Chinese Poem: "Thinking on a Quiet Night" 靜夜思 | Learn Chinese Now

In this episode we learn the classic Chinese Tang Dynasty poem "Thinking on a Quiet Night." The poem was written by Li Bai, one of China's most prolific poets.

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Hey everyone, today we're going to be
talking about Chinese Tang dynasty poetry

and I'm going to teach you probably the most classic poem of all of Chinese history

basically this is the first poem that students learn
when they begin to study classical Chinese,

that doesn't mean it's the best ever

but it is one of the most classic
textbook examples of Chinese poetry.

Written in the Tang dynasty by poet Li Bai,

this poem is called: Jing ye si.

now "jing" means tranquil, "ye" means
night and "si" means think.

so we can translate this title as thinking on a
quiet night

now let's take a look at the first line

"Chuang qian ming yue guang",

chuang means bed and qian in
this context means in front of,

and the Chinese put the character describing position

after the character for the thing
they're describing the position in relation to,

so chuang qian literally bed
in front means in front of the bed

next we have three characters "ming
yue guang",

so ming means bright, yue means the moon,
and guang means light

so these three together mean bright
moonlight

thus the whole line means in front of the bed there is bright moonlight

now for the second line "yi shi di shang
shuang",

yi means to suspect and is the same yi as in the modern Chinese word huaiyi

to suspect that we're not talking about suspecting a bad thing here

you could also translate it as "seems
like" which in modern Chinese is hao xiang

then we have shi which is basically
the same meaning as in modern Chinese,

it means "is", then we have three characters
di shang shuang

di means the ground, and shang means on

and if you remember from the first line
the Chinese put position words

after the thing they're describing the position in
relation to,

so "di shang" literally meaning ground on, comes to mean on the ground.

then the last character shuang means frost

so these three characters together mean
frost on the ground

and the whole line comes to mean: it seems like there is frost on the ground

so these two lines together refer to the
scene that Li Bai was describing

that the moon was shining so brightly outside the
window in front of his bed

that the ground outside the window was lit up and
look white as if they had been a frost

now for the next life

"ju tou wang ming yue", so ju means to
raise and tou means head,

so together this means to raise the head.

it's worth noting however in modern Chinese you don't say ju tou to raise the head you say "tai tou"

now let's look at the next three
characters "wang ming yue".

wang means to gaze into the distance

it can be seen in the
modern Chinese word xi wang which means hope

in this context we can translate the
single character as "to gaze at".

now the next two characters "ming yue" mean bright moon,

so the whole line "ju tou wang ming yue" means I raised my head and gaze at the bright moon.

now on to the next and final line
"di tou si gu xiang".

So di means low, but in this context it is
used as a verb meaning to lower.

then we have the character tou again meaning
head,

so together it means to lower the head.

then we have the character si- to think and the two characters gu xiang,

which together means hometown

so the whole line can be translated I lower my head and think of my hometown.

now let's try reading this poem together in Chinese

you can repeat each line after me

chuang qian ming yue guang,
yi shi di shang shuang

ju tou wang ming yue

di tou si gu xiang.

well thanks for watching guys and we'll
be bringing you more Chinese poems in

the weeks to come

zai jian!

Li Bai is one of my favorite Tang dynasty poets

and his style is categorized as "lan man chu yi"
romanticism,

in contrast to Dufu's xian shi chu yi - realism

and you know the Tang poet
often wrote about the moon

and gazing at the moon and in the Tang dynasty all the poets were like scholar officials

who are you know they
got sent off on a mission

to go and get to some province far away and they
have to leave the families behind,

I dont know why not take the families with you whatever,

and they are you know they had to go and travel all these places around the Empire

and then they would look up at the moon and it was symbolic

because you know their family and their hometown could look at the same moon,

there is some common bond they share like and
they can both see the moon,

and its very romantic isn't it?

So Li Bai described his moon as his massive big bright shining moon - ming yue

and Li Bai often was drunk as well
he had quite a relationship with alcohol