佳人 beautiful woman

五言古诗

 杜甫

佳人

绝代有佳人， 幽居在空谷； 
自云良家子， 零落依草木。 
关中昔丧乱， 兄弟遭杀戮； 
官高何足论？ 不得收骨肉。 
世情恶衰歇， 万事随转烛。 
夫婿轻薄儿， 新人美如玉。 
合昏尚知时， 鸳鸯不独宿； 
但见新人笑， 那闻旧人哭？ 
在山泉水清， 出山泉水浊。 
侍婢卖珠回， 牵萝补茅屋。 
摘花不插发， 采柏动盈掬。 
天寒翠袖薄， 日暮倚修竹。

Explanation to the Poem:

佳人：beautiful woman
谷：valley
兄弟：brothers
骨肉：flesh and blood
烛：candle
鸳鸯：mandarin duck
清：clean
浊：muddy
竹：bamboo

Translation:

Five-character-ancient-verse 
Du Fu 
ALONE IN HER BEAUTY

Who is lovelier than she? 
Yet she lives alone in an empty valley. 
She tells me she came from a good family 
Which is humbled now into the dust. 
...When trouble arose in the Kuan district, 
Her brothers and close kin were killed. 
What use were their high offices, 
Not even shielding their own lives? -- 
The world has but scorn for adversity; 
Hope goes out, like the light of a candle. 
Her husband, with a vagrant heart, 
Seeks a new face like a new piece of jade; 
And when morning-glories furl at night 
And mandarin-ducks lie side by side, 
All he can see is the smile of the new love, 
While the old love weeps unheard. 
The brook was pure in its mountain source, 
But away from the mountain its waters darken. 
...Waiting for her maid to come from selling pearls 
For straw to cover the roof again, 
She picks a few flowers, no longer for her hair, 
And lets pine-needles fall through her fingers, 
And, forgetting her thin silk sleeve and the cold, 
She leans in the sunset by a tall bamboo.
 

about the Poet:

Du Fu (Chinese: 杜甫; Wade-Giles: Tu Fu, 712 – 770) was a prominent Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty. Along with Li Bai (Li Po), he is frequently called the greatest of the Chinese poets. His own greatest ambition was to help his country by becoming a successful civil servant, but he proved unable to make the necessary accommodations. His life, like the whole country, was devastated by the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, and the last 15 years of his life were a time of almost constant unrest.
Initially little known, his works came to be hugely influential in both Chinese and Japanese culture. Of his poetic writing, nearly fifteen hundred poems written by Du Fu have been handed down over the ages. He has been called Poet-Historian and the Poet-Sage by Chinese critics, while the range of his work has allowed him to be introduced to Western readers as "the Chinese Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Béranger, Hugo or Baudelaire".

Since the Song dynasty Du Fu has been called by critics the "poet historian" (詩史 shī shǐ). The most directly historical of his poems are those commenting on military tactics or the successes and failures of the government, or the poems of advice which he wrote to the emperor. Indirectly, he wrote about the effect of the times in which he lived on himself, and on the ordinary people of China. As Watson notes, this is information "of a kind seldom found in the officially compiled histories of the era".
Du Fu's political comments are based on emotion rather than calculation: his prescriptions have been paraphrased as, "Let us all be less selfish, let us all do what we are supposed to do".Since his views were impossible to disagree with, however, his forcefully expressed truisms enabled his installation as the central figure of Chinese poetic history.
Du Fu's work is notable above all for its range. Chinese critics traditionally used the term 集大成 (jídàchéng- "complete symphony"), a reference to Mencius' description of Confucius. Yuan Zhen was the first to note the breadth of Du Fu's achievement, writing in 813 that his predecessor, "united in his work traits which previous men had displayed only singly". He mastered all the forms of Chinese poetry: Chou says that in every form he "either made outstanding advances or contributed outstanding examples".Furthermore, his poems use a wide range of registers, from the direct and colloquial to the allusive and self-consciously literary. The tenor of his work changed as he developed his style and adapted to his surroundings ("chameleon-like" according to Watson): his earliest works are in a relatively derivative, courtly style, but he came into his own in the years of the rebellion. Owen comments on the "grim simplicity" of the Qinzhou poems, which mirrors the desert landscape; the works from his Chengdu period are "light, often finely observed"; while the poems from the late Kuizhou period have a "density and power of vision".
Although he wrote in all poetic forms, Du Fu is best known for his lǜshi, a type of poem with strict constraints on the form and content of the work. about two thirds of his 1500 extant works are in this form, and he is generally considered to be its leading exponent. His best lǜshi use the parallelisms required by the form to add expressive content rather than as mere technical restrictions. Hawkes comments that, "it is amazing that Tu Fu is able to use so immensely stylized a form in so natural a manner".