Lament of the
Frontier guard
By the North Gate,
the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the
beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers
and towers,
To watch out the barbarous
land:
Desolate castle,
the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall
left to this village.
Bones white with a
thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered
with trees and grass;
Who brought this to
pass?
Who has brought the
flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the
army with drums and with kettledrum?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring,
turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of
wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and
sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow
like rain.
Sorrow to go, and
sorrow, sorrow returning.
Desolate, desolate
fields,
And no children of
warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defense.
Ah, how shall you
know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Riboku’s name
forgotten,
And we guardsmen
fed to the tigers.
Rihaku
En internet,
encuentro dos traducciones al español: la de Javier
Calvo y la de Rafael
Lobarte, que prefiero. Por alguna razón, los dos se empantanan en uno de
los versos más hermosos del poema: “And sorrow, sorrow like rain”. Calvo lo
omite y Lobarte lo literaliza: “y pena, pena con lluvia”. Gualter Cunha, en la edición portuguesa de Relógio d'Agua, lo vierte más apropiadamente: “E tristeza, tristeza
como chuva”. Pena a raudales en la tierra devastada.
