Translating a poem

[Dennisnguyen]

Hello everybody,
Recently I've tried to translate a poem into English.
Please, help me read and correct it if you see any mistakes.
Thank you so much.
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DREAM OF A BUTTERFLY LOVER
Old stories went by as water flew to the east
So far away that I couldn’t hold
And then some more troubles were coming along that disturbed me
The more slashing water by a sword, the more strongly water flew
The more drinking to forget sorrows, the more broken my heart was!

The morning wind blew everywhere
Up to now, just saw people smiling
No one found people crying in the past
What bitter the sense of love was, indeed!
Asking for clarification or just pretending to be naive
It’s only able to know much or a little
But difficult to get enough

Like a couple of butterfly lovers
In this tough time
Not being able to escape from sorrows
In that fake world
Living on earth was already crazy
How come they still wanted to walk in the clouds
It’s better to sleep in peaceful love
…
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[Sandy1]

Hi
you wrote sorrows but this word is uncountable you can not put `s` this is the mistake I noticed I don`t know if you have more.

[Sandy1]

Sorry you are right, I have just opened the dictionary...you can use it as countable or uncountable.

[Beeesneees]

To confirm:
You can use the 's' in sorrows, if you are trying to forget more than one sorrow, then "drinking to forget sorrows" and "not being able to forget sorrows" are correct.

The problem with trying to correct mistakes in poetry is that very often the normal conventions of grammar, punctuation and sentence structure aren't followed anyway. It's difficult to know what the poet meant by looking at a translation, so it is difficult to say what is right and what is wrong. A number of lines don't seem to make sense to me, but that doesn't mean they are wrong.

Here are a couple of the more obvious errors though:
"What bitter the sense of love..." should be "How bitter the sense of love..."
"How come they wanted to sleep in the clouds" needs a question mark.
_________________
Cheers m' dears!

[Alan]

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Hi Dennisnguyen,

As no one else has said it, I will. Well done. This is a brave and adventurous task. It would help to know possibly the language of the original or at least the background of the poem and the poet. I'll do one nitpick and one congratulation. Water usually flows so that would be 'water flowed' not 'flew'. The line I liked was:

[Dennisnguyen]

Hello everybody,
Thanks so much to all of you guys for correcting my translation.
This poem originated from a theme song in a famous Chinese movie. It was translated into Vietnamese then and I really got emotional after hearing. It's so sad but very poetic and full of deep feelings, especially for those who are falling in love. It had two sentences quoted from a poem of one of the most famous Chinese poets of old as below:
"The more slashing water by a sword, the more strongly water flowed
The more drinking to forget sorrows, the more broken my heart was!".
I don't know how you guys feel when reading it but because the original is so deep in meaning and I can't translate all of its feelings.
I know there still be some mistakes in my translation. If you guys find more, please tell me more.
Thank you so much.
Dennisnguyen