1st finished attempt to compose a poem in Classical Chinese - thoughts?

May 5, 2025 at 09:44 PM

Simplified Chinese:

中国之荣

蓝东青春
红南赤夏
黄西金秋
黑北白冬

万物皆变
千途归中
海内殷富
中国天下

Traditional Characters:

中國之榮

藍東青春
紅南赤夏
黃西金秋
黑北白冬

万物皆變
千途归中
海内殷富
中國天下

Hanyu Pinyin:
zhōng guó zhī róng

lán dōng qīng chūn
hóng nán chì xià
huáng xī jīn qiū
hēi běi bái dōng

wàn wù jiē biàn
qián tú guī zhōng
hǎi nèi yīn fù
zhōng guó tiān xià

This strange-looking kind of 律诗 sort of tries to conjugate the ancient style characteristic of four-character verses with a slightly more heterodox approach by adding alternations between tonal patterns, as is more common in later poetic styles. To be clear, Mandarin is not even my native language, so any and all constructive criticism, advice, etc. is immensely welcome.

The attached image also showcases the usual writing direction in ancient times, even though my quite frankly poorly thought-out "calligraphy", if you can even call it that in this case, certainly leaves a ton of room for improvement, aside from containing a couple of mistakes which have since been corrected in the versions shown above.

May 6, 2025 at 08:24 AM

Edit: the latest version of this changed has had its title changed to "华夏", in order to better reflect the diverse variety of poetic names there are for China.

As for the handwritten version, it too has been updated to reflect that, as well as to correct the aforementioned mistakes present in the original above, and also to make the calligraphic style at least slightly more acceptable, hopefully not as carelessly shabby as it admittedly was in the first version.

June 3, 2025 at 06:24 PM

Nice to see you having so much enthusiasm toward the Chinese language!

On 5/6/2025 at 5:44 AM, Fuggax said:

The attached image also showcases the usual writing direction in ancient times

Actually, Chinese is generally top-to-bottom when written horizontally, and right-to-left when written vertically. That is to say, the first line comes at the very right side of the paper, and the following lines are written at the left of the previous line one by one. There are times that these lines are arranged left-to-right today, but in classical usage, right-to-left vertical writing is undoubtfully the only way of writing.(At least as a doctoral candidate I've never see any ancient books written left-to-right vertically.)

And btw, the language used for classical poems is not quite the same as modern spoken Chinese. Classical poems are topic of Classical Chinese Literature Study - poets used Classical Chinese for poems. From my personal experience, foreign learners, even at a high level of Mandarin, should learn it specifically if they want to master Classical Chinese(of course a basis of Modern Chinese is helpful). Yet I don't recommend any learner at your level to start with Classical Chinese rashly - Even native kids start to face Classical texts when they're 12 yo.

Beyond that, correctly arranging the tonal pattern of traditional Chinese poems needs profound knowledge. It needs knowledge of ancient phonetics - to put it simple, there was once a time an extra tone that has disappeared and blended with the four tones today. It needs a bunch of complicated rules which is no compulsory knowledge even for the majority of native speakers(I, in contrary, as a doctoral candidate in the History of Chinese Language, am among one of those who have to learn this part in my undergraduate courses, which was still a very difficult experience), not

Now back to the text, I think the linkages between sentences are still too loose, which makes the topic of the whole poem quite vague. Maybe you could drill yourself into this part. But still I think it's okay for your current level of Chinese. Looking forward to your progress!

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1st finished attempt to compose a poem in Classical Chinese - thoughts?

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