How to translate "The family is poor, collecting salary for candles, reciting Dadan, and can't sleep"?

My family was very poor, so I would collect firewood and light it as a candle for lighting. I would stay up all night reading and studying without sleeping.

"Song History" was written and compiled in the late Yuan Dynasty. The whole book has 47 volumes of chronicles, 162 volumes of chronicles, 32 volumes of lists, 255 volumes of biographies, and a total of 496 volumes, about 5 million words, which is twenty-four The largest official history book in history.

As early as the early Yuan Dynasty, Kublai Khan, the founder of the Yuan Dynasty, ordered the compilation of the history of the Song Dynasty, but it could not be completed because the style was not determined. At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, Prime Minister Tuotuo advocated compiling the three histories of Song, Liao and Jin separately and independently. This opinion was agreed by Emperor Shun of the Yuan Dynasty. In March of the third year of Zhizheng (AD 1343), the three histories were compiled at the same time. After two and a half years, in October of the fifth year (AD 1345), "History of the Song Dynasty" was hurriedly completed.

"History of the Song Dynasty" is based on the original "History of the State" of the Song Dynasty. During the Song and Song Dynasties, the organization of historians was complete, engraving and printing were widely used, the circulation and preservation of books were more convenient, and a large amount of historical materials were accumulated. This provided a good foundation for Yuan's revision of "History of the Song Dynasty". However, due to the hasty compiler of "History of the Song Dynasty", there are many shortcomings in the cutting of historical materials, the verification of historical facts, the modification of text, and the style of the whole book. There are records but no text, and there are conflicts between chronicles and biographies, biographies and biographies, tables and biographies, biographies and biographies, etc., which makes it known as complicated and messy in the Twenty-Five Histories.