The Hanging Jade Belt And The Buried Golden Hairpin
The frightening fate of our heroes
The Hanging Jade Belt And The Buried Golden Hairpin
We’ve got another short entry today, but it’s packed with meaning. This is one of the most famous and controversial poems in all of Dream of the Red Chamber, and we want to give it its due. We’ll talk in today’s post about the poetic allusions present here, and we’ll then talk tomorrow about just who this poem might be about. It’s amazing how much meaning and depth you can get from a 20 character poem.
My Translation
Baoyu read that poem again, but couldn’t make any sense of hit.
He then picked up the Main Volume and started examining it.
On the first page he saw a drawing of two withered trees, with a jade belt hanging from their branches. There was a pile of snow on the ground below, and within the snow lay a golden hairpin.
Below this was a 4 line poem:
Alas for her domestic virtue,
How unfortunate her poetic wit!
A jade belt hangs in the woods,
A golden hairpin is buried beneath the snow.
Translation Critique
Hawkes
You’d think that I wouldn’t be able to find anything to comment on in such a short passage. But there’s actually a lot to say here.
Hawkes translates the second line of the poem as “One a wit who made other wits seem slow.” The reason for this somewhat awkward line is to create a “slant rhyme” (false rhyme) with the word “snow” in the 4th line. However, the focus of the second line of the poem is specifically on poetic wit, not on wit in general.
Also, “the gold pin” in the 4th line really should be a “hairpin,” not just a “pin.” This is somewhat implied by Hawkes’ translation, but it’s not specifically mentioned and can be confusing.
Yang
The Yangs translate the second line as “Her wit to sing of willow-down, poor maid!” This is extremely confusing, since they neglect to translate just what 絮 in 詠絮才 refers to. “Willow-down” and “catkin” are words that most modern readers of English are unfamiliar with. It’s much better to go the extra step and point out that this is referring to poetic wit among women.
The Yangs also mix up the order of the final two lines:
Buried in snow the broken golden hairpin
And hanging in the wood the belt of jade.
This is to create a rhyme between “poor maid” in the second line and “belt of jade” in the 4th.
I’ve complained about this before, and I’ll complain about it again. It’s a disservice to these poems to try to force rhymes in English. There’s no need for that.
Chinese Text
寶玉看了又不解。又去取那正冊看時，只見頭一頁上畫著是兩株枯木，木上懸著一圍玉帶；地下又有一堆雪，雪中一股金簪。也有四句詩道：
可嘆停機德，堪憐詠絮才！玉帶林中掛，金簪雪裡埋。
Translation Notes
停機 in modern Chinese refers to stopping a machine; 機 commonly refers to a machine. In older Chinese, 機 referred to a weaving machine or spinning machine – something like a loom.
停機德, “loom-stopping virtue,” refers directly to a passage in the 烈女傳 (Biographies of Exemplary Women). This story is about the wife of Le Yangzi during the Eastern Han dynasty. She halted her loom and stopped weaving at one point to admonish her husband to pursue her studies. As a result, women who conformed strictly to feudal ethical standards were said to possess this kind of “loom stopping virtue.” See more here. I’ve translated this as “domestic virtue” here to help this image make sense to modern readers.
詠絮才 is even harder to figure out. 詠 (yǒng) means to chant or sing a poem; it also means to describe in poetic language. 絮 (xù) refers to coarse silk floss, though in this case it means “fine hair” or even “pubescence.” 詠絮 in particular refers to a Jin Dynasty woman named Xie Daoyun who described snow with the line “Not unlike willow catkins lifted by the wind” (未若柳絮因風起). A “catkin” is a small cylindrical flower cluster that looks like fine hair. Chinese poets and writers in later generations used 詠絮 to praise gifted women who were skilled in poetry and literary composition. Therefore, 詠絮才 means something like “feminine poetic skill.”
玉帶林中掛, or “a jade belt hanging in the woods,” is an incredibly powerful symbol. A jade belt naturally is something of great value; having it hang alone in the woods is an obvious reference to alienation. 掛 is also a reference to death by hanging, including death by hanging inflicted by one’s own hands. That troubling image has been the source of controversy surrounding Dream of the Red Chamber for centuries. This single line is arguably one of the most vivid and stark lines in the entire novel.
金簪雪裡埋, or “a golden hairpin buried beneath the snow,” is another powerfully symbolic line. A golden hairpin is obviously something of great worth, and yet it’s abandoned in the snow, just as is the precious jade belt in the woods.