good hour 😂 And since I’ve got some free time and not a lot of energy, I embarked on a journey to figure out what the heck this song is actually saying! My Chinese language fluency is around HSK6, but less common phrases, like technical language or poetry, go over my head if I don’t concentrate.
Armed with Gemini and Google Translate, my research reveals that 诗人的旅途 (“The Poet’s Journey”) stemmed from a Chinese musical called 蝶 (Butterfly). It is an adaptation of the Chinese folktale of the Butterfly Lovers, which is a tale of ill-fated lovers and is the equivalent to Romeo and Juliet in the Western canon.
Maybe it’s because the clock just struck 2am and I’m a bit loopy, but I was feeling so overwhelmed by the beauty of the lyrics that I decided the proper thing to do was to translate the song into English. Right now. What is sleep anyways???
After doing a literal translation, I decided to push it further to match the cadence and mood of the original melody. I’d love to hear someone sing it, but my voice isn’t one for such a production! Perhaps I’ll look into AI at a later date.
Translation
| Literal - The Poets Path | As song lyrics - The Wandering Poet | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| The wandering poet has his own journey | The wandering poet walks his own road | The English language tends to require more action-oriented language to keep the same vibe! |
| In bustling ports | From busy city port | |
| In desolate canyons | To desolated fjord | The Chinese word for canyons 峡谷 evokes a misty green-ness with running water. However, the English word for canyon gives me more of a Wild West, Grand Canyon feeling. So I switched the word to “fjord”, both for a better rhyme scheme and to maintain the aesthetic. |
| To corners far from the hubbub | To corners of the world we don’t know | |
| The wandering poet has his own singing voice | The wandering poet sings his own song | |
| At fiery red dawn | From brilliant red dawn | |
| At gentle dusk | To gentle golden dusk | The Chinese phrase for dusk 黄昏 actually has the word for “yellow” or “gold” 黄 written directly into it! A detail that would be lost in literal translation. |
| When faced with night, he is never silent | When nighttime falls his voice will rise up | Again, the English language tends to require a subject for the action to sound natural. |
| The great earth is as vast as dreams | “The earth, vast as in our dreams | In the original song, it’s unclear whether these next few stanzas are specifically meant to be a quote from Liang Shan Bo. But the story felt much more cohesive if read as a letter, especially with the sign-off at the end, so I went with that structure in my translation. I debated between “earth” and “world” in this line but chose “earth” to maintain the contrast with “stars” in the next line. |
| The stars descend on the face of the sea | The stars, they fall upon the seas | The word for “descend” (坠落) evokes flower petals or fall leaves fluttering towards the ground. I was debating between “raining” and “falling,” but “falling” felt better when sung! |
| Sailing across the roiling, boundless grasslands | When I sail across the endless green hills | How could I convey turbulent waves and grasslands in much fewer syllables? I went with “hills” 😆 It also feels more familiar and easier to sing for an English audience than “grasslands.” Again, not a literal translation, but it kept the same vibe! |
| Who could drop their anchor? | Who could anchor me? | I loved this line SO MUCH! However, I did not love trying to rhyme the word “anchor” with anything. So I leaned further into painting Liang Shan Bo as the active subject of these verses—instead of a philosophical “who would stop?” it became “who could stop me?” |
| Fingers cradled by night wind | Fingers twining the night breeze | I love how we went from a painting of the grandness of nature to the depiction of small, intimate moments. |
| Spirit caressed by flowing water | My heart cradled by the streams | There is no good English translation for “胸怀.” The dictionary gave me “soul, spirit, mind, heart, quintessence.” I think “essence” is probably the literal closest, but the character “胸” (chest) in the phrase also ties the concept physically to the chest. So, I went with “heart.” Every good song needs a reference to the corazón! |
| On those roads | If you walk those roads | |
| Perhaps they’ll remember me. | Maybe they would remember me.“ | Here, I aimed to keep the vagueness on whether “they” referred to people or the roads themselves. |
| Liang Shan Bo | LSB | My face when I realized the initials would actually work here 😬 I guess it’s similar to how Aaron Burr sings his signature in Your Obedient Servant! Remember, it’s a musical, singing your own initials isn’t weird at all! 😆 |
Waldeinsamkeit
The German word waldeinsamkeit roughly translates to “the sublime or spiritual one feeling one has while being alone in the woods.” To me, this song feels like that concept in music.
There’s another term Stendhal syndrome, also known as Florence syndrome, which is a psychosomatic condition where individuals experience rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion, and even fainting when exposed to objects or artworks of great beauty. Maybe that’s what struck me, or maybe it’s that the time is now 4 am 🙃
Reflections
This was a good project to expand my Chinese and also scratched my wordplay itch. I discovered a few interesting patterns while doing it:
- English constantly demands a subject and action
- Chinese tends to favor rhyming the sound “wo,” whereas in English, it’s much easier to rhyme the sound “ee.” Both happen to be the sounds for “me” in their respective languages.
- Chinese needs less rhyming in its lyric schemes. The Chinese stanzas rhymed “BCDA, EFGA” and “BACA, DAEA.” In English, we typically need ABAB, AABA, or AABB at a stretch to keep it sounding poetic.
This experience also raised a thorny question in my mind: what are the ethics of changing cultural references to maintain the same “vibe” for a different audience? The examples in this song were fairly benign, like going from “grasslands” to “hills” or moving from a passive to an active voice. But even then, I could feel the aesthetic becoming less Chinese and more Western.
I was also lucky that this song didn’t have many references to the story of the Butterfly Lovers. If it did, should I have changed references of mallard ducks and butterflies to those of stars and balconies instead? It would have gotten the same point across and made the song easier to follow for a Western audience, but it would have also removed all references to Chinese culture. That feels like my personal line — if there are explicit references to a story the audience doesn’t know, I’d rather take that opportunity to educate the audience rather than to pander to them.
Difficult questions! But for now, this project is wrapped.