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Man of the people, how you kept me laughing,
Hemp-cloth in your arms, come to barter for silk.
But skeins of silk were not what you were after,
You were there with schemes to make me come with you.

And so—I went with you, across the Qi river,
To the Mounds of Dun we went together.
Don’t say it was I put off our day of marriage—
You’d found us no-one to serve as a go-between.
So, when I urged you to put away your anger,
We fixed the day for a date in autumn.

I climbed the crumbling wall.
I watched the toll-barrier for you to come back to me.
I watched the toll-barrier but could not see you.
My tears fell and fell.

Once I had seen you return to the barrier,
We laughed, then we talked.
You burnt cracks in tortoise-shell, cast stalks of milfoil,
No word of ill-luck.

Before leaves fall from the mulberry tree
They are glossy and green.
Doves, don’t eat of the mulberry fruits!
Girls, don’t take pleasure with gentlemen!
If a man takes his pleasure, he’ll still be excused,
If a girl takes hers, she’s no excuse.

When the leaves drop off the mulberry tree,
They lie brown and discoloured.
In three years with you
I have eaten poor food.

Qi’s waters swell and flood,
Our carriage hangings are wet.
Nothing I’ve done has not been straight,
Nothing of yours but bent.
You set no limit to what you did
—Man of too many inner selves.

Three years a wife!
Effort no effort,
Getting up early, late to bed,
No day for myself.
—It is finished now,
My brothers ignore me
With biting laughter.
I think in silence,
Sad for myself.

I came to you—to grow old with you.
We grew older. You made me resent you.
Qi at least has its shore-line, marshes their edges.
—When my hair was still up, as a girl’s is,
How we talked, how we laughed our contentment,
Vowed good faith so intently.
Not thinking it might all be altered,
The change that was not to be thought of,
The change that has happened.

Translated by Mark Elvin

Meng, or ‘Man of the People’, a folk song from what is now Henan province, is collected in the Shi-Jing, or Book of Odes, from the Spring and Autumn period of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, 720–480 bc. Mark Elvin discusses the poem in ‘Between the Earth and Heaven: Conceptions of the Self in China’ collected in Another History: Essays on China from a European Perspective, Sydney 1996.