海棠Ode to the wild crab-apple bloom

海棠

原作: 苏轼（字子瞻, 号东坡居士; 11世纪北宋）

英文版: 闵晓红(2023)

东风袅袅泛崇光，

香雾空蒙月转廊。

只恐夜深花睡去，

故烧高烛照红妆。

Ode to the Wild Crab-apple Bloom

Chinese original: Su Shi

English Version: Julia Min

The moon sneaks around the corner of a porch

For a glimpse of a glorious beauty she adores.

The east wind slows down for her shy perfume

In the dreamy waves of her beaming blooms.

I light a long candle, fearing she’d drowse away;

So I won’t miss a single moment of her grace.

Appreciation:

This poem was written in 1083. It can be read as pure enjoyment of a flowerholic—a man happily, helplessly besotted—over a blooming crab-apple tree in a neighbour's yard. Su Shi was then in Huangzhou, living in exile, farming like a common local, and had just taken the social name Dongpo, meaning "East Slope." The crab-apple was a species rare outside his native Sichuan. To find it blooming here, in a stranger's yard, must have felt like a memory made visible—a fragment of childhood smuggled into exile. One can almost see him leaning on his hoe, transported. The tree becomes a doorway back to the mountains of the west, to a self that existed before disgrace. It is, in every sense, a soothing moment.

But Su Shi, being Su Shi, cannot resist a second layer. The crab-apple carried another association, far more glamorous: Lady Yang, the Tang beauty Yang Guifei, beloved of Emperor Xuanzong. One morning, summoned to a royal banquet after a night of indulgence, Lady Yang knelt before the Emperor slow to rise, her eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, hair loosened. The Emperor, who loved her in every shade, did not scold. He smiled and said: "She is not drunk. She is a crab-apple flower, drowsing in her sweet mist."

It is, one must admit, the most elegant excuse for a hangover in all of Chinese literature. And Su Shi invites us to see both: the flower as the poet's lost childhood, and the flower as a tipsy Tang beauty too lovely to reprimand. The poem holds both possibilities in perfect suspension. Is the speaker a nostalgic exile? A smitten aesthete? A man who simply cannot stop looking at something beautiful?

Perhaps all three. The crab-apple bloom becomes a mirror, reflecting whatever longing we bring to it. For the exile, it is home. For the lover, it is the beloved. For the flowerholic—well, for him, it is simply itself: a brief, beaming presence in the night, worth lighting a candle for, worth missing nothing of.

And if that devotion seems excessive? One might say the same of Lady Yang's Emperor. But excess, in the presence of true beauty, is not excess at all. It is simply appropriate.

Reference:

1. Blooming Alone in Winter by Gordon Osing, Julia Min, and Huang Haipeng， published by the People's Publication House Henan Province in 1990 (《寒心未肯随春态》戈登.奥赛茵，闵晓红，黄海鹏) “Flowering Crabapple"--The east wind makes her dance and beam pure light/In the sweet mist of midnight as the moon declines./In dead of night I fear she’ll drowse away;/Light a long candle so she blooms till day.”)

2.Picture from Dragonsarmory.blogspot.com（龙军库博客）