“Poems are actually ancient citizen science”

There is very cool and relevant news for this blog from the Smithsonian today. The title quote is from Jiajia Liu, an ecologist at Fudan University in China and co-author of a new study. The study analyzes a contribution of centuries of Chinese poetry that goes beyond just literary contemplation. That is, these Chinese poems form a corpus – that is, a database – that can be linked to related data like location and time written. They’ve looked through this corpus of 724 poems written over 1400 years that mention the critically endangered Yangtze finless porpoise to triangulate the shrinking range of the animal. They can show that the range has probably fallen about 65% over that time.

This is the power of interdisciplinary research.

Like any good scientific study these days, the paper is open access and included in the supplementary materials is the corpus. Today’s poem is the oldest entry in the dataset, with two different English translations to enjoy. According to ChatGPT, the poem《程仲庸游京口留金山寺》was written by 唐仲实 (Táng Zhòngshí), a poet of the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127). But this conflicts with the data in the corpus, which says it was written in 1370 during the Ming Dynasty. So once again, a friendly reminder that ChatGPT may not know everything, though it does try to project confidence!

Original:
我正无心懒似云，
那堪奔走污缁尘。
飞花岸柳偏留客，
吹浪江豚忽拜人。
玉带暂抛烦转语，
楞伽曾写悟前身。
异时好说金山寺，
小小渔舟唤渡频。

English Translation V1 via ChatGPT:

My heart is idle, drifting like the lazy clouds,
How can I endure the chase through dusty, tainted life?
Falling petals and willows along the shore seem to bid me stay,
And river waves send leaping dolphins as if in sudden homage.
The jade belt’s burden, cast aside for now, ends worldly chatter,
Once, in the Lankavatara, I wrote of awakening to a former self.
One day, I’ll speak again of Golden Mountain Temple,
Where oft I hailed the tiny fishing boat to cross the stream.

English Translation V2 via ChatGPT, who offered to give me a "more poetic translation"

A Visit to Golden Mountain Temple – For Cheng Zhongyong

My heart adrift, like clouds too tired to roam,
What use the dusty world, its noise and foam?
Blossoms fall, and willow banks entreat—
The leaping dolphins bow in waves so fleet.

The courtly belt, for now, is cast aside,
With idle talk, let worldly cares subside.
In scrolls of Lanka once I glimpsed my soul,
A self long past, yet part of heaven’s whole.

One day, I’ll speak of Golden Mountain’s grace,
Where fishing skiffs once came to ferry me from place to place.