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Resenting Parting

• 1. The opening of this song reminds me a great deal of Jiang Cheng’s dream sequence in episode 19, just before he reawakens with a golden core restored. There is a doubling of himself in these lines—少年心 隔水仍发好梦 / the heart of my youth, separated by water, still dreams of pleasant things—in which the embittered Jiang Cheng of the present day looks back, wistfully, on his younger self, who “still dreams of pleasant things.”
• 2. This line gestures at the fundamental disagreement between Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian; where Wei Wuxian, in 曲尽陈情 Qujinchenqing, declares that, “even should [he] sink into an ocean flames / [he] would still harbor this hope of helping the world in [his] heart,” Jiang Cheng instead notes that he would still prioritize “those [he] hold[s] dear” over “the weight of crowds and mortal dust” (i.e. passing human connections and acquaintances). It’s a classic Slytherin primary vs. Gryffindor primary disagreement.
• 3. In this line, Jiang Cheng specifically wakes up from a drunken stupor. Also, the word I’ve translated as “mile” is actually 里 li, a unit of distance that measures about half a kilometer. The actual numerical value of the distance is unimportant, as 万 wan / “ten thousand” is a number often used to indicate A Whole Lot.
• 4. Jiang Cheng, throughout this song, avoids naming anyone directly. The lyrics often use phrasings like 他年人 tanianren / “the person of those years,” 故人 guren / “friends/acquaintances/people of the past,” and 旧友 jiuyou / “old friends,” to refer to Wei Wuxian. These terms all connote a sense of distance, a feeling of “we once were, but now no longer.” 故人 guren can also refer to the dead/departed.
• 5. The comparison to 飘蓬 piaopeng / “drifting seeds” is likely intended to evoke the literary tradition of using 飞蓬 feipeng / “flying seeds” to refer to distant friends. I’ve elided the characters 青山 qingshan / “green mountains” in this line because I, for the love of all that was holy, could not fit them in the translation without stacking more prepositional phrases on top of an already overlong line. A more complete translation might be—“after parting in the jianghu, who drifts like seeds on the winds through the green mountains, leaving no footprints as he passes?”
• 6. “These thousand threads, I’ve tied myself” is a bit of a cop-out translation for the line 作茧之人缚千层, as a full rendering would require the explanation of the chengyu being referenced. 作茧自缚 zuojian zifu literally means “to spin a cocoon and bind yourself,” and generally occupies the same idiomatic space as English sayings like “you reap what you sow” or “you’ve made your bed, now sleep in it.” Despite what this English translation would imply, the lyrics rarely use the first-person pronoun, and do not do so in this line. As a result, the fully literal translation of this line is also in an ambiguous, distanced third person: “the person who spins cocoons is bound by a thousand layers.” From contextual clues in the lines around this one, it seems rather apparent to me that this line is intended to refer to Jiang Cheng’s inability to speak to Wei Wuxian after the events of the Guanyin Temple arc, but the room for alternate interpretations still remains for those who wish it.
• 7. This line was… hard to translate, and honestly, I’m not completely convinced that this is the best rendition. Broken down, we get 本是 benshi / “originally,” 秋意 qiuyi / “the idea/intent/concept of autumn,” 正浓 zhennong / “rather thick/viscous,” in a way that suggests the intensifying of some kind of autumnal vibes. My translation adds a particular melancholy to the line that it may not deserve. Autumn is a particularly poignant season in the Chinese literary tradition—home to particular festivals like Mid-Autumn, it evokes home and homecoming (and, correspondingly, homesickness and nostalgia for those in exile). At the same time, autumn is an invigorating season, with stunning scenery and the rise of brisk winds. Jiang Cheng’s names are both heavily associated with autumn as well, as per this post. [See translation source.]