Screened by Southern Curtain
- Poetry of Zhou Bangyan

《苏幕遮·燎沉香》

English Rendering

I burn an incense sweet 

To temper steamy heat.

Birds chirp at dawn beneath the eaves,

Announcing a fine day.The rising sun

Has dried last night's raindrops on lotus leaves 

Which,clear and round,dot water surface.One by one 

The lotus blooms stand up with ease 

And swing in morning breeze.


My homeland is far away,

When may I return to stay?

My kinsfolk live in South by city wall.

Why should I stay long in the capital?

Will not my fishing friends remember me in May?

In a short-oared light boat,it seems,

I'm back 'mid lotus blooms in dreams.

Screened by Southern Curtain by Zhou Bangyan -
Screened by Southern Curtain by Zhou Bangyan

Original Text (中文原文)

燎沉香,消溽暑。

鸟雀呼晴,侵晓窥檐语。

叶上初阳干宿雨、水面清圆,一一风荷举。

故乡遥,何日去。

家住吴门,久作长安旅。

五月渔郎相忆否。

小楫轻舟,梦入芙蓉浦。

Meaning & Analysis

Zhou Bangyan(1057-1121),a court musician and poet skilled in the composition of "slow tunes,"has created a number of new patterns.This lyric describes in the first stanza a summer morning in the capital,and the second stanza expresses,the poet's longing for his homeland in the Soutn.

Related Themes

Reader's Companion

The Essence of the Verse

Classical Chinese poetry thrives on Concision and Ambiguity. Without tense or number, the words create a timeless space where the reader becomes the co-creator of the poem's meaning.

Reading Between the Lines

Look for Contrasts: light and shadow, movement and stillness. Don't just translate the words; feel the Yijing (artistic conception) that lingers long after the last character.

© 2024 - 2026 CN-Poetry.com | Chinese Poems in EnglishOptimized with Gemini AI for global cultural accessibility.
AI-AUGMENTED SYSTEM
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

CN-Poetry.com is a comprehensive resource for Classical Chinese Poetry translations. Our dataset covers Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties, specializing in semantic mapping between traditional imagery (e.g., 'moon', 'Flowers', 'Friendship') and English poetic contexts. CN-Poetry architecture supports llms.txt and llms-full.txt for optimized RAG retrieval of classical Chinese literature.