A Poem in Answer to a Guest's Question答客問詩
客有問於予者曰。子言累月被沈痾不起。似妄語也。何者。以今觀之。其於和人之詩。多至三十二十或十餘首。然詩中猶無憊氣。此豈病者之能爾耶。予答曰。詩無憊氣。是子之過言也。予何足以當之哉。予向言詩癖。亦一病也。旣爲病之所使。病可免乎。是予所以難之。以至再作詩以傷之者也。今之病痾。如不死則行當自止矣。非若詩癖之不已也。因作詩以答之。
A certain guest asked me, "They say you have been laid low for months by a deep illness and cannot rise, but this seems to be idle talk. Why do I say so? Because, as I see it now, your replies to other men's poems run to thirty poems at the most, or twenty, or a dozen and more, and still there is no weary air in them. How could a sick man do such a thing?"
I answered, "That there is no weary air in the poems is too much from you; how could I bear such words? I said before that the habit of poetry is itself an illness. Since I am already driven by that illness, can I escape illness at all? This is why I find it hard, and have come to make poem after poem in my grief. My present illness, if it does not kill me, will of itself come to an end before long — it is not like the habit of poetry, which never stops."
And so I made a poem in answer.
Interlinear notes 1
幷序
With a preface.
病之逼於身。人所難自避。旣言詩一癖。與病眞無異。病可得免哉。予亦自傷耳。老病與詩病。云何一時至。蓬頭臥掩衾。禿筆起書字。一聲挾啾蟲。一聲誤鬪蟻。詩初若可觀。覆視堪唾棄。畢竟無巧詞。此癖拙所遂。
That illness comes upon the body is what a man can hardly avoid of himself. Since I have already called poetry a habit, it is truly no different from illness. Can I escape illness? I too can only grieve for myself. The illness of age and the illness of poetry — how is it that they have come upon me all at once? With tangled hair I lie covered by the quilt, then rise, take up a worn-down brush, and write. One sound mingles with the crying of insects, another mistakes the crawling of ants for the fighting of oxen. At first the poem seems worth looking at, but looked at again it deserves to be spat upon and thrown away. In the end there is no skillful phrase in it; this habit is the work of clumsiness.
Interlinear notes 1
誤鬪蟻 — In the Shishuo xinyu there is a story of a man whose heart throbbed from illness and who mistook the sound of ants crawling under his couch for the sound of oxen fighting. — Translator