The mystery with the bamboo scroll

The last 3 weeks Karin has been in China, spending some time in Yunnan, and Jie has been busy with the Asian games going on in Guangzhou. We had little time to write, but now Karin is back in Sweden and in this blog we like to tell the story about an old mysterious scroll…

Some time ago Karin went to see a friend for dinner. The friend had a beautiful scroll on her wall with a painting of a bamboo and some written characters. “It is Japanese”, she said. “I inherited it from my father”. Karin took a closer look and told her that it couldn´t be Japanese, the written characters were Chinese. Karin took a picture of the scroll and promised to try to translate it.

The mysterious bamboo scroll

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beautiful, but difficult calligraphy

The calligraphy in the poem was beautiful, the characters almost looked like bamboo leaves… But Karin soon found out that it was too difficult for her to read and interpret the old handwritten characters. She sent the picture to Jie and asked if she could help with the translation.

Beautiful calligraphy

Jie replied within a couple of days:

Kaining ni hao!

Here is my translation. The scroll text should be read from right to left and from up to down. I get the idea of the poem, but I didn´t do well in translation. In general, it is about the beautiful scene of the bamboo thicket in the rain.

“The bamboo thicket stands in the rain.

Raindrops clear everything but the deep greeness

Thousands of branches, filled with water, low and wet.

Feel the breeze in the shadow of the bamboo thicket. “     

**********************************

Jie also explained that the poem ends with a notation of the year, a dedication to the receiver of the poem and the name of the author. In simplified characters it looks like this

庚申冬月画

应佛明先生雅

望指正

说臣梁图功

And in English with Jie´s explanations:

Drawn in Gengsheng Winter Month

This is a traditional way to mark the calendar. It refers to December of a monkey year.

For the invitation of Mr.Foming

This means Mr Foming had asked the author to draw and write a poem for him, therefore he writes this after the poem, similar to “thanks to Mr. Foming, I made this”

Hope you point out any mistakes and give me some guidance

You can consider it as ‘please kindly leave comments’, a polite way to ask for others’ opinions about how to improve. Just another typical humble Chinese saying when you write, there are similar sayings in Japanese and Korean with similar cultural background of being humble and obeying.

ShuoChen Liang Tugong

     Liang Tugong is the author´s name

 

When was the scroll painted?

Of course both Jie, Karin, and her friend were curious about how old the scroll was. According to Jie the date at the end of the poem required some knowledge about old ways of writing a date in China.

Jie wrote:

 The notation of the date is ”Gengsheng Winter Month”, which means December in a special year of the monkey. I checked the time, but I am not sure whether it refers to 1920 or 1980, since “Gengsheng” appears every 60 years. It is a complicated way to mark the year (at least for most young Chinese, I don’t know any Chinese who know much about this, including me…) If you’re interested in it, you can google “heavenly stems, earthly branch”.

 All the characters in the poem are traditional ones, but that is not an evidence of the scroll being written before 1950s, when the simplified characters were introduced. Old people or some scholars still write in traditional characters.

 Maybe your friend should ask her father about when he got this? Would love to know the rest of the story. Keep me updated 🙂 /Jie

 

The story of how the scroll came to Sweden

Karin sent an e-mail to her Swedish friend and asked if she knew when her father got the scroll, and soon got this reply (translated to English):

Hi Karin! Thank you so much for the translation. How interesting! Please send my sincere thanks to Jie! My father got the scroll on his 50th birthday, in June 1961. He got it from his brother who was an architect and traveled a lot in the whole world. My mother and father talked about it as something very special, and they liked it a lot. That is all I know actually. Obviously the year that is mentioned in the end of the poem cannot be 1980.  

So the scroll must have been painted 1920. Mystery solved!  But it was almost like a detective work to find it out!

Mystery solved

If our readers have anything to add or comment to this detective story, please tell us and give us some guidance! We would love to hear from you!

Karin&Jie