"Song of Seven Cups" by Lú Tóng

I love this poem :)

I have found several translations throughout the internet. I took from a couple of them to put together what I thought created the best poetic flow (keep in mind that I'm working only with other's translations):

The first cup caresses my dry lips and throat,
The second shatters the walls of my loneliness,
The third explores the dry rivulets of my soul
Searching for legends of five thousand scrolls.
With the fourth the pain of past injustice vanishes through my pores.
The fifth purifies my flesh and bone.
With the sixth I commune with the immortals.
The seventh conveys such pleasure I am overcome.
The fresh wind blows through my wings
As I make my way to Penglai.

I had never actually seen specific mention of the seventh bowl, but that actually makes more sense of the last line.

I have to say that I do wonder what tea he's drinking :)

Lotung, a Tang poet, wrote
"The first cup moistens my lips and throat,
the second cup breaks my loneliness,
the third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some five thousand volumes of odd ideographs.-
The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration, all the wrong of life passes away through my pores.
At the fifth cup I am purified;
the sixth cup calls me to the realms of immortals.
The seventh cup ah, but I could take no more!
I only feel the breath of cool wind that rises in my sleeves.
Where is Horaisan?* Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither."

*The Chinese Elysium.

By Kakuzo Okakura from his Book of Tea
http://www.archive.org/details/bookoftea00okakrich

That is a really gpod weblog.

I still have two issues with her translation which are he does not finish the seventh cup, and in the third line the guts, or bowels especially at that time in China were an area of creative thought, which of course she does mention.  I understand this third line to be that the tea acts on the writer's 'mind' as rain in the desert, allowing him to produce 5000 volumes of writing. I base this on no authority at all, however, and would be obliged to anyone who offered a cogent argument to the contrary.

Also in the shortened version of this poem called the "song of seven bowls of tea" Penglai is never mentioned in the Chinese, it always ends with the bit about the breeze carrying him off. This may be a sort of literary elitism, you are supposed to know the rest of the poem, and if you ask about its apparently abrupt ending, you are ignorant.

Hehe, did this come about after they came into contact with the French? :X

Read this with my Mandarin tutor today... he found the poem a lot more pleasant to work with than the usual "No, I don't have a dog. Do you have a boyfriend?" dialogs in our book. I printed out 3 different translations along with it, and it was fun to compare them.

He had a couple points; I solicited some help from my friend Sharon who was patient enough to look some things up and provide some of her own comments....

* The "light breeze spring up under the arms" line (last line) apparently does imply something specific in Chinese literature, so I don't know if it's exactly elitism... maybe it's implied even without the direct reference to 蓬莱山. My other friend said she wouldn't necessarily know it was referring to Penglai, but that she would know that line implies something like that. Her exact comments "i would know it implies that he felt that he could fly, meaning he's becoming a 仙". I wasn't familiar with Penglai Shan before this thread...
I did quickly read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penglai_Mountain, though

* I don't know if the use of "tendon" for 骨 is poetic, but he seemed to think that "bone" was a better translation. Maybe "flesh and bone" sounds more poetic in English than "muscle and ....", if only because it sounds similar to "flesh and blood". My other friend says that "bone" is the meaning also. Her additional comments: "it means the flesh and bones feel lighter, but it can also imply that the mind feels clearer [...]oh the mind feels clearer.. hmm it's more like.. not that you've reached spiritual enlightment, but getting closer". She suggested something along the lines of "purified, both body and soul", which has a nice sound to it.

* (second cup) He translated 孤闷 together as "loneliness", though said that 闷 implied boredom. My friend described it as "being lonely and depressed" without even seeing any of the English translation, so I think that one is probably correct.

* We talked a little about how translating 仙 to English is difficult, because there's not really a similar concept. He said that Greek gods or something were the most similar thing in western mythology.