Please help with a Chinese translation!

October 15, 2012 3:35 PM

Can someone help me translate this wall scroll written in traditional Chinese characters? (photo inside)

I've have the explanation/translation before, but it still didn't make much sense in it's entirety. It's supposed to be from an ancient Chinese poet who after visiting various places throughout China now has this collection on places on the his wall in his room to remember all the places he saw. I believe a few of the phrases are famous landmarks and natural areas throughout China, such as the Wuyi Mountains, etc. Ideally, I'd like to have a translation for the entire poem so I can pair it as a caption with the piece on a wall. Otherwise, I have a feeling it won't mean much to people who see the scroll on the wall. Here is the scroll

Thanks in advance!

posted by melizabeth to Writing & Language (2 answers total)

Well, I've been squinting at the picture and tracing my finger through the air trying to figure out the characters, but can only come up with bits and pieces. Starting from the upper right, the first two characters are probably lun2hai3 沦海, "ripply sea" or possibly cang1hai3 "blue sea" and the first 2 characters in the 5th column over are guang3ling2 广陵, which according to a quick Google search appears to be the ancient name for the city of Yangzhou. The 2nd character in the 2nd column, 嶑 is the name of a mountain, according to Chinese search engine Baidu. (It didn't get more specific than that.)

I can figure out some more characters, but again it's all piecemeal so I can't string together anything out of it. Though it's very clear that some of the characters do deal with place names, they must be really archaic names for places. I'll show this to my dad; he might know this poem if it's famous and recognize the places named.
posted by ditto75 at 9:06 PM on October 15, 2012

Response by poster: Yeah, I think most of the words on there are related to places, but at some point there is one or two conclusive sentences that pull it together. Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
posted by melizabeth at 4:10 PM on October 18, 2012