Wang Guowei: Lyrics to a Forgotten Tune (From Chinese)

Wang Guowei in the early 20th century realizing as he writes in the classical style, that what he's saying doesn't match what he's thinking. The traditional poetry once had a vital social function, served as a means of refined expression, and was normally taken to be non-fictional. Now it corresponds to no reality whatever. It's become a heap of clich�s that don't align with the world he knows, an arabesque of refined wordgames.


Lyrics to a Forgotten Tune
Wang Guowei
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Is there something real in the words
to these new songs of yours?
To maiden heads those fancy phrases
are laughably soft-core*
"Lamplight o'er a broken heart..."
just who'd you write that for?
Behind my desk I peer around
at recent works of mine
Then dim the lights and reckon out
the joys of bygone times
All trivial affairs of the heart
where not one line aligns

* This line is a pun about puns. The term ?? means either "ornate writing, fancy phrasing" or more euphemistically "smutty language, erotica." The term ?? means "loud laughter" or "calabash, bottle gourd" (in this latter sense also written ??.) Calabash may be used to allude to the closed world of women, to various hidden forbidden delights, or to the vagina and the delights sequestered therein. It could be read to mean "ornate writing like this is just hilarious" or else something like "this kind of innuendo belongs between the sheets." To top it off ?? is also a homophone for ?? "double entendre"

The Original:


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