Chang Yen (1248–c. 1320)
All of a sudden my delight in sightseeing wanes,
Now the maidens gathering flowers
Are nowhere to be found.
Away from home one cares little
For spring outings,
Distracted by composing mournful verses.
Under whose roof are the swallows
That last year were roaming the ends of the earth?
I’d rather not listen to the patter of evening rain:
Late spring is no time to speed
The blossoming of flowers.
Translated by Jiaosheng Wang
Chang Yen was a native of Hangchow. Though descended from a Southern Sung nobleman, he experienced so many misfortunes in life that at one time he had to support himself as a fortune-teller in the marketplace of the city of Ningpo. Chang spent forty years studying music and wrote an important work on the theory and history of lyric meters entitled Sources of the Lyric (Tz’u yüan). His summation of the genre in this work also represents its culmination. After him, the waning lyric gave way to the newly exuberant aria and was only revived sporadically much later during the Ming and Ch’ing periods.