A Different Point of View

 

This is my paltry equal time as a devil’s advocate for the businessman inspired by the original poem which we hear only from one side – that of the lute player. No one casts oneself in a negative light.

I have used many of Po Chu-I’s wordings.

1 春江秋月花朝夜 Springtime rivers, autumn moons. Flowers in the day, flowers by night,
2 淚浸蟾宮玉兔斜 But my tears flood the Toad Palace until the Jade Rabbit sets a low.
3 琵琶寂寞誰得怨 To whom should the lonely lute be blaming?
4 醉世浮生瓦無遮 An inebriated world, a floating life with no roof tiles overhead.

5 訴盡銀河萬里星 The ten-thousand-mile stars in the Milky Way I looked, I yearned to tell,
6 默對營火千山野 By the thousand-mountain range, into the campfire I stared in silence.
7 含鬱重利輕別離 To bear the charge of favoring profits over love,
8 可憐商人兩難騎 Between a rock and a hard place, pity this businessman has to mount. 

1 To convey the passage of time, the seasons and the hours of the day.

2 This is a line in exaggeration. To the lute player, the reflection of the moon is on her river of tears. The three-legged toad and the jade rabbit that live by the lunar palace. Poetic terms for the moon.

3 We don’t know whom she is blaming, her husband for his heartlessness or that her foolishness in getting herself hitched to the lowest class of society. Businessmen are not looked favorably by ancient Chinese. Perhaps seen as the threat to the elite because of their financial independence. Taxing transactions is impossible in those days without computers and the internet.

4 No roof tiles overhead – homeless. The real reason she married the businessman.

5 The viewpoints of the businessman-husband. Practical reasons to earn a livelihood to keep her living in style. She went boating in his absence and still complained of being a golden gilded caged bird if negatively put.

6 At the same time, one has to be vigilant camping out in the wilderness because of bandits and what nots.