Don’t you love it when your reference text has a footnote calling the text “exceedingly difficult to translate”? I was depending on you, Prof. Yu! The poem that describes the heavenly horses depends heavily on both real and fake famous horses throughout Chinese history, and, for my translation, I threw most of it out. I had never heard of any of these horses before and a cursory internet search revealed little to no information. Some of the characters that make up the names of some of these horses are no longer in modern dictionaries, and entries for other characters are literally just “name of famous horse (literary).” But isn’t that what makes translation so much fun? /s
I’ve taken a few liberties with the horses’ names to make them sound more like names in English. In Chinese, each horse’s name is two syllables/characters long. I’ve tried to keep the English names short to maintain flow. My goal with this post is to just demonstrate the structure of the poem. For a even more literal translation, see the Yu or Jenner translations. Enough complaining. Here it is.
骅骝骐骥1，騄駬2纤离；
龙媒紫燕，挟翼骕骦3；
駃騠银騔，騕4褭飞黄；
騊駼5翻羽，赤兔超光；
逾辉弥景，腾雾胜黄；
追风绝地，飞翻奔霄；
逸飘赤电，铜爵浮云；
骢珑虎𩤲6，绝尘紫鳞；
四极大宛，
八骏九逸，
千里绝群：
——此等良马，一个个，
嘶风逐电精神壮，
踏雾登云气力长。
Chestnuts, bays, piebalds, thoroughbreds, Lu’er, She-demon；
Dragoness, Purple Swift, Diving Kite, Shushuang;
Dancing Hooves, Quicksilver, Elegance, Yellow Wings;
Taotu, Arrow, Red Hare, Lightspeed；
Glory, Bright, Mistclimber, Triumphant Yellow;
Windchaser, Flying Mile, Featherflight, Cloudrunner;
Fleeing Wind, Red Lightning, Copper Sparrow, Fleeting Cloud;
Blue Dragon, Tiger, Dusteater, Purple Scales;
Four superb Dayuan7 steeds,
Eight spirited horses and nine outstanding mounts,8
The herd a thousand miles wide：
Horses this good, each and every one，
Neigh like the wind, chase lightning, strong of spirit，
Walks on mist, climbs the clouds, long-lasting strength.
1 Are these names of two horses? Or descriptions? ↩
2 My dictionary gives the definition of these two characters as (horse) and (horse). ↩
3 Shushuang def: (literary) good horse (old). Thanks, MDBG. Real helpful. ↩
4 def: name of a fabulous horse ↩
5 Taotu isn’t in my usual dictionary, and Wiktionary gives ‘A kind of horse.’ ↩
6 I haven’t been able to find this second character in a dictionary anywhere, not even the pronunciation. ↩
7 A country in Central Asia (Ferghana valley, modern day eastern Uzbekistan, southern Kyrgyzstan, and northern Tajikistan) that bred great horses around 130 BC. ↩
8 Numbers used this way usually indicate that every horse was spirited and outstanding ↩
Etymology Adventures 