Involuntary

• 1. As in 无羁 Wuji and 不忘 Buwang, I’ve elected to translate 云深 yunshen as “deep in the clouds,” rather than “Cloud Recesses.”
• 2. This line—来时光景何洒脱—is ambiguous enough to have multiple interpretations: it could be a past-facing sigh, wondering at the untroubled days of before (“How carefree and unrestrained we were, at the beginning” or, more literally, “initially upon our arrival”) or a future-facing question, asking the moon in equal parts grief and helplessness (“How can I be carefree and unrestrained in the coming days?”).
• 3. I’ve translated 染尘 ranchen here as “touched by dust,” but I think the symbolic valences of these words can be teased out a bit more. The character 尘 chen / dust is likely familiar to us from its past usage in 无羁 Wuji, 赤子 Chizi, 恨别 Henbie, and 避尘 Bichen (the name of Lan Wangji’s sword) as dust symbolic of the mortal realm. 染 ran / “to dye, stain,” is somewhat new, but the visual metaphors of staining something that was once pure are pretty easily transferable. The binome 染尘 ranchen in the context of Buddhism also specifically refers to a member of a monastic order returning to non-monastic life—a kind of permanent staining of their person/character.
• 4. A fuller translation of the lines 不欲染尘 染尘不由我 might be “I did not wish to be touched by dust / but getting touched by dust is not up to me.” Not the most elegant or poetic of sentence structures in English, but you get a better idea of the way repetition is being utilized in concert with 不由 buyou sentence construction. Subsequent lines of parallel structure (e.g. 不欲刀剑 刀剑不由我 / “I did not wish to wield blade and sword but that was involuntary”) might be similarly rendered (“I did not wish [to wield] blade and sword / but [wielding] blade and sword is not up to me”).
• 5. I’ve rendered 兴衰 xingshuai here as “rises and falls,” but I wanted to emphasize how dramatic 兴衰 xingshuai really is. For context, it’s often used to describe the rise and fall of cities, kingdoms, dynasties, and empires.
• 6. The line 只是过往人已不在 / “Only the people of days past—no longer here” evokes two literary references off the top of my head. The first is a line from 词 ci poet 李煜 Li Yu’s final poem, 《虞美人·春花秋月何时了》 “When Will the Turning of the Seasons End.” In it, the final ruler of Southern Tang mourns all that time has taken from him, writing that 雕栏玉砌应犹在 只是朱颜改 / “the intricately-carved banisters and jade steps should still be there / only the rosy faces have changed…” A few centuries later, legendary Song Dynasty poetess 李清照 Li Qingzhao, in one of her 词 ci poems, coins the chengyu 物是人非 wushi renfei / “things are still the same, but all the people have changed.” This chengyu is generally used to express the melancholy and existential nostalgia of returning to a place that looks the same, but is now populated by different people from the ones in the poet’s memories.
• 7. A few notes on these lines: first, I want to highlight how cool this ink-splash painting metaphor is. The first line/three characters evokes the vastness of natural scenery and the unchanging nature of the mountains and rivers, which resonates/contrasts with the chorus’s thematic focus on political turmoil in the human realm, the rapidity of change and its attendant sorrows. In the next line, the lyrics take this sweeping imagery and shift it from natural spectacle to artistic effect, tying the moment to Lan Xichen as he gazes at an ink-splash painting of a landscape. The third line then uses the metaphor of landscape painting to bring us back to the thematic narrative of the song—咫尺难分清与浊 / Up close, separating the clear from the muddied is difficult. 清浊 qingzhuo, literally “clear, muddied,” contains figurative and moral valences of opposites (i.e. good and evil, excellent and inferior, high and low, etc.).
• 8. 歧路 qilu is actually less “crossroads” and more “fork in the road,” but both are traditional places to part from friends. In addition, 歧路 qilu has a valence of not just a different road taken, but the wrong road taken (in opposition to 正途 zhengtu / the correct or righteous road). This could, conceivably, be a reference to a line from Li Bai’s 《行路难三首》: 行路难！行路难！多歧路，今安在？/ “The road is hard! The road is hard! There are many forks in the road; where am I today?”
• 9. The line 一曲洞箫怎寄托 / “How can a single song from the xiao carry my grief?” is playing on the chengyu 寄托哀思 jituo aisi / (Pleco gloss) “to give expression to one’s grief over someone’s death.”
• 10. These two lines are spectacularly ambiguous; 遮眼 zheyan, here, is likely an abbreviation of the chengyu 遮人眼目 zherenyanmu, which means “to cover people’s eyes” (i.e. to engage in deceptive behavior). What’s left ambiguous in the line here is whether Lan Xichen is the one performing deceptive behavior, or if he is the recipient of such hoodwinking. Regardless, the second line—遮眼有因果—might be more literally rendered as “covered eyes have consequences.” Though 因果 yinguo in its daily usage is something along the lines of “causes and effects,” the binome takes on the valence of “karma/karmic retribution” when read in a Buddhist context.