Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

Tao Yuanming, “Back to the Land”

(Late 4^th – early 5^th century AD)

When I was a kid, I could never fit in 
I longed to be out on the hills.
The rat-race got me in the end
Trapped me thirteen years.

A caged bird longs for the woods
A fish in a tank wants the river.
I cleared a patch of Southern scrub
Got myself back to the land. 

It’s only a couple of acres in all,
The hut a few paces wide.
Willows shade the eaves at the back
Peaches spread out front.

I hardly see my neighbours at all,
Just trails of smoke from the village.
A dog barks somewhere deep in the lanes
A bird sings in the trees.

Throughout the place no noise or fuss
In my empty rooms just peace.
I’ve served my sentence, done my time
Now I’ve returned to the real.

(Photography: Judith Robinson)

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Tao Yuanming (365-427) was one of the most widely admired of early Chinese poets, celebrated particularly for the way he embodied the Taoist ideals of withdrawal from worldly affairs and direct communion with nature. In his book The Poets Graded, Zhong Rong (469-518) writes: “His literary style is limpid and spare, with scarcely a superfluous word. His sincerity is true and traditional, his verbalized inspirations supple and relaxed [. . .] Ordinary men admire his unadorned directness.”

I worked from the Chinese text in Archie Barnes, Chinese Through Poetry: An Introduction to the Language and Imagery of Traditional Verse (2007). In this wonderful book (far more than just a language text-book), Barnes urges students following his course to attempt their own literary translations of the poems, as a way of thinking their way into the meaning of these texts. It’s in that spirit that I’m attempting this series of translations.

To capture the direct, popular style of the original, I’ve freely used English-language idioms. In line three of the first stanza, for example, the original uses the phrase “dust-net” (chen wang). Chen (dust) was often used metaphorically by Taoists and Buddhists to refer to the affairs of the everyday materialistic world. I’ve followed Archie Barnes’s suggestion of “rat-race” as a close modern equivalent.