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Hello, I was looking to see if anyone would be able to translate this painting/poem and also let me know who this artist is by the seal/stamp. Thank you!

王勃

「春園」

山泉兩處晚，花柳一園春。還持千日醉，共作百年人。

Thank you so much for the reply. I'm wondering, could you translate this to English? Thank you!!

It is easily said than done. To be able to identify this as a poem that was written by the famous Tang dynasty poet, Wang Bo, was easy because his name was on your scroll. I just needed to track down which of his poems. Unfortunately, this poem "Spring Garden" was not one of the 300 Tang Poems nor was it one of his more famous poems. If it is, then English translation for it would be readily available. In schools, we did study the Tang 300 poems and therefore was more familiar with them. I am not familiar with this poem and in order for me to do a decent job in translating it, I would have to spend hours in tracking the origins of the words used in each of its four sentences (5 characters each)or lucky enough to track down some Chinese translations for it, then translate it into English. This is not time I am willing to spend. Once, another forum member asked me to assist him in translating a poem on a pair of jade seals he and his brother had inherited. He originally paid a professional to help him in deciphering and translating the scripts (some scripts were not very visible)on the seals, only found the translation of the "professionals" was extremely awkward. I originally thought I would be able to assist him by spending about a few hours and he was willing to compensate me for my time. I ended up spending several weeks in communicating with him and we finally were able to translate the poems for him. Of course, I did make a new friend and had fun in corresponding with him. However, when I got older, my time has become much more precious. Therefore, with this new info may be you can now check or hire some professors or graduate students in your local universities who teach/study Chinese literature and/or poetry to assist you in the translating of this poem. Or may be rat or Bill H or others can try to help you.

Sorry.

Thank you, I appreciate all of the effort you have put into helping me! Do you think this could be worth anything? We have 2 poems scrolls and we were told they were authentic by the family who gave them to my parents many years ago. Is there a way to tell authenticity for sure? And also, is there a date on the poem or anyway to tell the time frame from which these were created? Or your best guess? Thank you again for your help!!!

The calligrapher of both scrolls appears to be 劉永良 Liu Yong-liang based on the name on the first scroll and the seal marks on both scrolls. While Wang Bo was indeed a Tang dynasty poet, Liu can be contemporary, just wrote Wang's poem on this scroll. I cannot find any references on Liu and therefore cannot really determine the values of your scrolls. His calligraphy, IMHO, while not bad, but not necessarily exceptional. May be rat can shed some light on it.

I'm attaching a picture of the red stamp signature from the other poem scroll we have. What is the top red stamp mean? The bottom one looks like the same from other poem. After searching Wang Bo online, it shows he was born in 650ad, that is a long time ago, doesn't seem possible that these could be originals???

Hi Kerri, this isn't a scroll by Wang Bo, rather it's by someone who chose the Wang Bo poem that Super has identified as to write out as an example of his calligraphy. Judging from what I can see of the mounting and materials in your photos, I'd imagine this is from the second half 20th century, perhaps more rather than less recent. The bottom seal in this photograph (as on the other scroll) seems to include the artist's name. My facility with seal script isn't as good as others' here but my guess is that your artist may be someone named 劉水良 (Liu Shuiliang), except that the seal is missing an element that would usually appear in the first character shown, the surname Liu, and I am not confident in my reading of the second character, which I have guessed as "shui". Looking for calligraphers on Google using the three characters above doesn't yield anything, so either my reading is wrong, this is a minor artist, or both.

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