EALC110 GRAPHIC ADAPTATION PROJECT

by Tram Nguyen, Yi Lin, and Yu Zhou

Online Access: issuu.com/tramnguyen307/docs/ealc110adapt

DU FU杜甫 (712 – 770)

Original Text

春夜喜雨

好雨知时节

当春乃发生

随风潜入夜

润物细无声

野径云俱黑

江船火独明

晓看红湿处

花重锦官城

English Translation

Welcome Rain on a Spring Night

The good rain knows its season,

When spring arrives, it brings life.

It follows the wind secretly into the night,

And moistens all things softly, without sound.

On the country road, the clouds are all black,

On a riverboat, a single fire bright.

At dawn one sees this place now red and wet,

The flowers are heavy in the brocade city.

Translated by Burton Watson in The Selected Poems

of Du Fu. New York, Columbia Uni. Press (2002).

The good rain knows its season,

When spring arrives, it brings life.

It follows the wind secretly into the night,

And moisten all things softly…

…without sound.

On the country road,

the clouds are black,

On a riverboat,

a single fire bright.

At dawn one sees this place now red and wet,

The flowers are heavy in the brocade city.

Reflections on the Graphic Adaptation Project

This semester in EALC110: Introduction to Chinese literature, we are asked to create

a graphic adaptation of a Tang poem of our choice, to demonstrate the formal characteristics

of the poem (parallelism, synecdoche, metonymy, focalization, etc.). Our group selects

“Welcome Rain on a Spring Night” because we are deeply captivated by the way Du Fu

utilizes motifs of landscape and seasonal passing as an analogue of human emotion. Since his

poem incorporates four couplets (or eight lines of verses), we decides to make four drawings,

with each serving as the visual representation of the respective couplet. For us, the beauty of

natural imagery in Du Fu’s poem is most conveniently conveyed through the traditional

medium of colored pencils on paper. We, however, do recognize a fundamental limitation in

our decision to work with a still life medium—the thematic significance of the poem, which

is about the progressive process of nature’s transition into spring, could be better portrayed

through the use of animation effects. Given our inadequate artistic and technological skills,

we struggle a little in our attempt to answer the questions:

• How can our inanimate adaptation provoke these tactile and sensorial emotions that Du Fu

experiences in his process of enjoying the springtime rain?

• In what specific ways can we help potential readers of this adaptation appreciate the linguistic

elements in the poem?

Our group eventually comes to the conclusion that we must pay very close attention

to all visual language of the adaptation; even the smallest detail should be methodically

constructed:

First, color usage is important. The green shade of leaves in our graphic illustration,

for example, shifts from being very pale and barely noticeable to becoming more lush and

pronounced over time. Meanwhile, the trunk of the tree gradually obtains a lighter brown

color as a result of the spring’s arrival. The background color of the pictures also transforms

itself in a way that signifies how the natural scene changes from winter to spring and from

nighttime to daytime.

Second, there is an important emphasis on visual elements that depict notions of

presence and absence. For instance, the first picture draws attention to a tree with leafless

branches and a pond covered with nothing but ice, both portraying the absence of life.

Thanks to the nurturing intervention of the rain, springtime liveliness is later present in the

new leaves on the tree, the animals swimming across the pond, and eventually the red

blossoms that warm up the city.

Third, the shape of visual imagery plays an important role in capturing the

movements of the poetic language. As exemplified in the illustration of the second couplet,

the rain and the wind are depicted as travelling in accordance with each other (i.e. together

they move from right to left and go downward) to “moisten” everything. Their swirling

visual shape is exerting a soft pressure over the tree, the soil and the animals.

At the same time, we find it important to thoughtfully arrange new visual elements in

our adaptation, rather than copying the visual language that inherently exists in the original

work of literature. For example, although Du Fu in his original poem appears to be

contemplating a landscape without people, we want to let him catch a glimpse of a human

figure—the fisherman. Our reason for introducing the fisherman lies in the fact that there is

a contrasting parallelism of natural landscape (road versus. river and black cloud versus.

bright fire) in the third couplet, and it would be necessary to place another human figure in

parallel with Du Fu.

Our set of four drawings for EALC110 Adaptation Project is created in a structural

arrangement that corresponds to the way Du Fu’s poem unfolds, line by line, both in scenery

and in expression: 1) the second couplet embodies a zoom-in shot of the natural

phenomenon in the first couplet, 2) the third couplet is a representation of parallel/

contrasting images, and 3) the final couplet extends a gaze at a landscape off in the distance.

We hope that our graphic translation of “Welcome Rain on a Spring Night” provides an

interesting lense to interpret Du Fu’s preoccupation with the imagery of solitariness against a

natural landscape.