Ruan Ji

Inscribe on your heart
Every inch of the time at sunset.

Ruan Ji (Chinese: 阮籍; 210–263) was a poet and musician who lived in the late Eastern Han Dynasty and Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history. He was one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.

Quotes

• Inscribe on your heart
  Every inch of the time at sunset.
  • "Inscribe on Your Heart", translated by Jerome Ch'ên and Michael Bullock in Poems of Solitude (1960)

• Autumn is beginning, the weather is turning chill.
  Crickets move in to sing under my bed.
  A thousand things surge into my mind
  And grieve my heart. A thousand tales search for words;
  But to whom will they be told?
  The morning breeze flows under my sleeves,
  The moonlight thins,
  And the cock crows,
  As I turn my horses' heads towards home.
  • "The Autumn Is Beginning", translated by Jerome Ch'ên and Michael Bullock in Poems of Solitude (1960)

• There is a fair woman in the west,
  who is as bright as sunlight.
  She wears a dress of the finest silk
  and jewelry shines from her left, her right.
  Her face is a charm, so full of grace,
  lightly perfuming the breeze.
  Climbing upward, she keeps watch for her loved one,
  holding her sleeves, she faces the morning sun.
  She hovers, she drifts through the sky,
  waving her sleeves, she dances,
  flies like the wind, like a cloud, in [a] trance.
  Every so often, she glances at me,
  but for me this beauty is out of reach.
  Left alone, I lament my fate.
  • Poem XIX, translated by Wu Fusheng and Graham Hartill in The Poem of Ruan Ji (2006), p. 39, as reported in Constructing Irregular Theology (2009) by Paul S. Chung, p. 13

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Ruan Ji on Wikipedia