This is a translation and annotation of the poem 登鸛雀樓 (Dēng Guànquè Lóu), by the Tang dynasty poet 王之渙 (Wang Zhihuan). The poem is #236 in the collection 300 Tang Poems, and is also known by its first line: 白日依山盡 (Bái Rì Yī Shān Jǐn).
登鸛雀樓
Dēng Guànquè Lóu
[ascend] [stork] [sparrow] [tower]
Climbing White Stork Tower
白日依山盡，
Bái rì yī shān jìn,
[white] [sun] [on] [mountain] [finish]
The white sun sets behind the mountains,
黃河入海流；
Huánghé rù hǎiliú;
[Yellow] [River] [enter] [sea] [flow]
and the Yellow River flows into the sea.
欲窮千里目，
yù qióng qiānlǐ mù,
[want] [furthest] [thousand] [mile] [eye]
To see a thousand mile view,
更上一層樓。
gèng shàng yì céng lóu.
[more] [ascend] [one] [floor] [tower]
go up another floor.
If you notice a mistake or disagree with the translation, please comment below to improve this resource. You might want to have a read of this, as well.
Notes
鸛雀樓 is a tower in Shanxi province, with three floors, situated between mountains and the Yellow River.
窮 in the third line is like 盡 here, meaning “furthest”. 里 has been translated as ‘mile’ above, although more accurately one 里 is a third of a mile.
The last line, 更上一層樓, is now a general idiom for taking things up a level, a bit like the colloquial 加油.
Source: 登鹳雀楼 – 百度百科
Links:
- 300 Tang Poems (Waters, Farman, Lunde)
- Fifty Five T’ang Poems (Hugh M. Stimson)
- Poems of the Late T’ang (A. C. Graham)
- Translation of 登鸛雀樓 into English by 曾培慈
- Translation of 登鸛雀樓 into English by Ying Sun
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[...] 終南望餘雪孟浩然 宿建德江孟浩然 春曉李白 靜夜思李白 怨情杜甫 八陣圖王之渙 登鸛雀樓劉長卿 送靈澈劉長卿 彈琴劉長卿 送上人韋應物 秋夜寄邱員外李端 [...]
I believe that in the fourth line, yī should be yì. When yī(一) is before a word that is not second tone, it becomes yì.
Thanks for pointing that out. I don’t usually bother to adjust the pinyin for tone sandhi, but I’ve corrected the one above.
[...] English translation is from http://eastasiastudent.net/china/wenyan/wang-zhihuan-stork-tower/, a blog by Hugh Grigg. I substituted Hoisanva for the Mandarin pinyin and made some rearrangements [...]
白日依山盡，
Bái rì yī shān jǐn,
Sorry; shoudn’t the last word in Hanyu Pinyin be in the 4th Tone ?
I am sorry as I am not a student of Chinese but just look up the dictionery on the word “盡 ” which means : end, finish and exhaust.
Yeah it should be jìn, thanks for pointing that out. The pinyin is auto-generated by software so sometimes it makes odd mistakes like that.
Why drop “white” and obscure the parallelism of the first two lines? More significant to the prosody perhaps than to the meaning. Ron Tuohy
Thanks, I’ve updated the annotation.