The poem
静夜思
床前明月光，
疑是地上霜。
举头望明月，
低头思故乡。
Jìng yè sī
Chuáng qián míng yuè guāng,
Yí shì dì shàng shuāng.
Jǔ tóu wàng míng yuè,
Dī tóu sī gùxiāng.
A simple, naive translation
Before the bed, bright moonlight—
I think it is frost on the ground.
I raise my head and look at the bright moon;
I lower my head and think of home.
Before I read a good translation
This took me back to being a child, still awake in bed late at night, when a full moon would peek out from behind the clouds. The frost made me picture crisp white blankets, matching the blanket I would be snuggled under while hiding from the cold.
There is something lonesome already about raising your head to look out of the window at the moon. Then the last line—“think of home”—really hits hard in the feels. It adds to the nostalgia.
I didn’t even attempt to sound out the Chinese myself because I have no familiarity with it. The first recording was much more sing-song and childlike than I expected. It made the poem sound almost upbeat, which did not match the homesickness I had pictured.
A more subdued reading still sounded upbeat to me. The words end with missing home, but the melody sounded happy.
After reading the translations
Of the four translations I read, I preferred Shigeyoshi Obata’s:
I saw the moonlight before my couch,
And wondered if it were not the frost on the ground.
I raised my head and looked out on the mountain moon;
I bowed my head and thought of my far-off home.
Obata’s came closest, although it still does not quite feel like the poem I had pictured. That is strange given that I know no Chinese at all and he was the expert. I can see part of the distance now: I had added a window, clouds, a full moon, and blankets. None of those things is actually in the poem. They came from me.
The biggest change was the frost. I had imagined real frost on the ground outside. Now I see it as the gleam of moonlight, briefly mistaken for frost until the speaker looks up. There may be no actual frost, but the night still feels chilly.
What I learned
I also discovered that there is more than one Chinese version of the poem. The familiar version says “bright moonlight” in the first line and “bright moon” in the third. Some early printed versions instead say “watching moonlight” and “mountain moon.” That is why Obata writes “mountain moon”: he was translating a different version, not adding scenery of his own.
The poem has only twenty characters, arranged in four lines of five. In modern Mandarin, the last words of lines one, two, and four—guāng, shuāng, and xiāng: light, frost, and home—rhyme. The final two lines also mirror each other: raise the head, lower the head; look at the moon, think of home.
It has also been memorized and repeated by generations of children. That made the childlike sound of the recordings less surprising. A homesick poem can also be a poem children know by heart.
Li Bai spent much of his adult life travelling. The last word, gùxiāng, means more than a house. It is an old or native place—the place someone comes from.
Rereading it
My first reading sent me back to childhood. Reading it again made me think about leaving home.
I left home a long time ago, and these days I often feel nomadic and untethered to any particular place. That makes the last line carry more weight, not less. I am not always sure which place I mean when I think of home. Rereading it brings a sting to my eyes.
The image I kept thinking about
I still picture the pale light of a full moon, almost unreachably far away and yet visible and seemingly graspable.