Page:The Spirit of the Chinese People.djvu/151

Rh when dressed in full court dress uniform, is. The specimen I take is a poem of four lines from the poetry of the T'ang dynasty describing what sacrifices the Chinese people had to make in order to protect their civilisation against the wild half civilized fierce Huns from the North. The words of the poem in Chinese are:

which translated into English word for word mean:

Swear sweep the Huns not care self, Five thousand embroidery sable perish desert dust; Alas! Wuting riverside bones, Still are Spring chambers dream inside men!

They vowed to sweep the heathen hordes From off their native soil or die: Five thousand taselled knights, sable-clad, All dead now on the desert lie. Alas! the white bones that bleach cold Far off along the Wuting stream, Still come and go as living men Home somewhere in the loved one's dream.

Now, if you will compare it with my poor clumsy English version, you will see how plain in words and style, how simple in ideas, the original Chinese is.