A River of Love Across Twelve Centuries

Original song composed over Du Fu’s poem, Thoughts on a Traveling Night 旅夜抒怀

In the year 765 CE, a 54-year-old Chinese poet named Du Fu (杜甫) wrote A Night Traveler’s Thoughts (旅夜书怀), one of his most beloved poems. Five years later, Du Fu died in poverty and hardship. Yet his poetry lived on, touching countless hearts across centuries and earning him a place among the most cherished poets in Chinese history.

In 2014, I was 41 years old. For the first time in my life, I began exploring the possibility of awakening the music within me through singing. I opened my mouth, but only a tiny, fragile voice emerged, as though it were trapped behind a thick stone wall—a wall built from years of pain, grief, and wounds born of disconnection from the deepest core of my being.

I turned to my beloved poetry.

Growing up during the tumultuous years of China’s Cultural Revolution, classical Chinese poetry was one of the few sources of beauty, art, and spiritual nourishment available to me. Its verses sheltered and nurtured something precious in my young heart, even amid the turmoil of the world around me.

As a young girl, I often lacked the knowledge and life experience to grasp the deeper meanings of these poems. Yet that hardly mattered. Their innate musicality, rhythm, and beauty reached me in ways that transcended intellectual understanding. Like a heavenly ambrosia, they seeped into my bloodstream, nourishing something deep within me. I turned to poetry instinctively, like an infant seeking her mother’s breast, drinking in a nourishment I could neither name nor comprehend, but knew I needed.

Fast forward to my 41-year-old self.

One day, as I was reading Du Fu’s A Night Traveler’s Thoughts, something utterly unexpected happened.

The stone wall began to crumble.

A clear, gentle stream of timeless love flowed through the cracks, into the parched desert of my heart, awakening a precious seed that had long been sleeping beneath the earth.

And my very first song was born.

It came through me as a melody woven into the first half of Du Fu’s poem. Across more than twelve centuries, the voice of an ancient poet had reached into my heart and awakened a voice of my own.

Below is the original poem in Chinese.

This website offers 43 different English translations. The differences among these translations offer English readers a glimpse into the extraordinary richness of classical Chinese poetry. A single Chinese character is rarely confined to one discrete concept. Rather, it opens into a web of interconnected images, sensations, associations, and layers of meaning.

The characters are often woven together through musicality, rhythm, and rhyme, rather than rigid grammatical structures, creating a dynamic interplay of meanings that opens up multiple possibilities for interpretation and invites the reader’s imagination and felt experience into the poem.

Perhaps this is part of the magic that allows a poem written more than twelve centuries ago to remain alive today—crossing time, language, and culture to touch something timeless within the human heart.

I have chosen two English translations to share with you, each illuminating a different facet of this beautiful poem.

Bynner, Witter The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology (New York: Knopf, 1931)

A Night Abroad

A light wind is rippling at the grassy shore. . . .

Through the night, to my motionless tall mast,

The stars lean down from open space,

And the moon comes running up the river.

. . . If only my art might bring me fame

And free my sick old age from office! —

Flitting, flitting, what am I like

But a sand-snipe in the wide, wide world!

Chou, Eva Shan Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Fine grasses and a light wind on the bank,

A tall mast, a solitary boat in the night,

Stars hang down over a vast level plain,

The moon undulates in the flow of the great River.

Has my name become known through literature?

My office is resigned due to illness and old age.

Drifting, drifting, what am I like?

A gull between heaven and earth.