Red Beans

Lines 1–2: a plant at a distance

紅豆, red beans, names the bright seeds that serve as a token of remembrance. 南國 is the southern country or southern lands, not a precise address. The poem gives no botanical description from which to settle an exact species.

發幾枝 asks how many shoots or branches the plant puts out. It is a question carried toward someone who can see the growth. The opening's apparently simple statement therefore becomes an exchange across distance.

Lines 3–4: gathering a feeling

君 respectfully addresses “you”; it does not identify the person's gender or the kind of relationship. 相思 can be longing for a friend or an intimate beloved. Reading it as love is possible, but the text does not supply a wedding or a named lover.

采擷 is a two-character verb meaning to pick or gather. We split it in the gloss and reunite it in the translation. “A handful” is supplied in English to give 多, “more” or “many,” an idiomatic shape; the Chinese specifies no quantity.

The final line makes the object itself carry 相思. Our “carries longing” keeps that transfer without asserting that a seed literally feels. The variant 勸君休采擷 reverses the advice: do not gather what intensifies longing. It would need a different English third line.

How the last line answers the question

The question 發幾枝 asks for a count of the branches. 多 in the wish gives no exact number, and 最 in the last line shifts from quantity to what the beans mean to the speaker. 此物, “this thing,” directs the reader's attention to the particular seeds, small enough to pick up and carry. That movement from a count to an attachment gives the familiar token its weight in this poem.

This five-character jueju moves from a plant, through a question and a wish, to the feeling named in its title. 枝 and 思 hold the second and fourth rhyme positions.

Short commands and questions do much of the work; the poem offers no descriptive portrait of its addressee. Pinyin gives modern Mandarin, including 擷 as xié. We do not derive a historical tonal grid from those modern tones.

Wang Wei puts a relationship into a portable object. This is one reason to read it beside other poems on the love shelf without deciding in advance that every use of longing must be romantic.

In Yi Jian Mei, Li Qingzhao explicitly divides one longing between two places. In Farewell in the Mountains, Wang Wei makes next year's grass a measure of uncertainty about a friend's return. Red Beans uses an object that could pass between people, although it never narrates a gift being delivered.

Our translation and commentary are original. The source note makes the chosen wording visible because the alternative third line changes the speaker's action.