搬興廢東生玉兔
識榮枯西墜金烏
Fortune may change for good or ill:
The Jade Hare of the moon will still
rise nightly from the east.
Whoever lost, whoever won,
it will not in the least
detain the westering Gold Bird of the sun.
(Start of anonymous Yuan-dynasty lyric; first draft)
I am a little curious why the author specified the Beimang Hills for the last line; can't say either Liu Bang or Xiang Yu have any particular association with the Luoyang area.
Yeah; I’m not wild about the way the last line loses the specificity of “Beimang,” which is the sort of thing that tends to happen in my translation approach, but in this case I think it’s just a conventional figure for being fancily dead, rather than anything literal. Or seriously bad geography.
There's a proverb, 生居苏杭，死葬北邙 - which suggests that the axiomatic best place to live is Suzhou/Hangzhou while the best place to be buried is Mangshan; but I don't know how old it is, and a quick search is getting me nothing useful.
I’d read it here as just underscoring that both are deader than disco and the Han, but as I say, my approach tends to elide specifics (a draft of a poem about the 銅雀台 renders the last lines 當時歌舞人不迴 / 化為今日西陵灰 as “The ones who sang and danced here must / Have fallen long ago to kingly dust”)
