澄迈驿通潮阁 二首 Sea-Tide Pavilion, Chengmai Post Station

Chinese original:

《澄迈驿通潮阁二首·其二》 苏轼

余生欲老海南村，帝遣巫阳招我魂。杳杳天低鹘(hú)没处，青山一发是中原。

At Sea-Tide Pavilion, Chengmai Post Station

Poem Two

Chinese original: Su Shi

English version: Julia Min

I planned to end here in this village of Hainan,

When Heaven calls my spirit to the mainland.

Where the falcon fades in the misty distance,

The green horizon holds the Middle Kingdom.

Notes:

1. “this village of Hainan”: Hainan Island, where Su Shi was banished in exile and pardoned in 1100. ‘this’ is used for irony.

2. “Heaven” / “my spirit”: ‘Wuyang’ in the original, a legendary spirit-summoner from the Chu Ci, is here a poetic image for the imperial pardon that called Su Shi back from exile. Heaven here implies the Emperor.

3. “falcon”: a swift and fierce bird of prey, such as a falcon or hawk.

4. “the Middle Kingdom” — the Central Plain of China, the cultural and political heartland from which Su Shi had been exiled. A localisation in translation for a familiar touch.

Appreciation:

There is a wonderful irony in the opening. Su Shi has apparently made peace with exile. After years at the far southern edge of the empire, he is ready to grow old in “this village of Hainan.” Then, just when he has accepted that fate, Heaven changes its mind. The imperial pardon becomes Wuyang, the spirit-summoner of the Chu Ci, come to call his wandering soul home. The conceit is grand, but the tone is almost playful—as if Su Shi were saying, Well, the Emperor finally remembered me!

Then the excitement breaks into vision. A falcon disappears into the misty distance, and beyond it a faint line of mountains meets the low sky. After years of exile, the Central Plain is reduced to a thread on the horizon, yet that thread is enough to transform the entire landscape.

The choice of the falcon is telling. Su Shi could have given us the familiar returning wild goose, the traditional emblem of the exile longing for home. Instead, he gives us a solitary, fierce bird of prey—one that does not migrate out of homesickness, but cuts through the sky on its own terms. There is something of Su Shi in that bird: not the weeping exile finally permitted to crawl home, but the untamed spirit that has survived the storm. The falcon vanishes at the very edge of sight, and beyond it the homeland on the horizon.

The poem's emotional power lies in this sudden reversal—from resignation to astonishment, from the end of the road to the first glimpse of home. In this sense, it has a kindred spirit in Robert Herrick's “His Return to London”:

London my home is, though by hard fate sent

Into a long and irksome banishment;

Yet since call'd back, henceforward let me be,

O native country, repossess'd by thee!

But where Herrick openly celebrates his return, Su Shi lets the excitement flicker through irony, myth, and the solitary flight of a falcon. And perhaps that is the most Su Shi-like touch of all: after surviving exile, he does not make a grand declaration of triumph. He simply turns northward, sees a thin, dark green line where the mountain ranges meet the misty blue sky, and knows his way home — seemingly plain, yet an inner calmness gained after turmoil.

Reference:

1. baike.baidu.com