Ma Zhiyuan

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Ma.
Ma Zhiyuan
Traditional Chinese 馬致遠
Simplified Chinese 马致远

Ma Zhiyuan (Chinese: Ma Zhiyuan (Chinese: 馬致遠, c. 1250–1321), courtesy name Dongli (東籬), was a Chinese poet and celebrated playwright, a native of Dadu (present-day Beijing) during the Yuan dynasty.[1]

Among his achievements is the development and popularizing of the sanqu (散曲) lyric type of Classical Chinese poetry forms. The poem "Autumn Thoughts" (秋思) from the book '东篱乐府' is the most widely known of his sanqu poems.[1]

Works

Only seven of his 15 plays are extant, of which four have been translated into English:[1]

A sanqu poem, composed to the metric pattern Tianjingsha (天淨沙), using ten images in twenty-two monosyllables to preamble a state of emotion, considered the penultimate piece in Chinese poetry to convey the typical Chinese male literati's melancholy during late autumn:

《秋思》 Autumn Thoughts
枯藤老樹昏鴉。 A Withered vine, an ancient tree, crows at dusk
小橋流水人家。 A Little bridge, a flowing stream, some huts
古道西風瘦馬。 An old road, wind out of the west, an emaciated horse
夕陽西下,斷腸人在天涯。 On the horizon at sunset is a heart-broken man far, far from home.

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Cihai: Page 1132-1133.

References


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 8/31/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.