At a Snow-storm Night

雪夜宿芙蓉山主人

刘长卿

日 暮 苍 山 远，天 寒 白 屋 贫。

柴 门 闻 犬 吠，风 雪 夜 归 人。

At a Snow-storm Night

Liu Changqing

The green mountains appear far away when they are seen at twilight

His poor straw hut stands in coldness on the hillside.

When hearing a dog’s barks from his twig-made gate,

He knows someone is coming to stay with him at this snow storm night.

  Hi people! I still have many scripts and I found these days always be snow in our JYV, therefore I selected this one “at a snow-storm night”. But if you let me translate the title into English, I`ll never give this name because at a snow-storm night is just a free interpretation. If I translated directly it should be: Accommodation in the host of FuRong Mountains in a snow night.

  Liu Changqing, the author describes a picture of “Returing in snow” in the beginning. In the first piece of poem he says that now it`s twilight and the mountains are really far so looks a bit green in the visual angle. And then he also describes that it`s pretty cold outside and even the house looks totally white but inside the houst, it`s quite worn and not warm enough.

  After introducing the static view, the author starts to narrative: he hears the bark outside the wood door, he feels that the host is backing from the winds and snows.

  The views from this poem are very simple. Mountains, twilight, sky, snow, house, door, dog and a person, maybe it`s the whole life in the village or I mean in this mountain. The lively words, the sentences tend to the life, this poem only consists of 20 characters, but a hostee, a village house, the snowing evening, all of them are in the paper, you even can touch this miserable night from his words.

  The author guess the host is backing home because the home dog is barking.  Maybe it will be induce loudly echo. The barking break the peace of mountains meanwhile it injects the air of life into the inanimate environment. But it also brings more sorrow in this picture.