Portrait of Two Ladies

On a Beautiful Woman Contemplating a Painting
(From the Chinese of Hsiao Kang, 503-551AD)

In the hall hangs a painting of a woman divine.
A beautiful lady steps out of the court.
The pair of them – pictures of beauty sublime.
Which is real? Which unreal? Who is able to note?
They share the most elegant eyebrows and eyes;
their delicate waists are of the same kind.
The difference between one and the other is found
that in one, lively spirit always abounds.


(From Beneath the Silver River: Translations from Classical Chinese Poetry)




In my Christmas 2023 poem and article (A Dickensian Christmas), inspired by an old Christmas card, I mentioned that poetry arising from pictures is known as ‘ekphrastic’ poetry; the name is derived from a Greek word which simply means ‘description’.

Well-known modern examples which will spring to mind are Keats’ Ode to a Greek Urn, and Auden’s Shield of Achilles. The poem above is from China of seventeen hundred years ago – old enough. But this pictorial tradition in poetry has a greater antiquity still; for Achilles’ wonderfully decorative shield was described, and at great length (149 lines of it) by Homer in his Iliad. Originally the process – ekphrasis – was part of the discipline of classical Greek rhetoric, which of course demanded the speaker’s ability to describe clearly.

In a couple of recent poems I’ve played around just a little with translation’s emphasis in order to achieve some jocularity. Hsiao Kang’s On a Beautiful Woman Contemplating a Painting, though, is quite exact, as readers will probably sense from, for instance, the rapidity of transition between the first and second lines. That’s what we find in the original Chinese; a necessary, immediate, and efficacious transition.