English Rendering
Noble Zhang, what has become of you?
You worked at your poetry through thirty springs.
Masterful were your lyric poems,
Lifted above your peers by your new understanding.
For poetry, what did this mean?
A blossoming of meanings, which I will fully describe.
With elegance, which went beyond mere feelings,
You never wrote an empty word.
Reading your poems of studying immortality,
One intones the freeing of the gentleman in us.
Reading your poems of public service,
One learns the greed and corruption of state officers.
Reading your poems of working girls,
One feels the humanity of the purchased woman.
Reading your poems of industrious society,
One is urged to respond to the kind-heartedness in man.
At first, your poems are an aid to enlightenment:
Gently, they help all the myriad people.
Next, your poems bring order to the passions:
Like a broom, they sweep clean the whole body.
Then they yield the scholar's harvest
Until they have made his old age new.
Day and night, Zhang, your writing brush sang,
Your painstaking heart strong and constant.
Timeless, your opus, fit for noble offerings,
Now abandoned like so much clay and dust.
Zhang, I fear, one hundred years from now, for
Your destruction, when no man will hear you any more.
I wish you safety, within your mysterious pages
So that one hundred generations will not obscure you.
I hope that you spread, from within these lyric poems,
So that the future will bring you fame and reverence.
As wordsmith, you are the beginning of an ideal.
As journeyman, you are the root of culture.
Zhang, your poems, once known,
Endear themselves to us.
So why, now that you are almost fifty,
A minor official, poor and lowly,
Almost blind, and living along the Western Road,
Does no one make the journey to your door?
