Archived

I happened to make the discovery the other day that my senior work has finally been digitally archived, and to my delight, they successfully pieced together the 4 or 5 separate documents that when printed out and placed together made the entire project in hard-copy form (this was a necessary evil for two reasons: page numbering and a hard-to-explain printing issue). So now, should you desire, you are free under Creative Commons license to download a PDF version of "Studies of Women and Love," Yuan Zhen's Yanshi: Twenty-Three Translations. Please excuse the complicated title and subtitles, it looked better on paper. For a more accurate abstract (as opposed to the first paragraph as quoted on the archive page), I'll draw out one paragraph from the introduction:

In the twenty-three poems here translated, we find a world of flowers—one filled with the fragile beauty of maidens—young but fading, the enchanting figures of dancers and goddesses, close description of the ornaments they wear, the heartaches of parted lovers, and perhaps most poignantly: tender portraits of one woman left in the past. These yànshī are most accurately described as a study of women in all of their aspects, complimented with the personal meditations and experiences of one of their greatest admirers—Yuan Zhen himself.

And for a taste, here is one of the translations published in a campus art/writing magazine called The Sweatervest:

閨晚
紅裙委塼堦
玉瓜剺朱橘
素臆光如砑
明瞳艷凝溢
調絃不成曲
學書徒弄筆
夜色侵洞房
香煙透簾出

Her Room at Night

Her red skirt is yielded to the bricks of the floor.
There's jade melon and cut tangerine.
White silk 'cross her breast shines as if polished,
and her bright pupils' beauty is heavy, brimming.
She tweaks a string, but doesn't make a tune;
tries calligraphy, vainly playing with the brush.
Night-color invades the deeper room,
incense smoke passing through the screen and out.