What The Goddess Who Unveils Illusion Does

Digging through the old poems

What The Goddess Who Unveils Illusion Does

As you know, I’m a fan of dispensing with formalities and getting right down to business. So let’s get right down to it.

None of the Chinese versions of 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber) that I am aware of write yesterday’s poetic passage out as verse. This includes both the 1791 and 1792 version of the book. They all publish it something like this:

司人間之風情月債，掌塵世之女怨男痴。因近來風流冤孽，纏綿於此，是以前來訪察機會，佈散相思。今日與爾相逢，亦非偶然。此離吾境不遠，別無他物。

Note, of course, that the punctuation here isn’t original. You can punctuate this all sorts of different ways if you like.

But, if you take these passages and write them out in a different way, you’ll see right away that they actually do form a poem. To start things off are these two lines:

司人間之風情月債

掌塵世之女怨男痴

Do you see the way these line up? If you have even only a low intermediate level of Chinese, I bet you can see what I’m talking about.