饮马长城窟行
I watered my horse at a singing spring by the Great Wall,
so cold that even her bones could feel it.
I wandered over to joke with the man in charge.
“I hope you won't keep us Taiyuan people out here for long!”
He looked at me.
“Government works can’t be hurried you know.
Why don’t you raise those tampers, and sing your Taiyuan songs!
A man needs to die fighting!
You can’t pull faces and finish a wall such as this.
Look at it! Three thousand miles!”
*
Here on the frontier I’ve seen many strong youths –
there must so many widows left alone at home.
I wrote to my wife:
“Marry another man, don’t hesitate,
and take a good care of your new in-laws.
Just give a thought, now and then, to me, your old man.”
Surprisingly, after a while, I got a letter back.
“How heartless are your words, my lord!”
And now, I’m troubled even more.
How can I ask her to wait for me like this?
I wrote again:
“If you should have a boy, don’t raise him;
if you have a girl, give her just dried meat!
Don’t you not know that today, beneath this very wall
there are thousands of skeletons stacked in drifts?”
And she replied:
“When I tied up my hair to become your wife,
I gave my heart to you out of respect.
I’ve seen the wagons rattling and banging,
the horses grunting and snorting,
the conscripts marching, each with arrows at his hip.
Fathers and mothers, wives and children, were running to see them off,
so much dust kicked up you couldn't even see the Xian-yang Bridge!
Families snatched at their sleeves and stamped their feet in despair,
trying to block the way, and weeping.
I heard a passing merchant ask, "And what's all this?"
and a soldier said simply, "Agh, you know, it’s all the time.
From fifteen years of age they are sent to guard the north –
they’re such good fighters they're driven around from battle to battle like chickens!”
He carried on eating.
“When they leave their homes, the village headman has to wrap their turbans for them,
and when they come back, white-haired at forty,
they are sent out west to work on the military farms.”
I know that the frontier posts are running with blood,
and the Emperor's dreams of conquest are far from ended.
Hasn't he heard that east of the mountains,
there are two hundred prefectures, thousands of villages,
that grow nothing but thorns?
And even where there’s a sturdy wife who can handle a hoe or even a plough,
the niggardly crops grow ragged in disordered fields.
New ghosts complain, but the old ghosts only weep.
Under our lowering sky we hear them cry in the rain."
Husband, I know too well the sufferings at the frontier.
How can your humble wife survive them, even here?”
after 陈琳 Chen Lin (177‒217）& 杜甫; Du Fu (712–770)
