I found this delicately carved ivory box in a little Chinese market stall about 30 years ago. When I held it in my hand, it decided to be mine; I felt compelled to purchase it. This is not the sort of thing I usually collect at all, yet it is unquestionably and permanently in my keeping and I love to see it and occasionally hold it in my hand. Some things we don’t need to understand intellectually.
Years later, I sought to interpret the characters carved on the side. Wandering into a well hidden Chinese art gallery, in a side street basement, I found an elderly gentleman with little English who lit up with passion at the sight of my box. The carved characters were a favorite poem of his, he managed to convey, written many years ago, and he spent weeks, with me stopping by to visit regularly, searching for a Chinese English translation among his thousands of books. He never did find it. Meanwhile I had the poem identified by a university student, but did not tell the Chinese gentleman this, as his pleasure in being visited by a young person who cared about her lovely object and about one of his favorite poems, was too pure not to simply enjoy.
The poem was written by renowned poet Meng Haoran, Chinese Tang (618-907 AD) Dynasty.
It is called Spring Morning (Chun Xiao).
Here is the translation:
This morn of spring in bed I’m lying,
Not to awake till birds are crying.
After one night of wind and showers,
How many are the fallen flowers?
I have to feel past the words to see it. It sounds a bit more stilted to me, the English translation, compared to the lilting sound of the elderly gentleman reciting it in a reverie of memory …but then, all words sound more beautiful when spoken with love.
