醉宴晚晴樓（江南套曲之二）－－－－悉尼：安红

Drunken party on a dusk- dawn water pavilion

(Second of Chiang-Nan ditties: Ch’ui-yan hwan-ch’ing Lou)

（江南套曲之二：醉宴晚晴楼)

（Translation from the Chinese by jinsheng）                                                                                                           

A postcard view of a dusk- dawn water pavilion: 

Up the terrace there was a lightened silken window by last tread of sky-light at dusk, as an enchanting eye of the coming night, with a figure silhouetted against it, a sitting –lady shining pinkish-gray, and then she lit the waited-return large red candles which put a devil of a fire in blood on her reading desk framed like a painting of the pink of perfection in solitude as a soul with iceblink in a jade bottle by a folding-silky screen at her back: that was her lifeblood. And outside clustered neighboring antiquity water pavilions rising high along hill ascending slopes as a dusky shield invariably curving round the river of Ch’in-huai, of which the tone was raised by those pretty houses that were amusingly unpretentious for anyone of their bookish interests. And it made a glowing picture with each evening a rainbow shone over like a cry of first see light of day.

 But outside  that only I wasn’t there. So what the color of Ch’in-huai River was nobody knows now. A silver thread of river？I think so, as clear as crystalif comparing with today’s. (By jinsheng)