Poem of the Week 2024/15

They Mock Me for Planting Trees at My Age

Seventy, and still planting trees. . . 

Don't laugh at me, my friends.

Of course I know I'm going to die.

I also know I'm not dead yet.

– Yuan Mei, translated by JP Seaton

This pellucid poem doesn't really call for much commentary, I think, as it elegantly sums up, in just four lines, a situation, a conventional social reaction, & the narrator's defiant wisdom, part of the great tradition of carpe diem poetry. So here's a variant translation of the same poem:

If at seventy I still plant trees,

Lookers-on, do not laugh at my folly.

It is true of course that no one lives forever;

But nothing is gained by knowing so in advance.

– Yuan Mei, translated by Arthur Waley

Unfortunately in my ignorance of Mandarin, I can't comment on how closely either version hews to the eighteenth-century original. The gist of both translations is the same, but with some differing nuances: In the Seaton, the poet addresses his friends, in the Waley, the more general lookers-on (who may or may not be well-intentioned in their views of the old man, while friends, though perhaps lacking in understanding of why he is planting trees he is unlikely to see grow to maturity, are presumably basically accepting in their views of him & his actions). In the third line of the Seaton, the knowledge of looming mortality is much more personal: Of course I know I'm going to die. In the Waley, It is true of course that no one lives forever is much more indirect – the abrupt honesty of die vs the indirect truth that no one lives forever, the straightforwardness of Of course I know against the more genially philosophical proposition that It is true of course, the first-person I against the third-person no one. You get the same contrast in the two treatments of the final line: the Seaton more personal & defiant, the Waley more abstract & stoic. I have no preference between the two approaches; a single poem in Mandarin has fructified into two convincing versions in English.

The Seaton translation is from I Don't Bow to Buddhas: Selected Poems of Yuan Mei, translated from the Chinese & with an introduction by J P Seaton. In his introduction, Seaton recommends Waley's biography Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet, which is where I got the Waley translation.