Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
They came here to escape the chaotic world.
Deathless now, they have no hunger to return.
Amid these gorges, what do they know of the world?
In our illusion we see only empty clouds and mountain.
I don't know that paradise is hard to find,
and my heart of dust still longs for home.
Leaving it all, I can't guess how many mountains and waters lie behind me,
and am haunted by an obsession to return.
I was sure I could find my way back on the secret paths again.
How could I know the mountains and ravines would change?
I remember only going deep into the hills.
At times the green river touched cloud forests.
With spring, peach blossom water is everywhere,
but I never find that holy source again.
Sitting alone I lament my graying temples
in an empty hall before the night's second drum.
Mountain fruit drop in the rain
and grass insects sing under my oil lamp.
White hair, after all, can never change
as yellow gold cannot be created.
If you want to know how to get rid
of age, its sickness, study nonbeing.
To find the meadows by Yellow Flower River
you must follow Green Creek
as it turns endlessly in the mountains
in just a hundred miles.
Water bounds noisily over the rocks.
Color softens in the dense pines.
Weeds and water chestnuts are drifting.
Lucid water mirrors the reeds.
My heart has always been serene and lazy
like peaceful Green Creek.
Why not loaf on a large flat rock,
dangling my fishhook here forever?
He leans into twilight on a bamboo cane,
waiting for me at Tiger Creek.
1
Hearing tigers roar, he urges me to leave,
then trails a pouring brook back to his cell.
Wild flowers bloom beautifully in clusters.
A bird's single note quiets the ravine.
In still night he sits in an empty forest,
feeling autumn on the pine forest wind.
Don't be fooled. Why bother with the shallow joys of favor
or worry about rejection? Why flounder in the sea helping others, or being
abandoned?
Where can you dig up a Yellow Emperor or Confucius
to consult with?
How do you know your body isn't a dream?
How many years can a man possess?
In the end he will be formlessness.
Friend, now you are dead
and thousands of things sadden me.
You didn't see your kind mother into the grave
and your daughter is only ten.
From the vast and bleak countryside
comes the tiny sound of weeping.
Floating clouds turn to dark mist
and flying birds lose their voices.
Travelers are miserable
below the lonely white sun.
I recall when you were alive
you asked me how to learn nonbeing.
If only I'd helped you earlier
you wouldn't have died in ignorance.
All your old friends give elegies
recounting your life.
I know I have failed you,
and weep, returning to my thorn gate.
The red sun bakes earth and heaven
where fire clouds are shaped like mountains.
Grass and woods are scorched and wilting.
The rivers and lakes have all dried up.
Even my light silk clothes feel heavy
and dense foliage gives thin shade.
The bamboo mat too hot to lie on,
I dry off, soaking my towel with sweat.
I think of escaping from the universe
to be a hermit in a vastness
where a long wind comes from infinity
and rivers and seas wash away my turbulence.
When I see my body holding me here
I know my heart is not enlightened.
Abruptly I enter a gate of sweet dew
where there is a medicine to cool me.
1
Taiyi is another name for Deep South Mountain, south of Changan (now the city of Xian), the capital city of the Tang dynasty. It lies in central China, in Shanxi province, far from the ocean. Only in the eyes of the poet, of course, do the mountains extend to the ocean.
1
Some Buddhist texts refer to benevolent laws as the “white laws” and evil laws as the “black laws.”
2
Qiu and Yang were ancient scholars who declined offers of official salaries and earned their living by making carts and carriages.
1
Jie Yu was known as the “madman of Chu” and was supposed to have feigned madness to avoid having to serve in government. He appears in the
Analects
and in the classic Daoist text, the
Zhuangzi.
2
“Five Willows” is often used in Wang Wei's poems to represent a peaceful and secluded life. The term comes from Tao Qian, the great poet of the fifth century, known for his retreat from officialdom to a life of pastoral simplicity. Tao Qian called himself “Master of Five Willows” after the willows that grew at his country cottage.
1
Xie Huilian (397–433) was the valued cousin of the famous Northern and Southern dynasties poet Xie Lingyun (385–433). Huilian was a talented young man who began to write at the age of ten. Later poets often referred to him when praising their cousins or brothers.
1
The Han emperor Wu Di (meaning “military emperor”) once saw an old courtier named Yan Si and asked why he was so old but still held a low official rank. “In the time of your grandfather Wen Di [meaning ‘literary emperor'],” the old man answered, “I was a military man and thus was not in favor. Then your father Jing Di [meaning ‘emperor of scenery'] trusted only the old people and I was young. Now you like militant young people, but I am old.” Wu Di was moved by this answer and raised the old man to a higher rank.
*
Peach Tree Spring refers to a tale by the great poet Tao Qian (also known as Tao Yuanming) recounting how a fisherman lost his way and sailed into a Peach Grove. Curious to sail to the end of the wood, he lost all sense of time and came to a narrow opening at the foot of a mountain. He sailed through and found himself in the vast stretch of land inhabited by a people whose life had been cut off from the world since the Qin dynasty (221–207 bce). Once the fisherman had returned home, he couldn't find his way back again. This tale of a lost world of people living a natural life in the mountains is, of course, a Daoist fable of retreat from the “dusty” world of the court.
1
Tiger Creek is located at Lou Mountain. According to legend, in the Eastern Jin dynasty (317–420) the distinguished monk Fayuan lived at Donglin Monastery by the side of Tiger Creek. When he went beyond the creek, tigers would growl, so he never went farther when seeing friends off. One day he was walking with the poet Tao Qian and with Lu Jingxiu, a Daoist. Absorbed in their conversation, they crossed the creek, unaware of what they were doing. Suddenly, all of the tigers began to roar. The three of them laughed and went away. Later, a pavilion was built on the spot and called “Three Laughter Pavilion.”
Li Bai is probably the best-known Chinese poet in the West. He and Du Fu are considered the finest poets of the Tang dynasty. Li Bai has attracted the best translators and has influenced several generations of American poets, from Ezra Pound to James Wright. Yet there is considerable confusion surrounding something as basic as his name. He is best known in the West as Li Po, though he is also called Li Pai, Li T'ai-po, and Li T'ai-pai, all of these being Wade-Giles transliterations of variations on his Chinese names (“Pai” and “Po” are different English transliterations of the same character). For each of these names there is a new English version, according to the now-accepted Pinyin transliteration system (Li Pai = Li Bai). To add to the confusion, Ezra Pound, in
Cathay
, his famous sequence of Chinese poems in translation, refers to him as Rihaku, a transliteration of the Japanese pronunciation of his name.
The facts of Li Bai's life come to us through a similar veil of contradictions and legends. Where he was born is unknown. There are those who say he was of Turkic origin, but it seems he was probably born in central Asia and raised in Sichuan province. His brashness and bravado are characteristic of a tradition of poets from this region, including the great Song dynasty poet Su Shi. Li Bai claimed to be related to the imperial family, though this is probably spurious. Perhaps in his teens he wandered as a Daoist hermit; certainly Daoist fantasy permeates his work. We do know that he was alone among the great Tang poets in never taking the imperial examination and that he left his home in 725 and wandered through the Yangtze River Valley, hoping to gain recognition for his talents. During this period he married the first of his four wives. In 742 he was summoned to the capital of Changan (modern Xian) and was appointed to the Hanlin Academy (meaning “the writing brush forest”) by Emperor Xuan-zong. During his time in the capital he became close friends with
Du Fu, who addresses a number of poems to him. Within a few years he was expelled from the court and made to leave Changan, and he began presenting himself as an unappreciated genius, or as one friend named him, a “banished immortal.” In 755 the An Lushan Rebellion took place, in which a Turkic general led his group of Chinese border armies against the emperor. Li Bai was forced to leave Hunan for the South, where he entered the service of the Prince of Yun, sixteenth son of the emperor, who led a secondary revolt. Eventually, Li was arrested for treason, sent into exile, and later given amnesty. He continued his wanderings in the Yangtze Valley, seeking patrons, until his death at sixty-two.
About one thousand poems attributed to Li Bai have come down to us, though some were probably written by imitators. While most of his poems were written for specific occasions, others incorporated wild journeys, Sichuan colloquial speech, and dramatic monologues. Perhaps the most remarkable subject for his poems, however, was himself. He portrays himself as a neglected genius, a drunk, a wanderer through Daoist metaphysical adventures, and a lover of the moon, friends, and women. His colloquial speech and confessional celebration of a sensual flamboyance and fallible self made him the best-loved and most-imitated Chinese poet in English. Translations of Li Bai helped to establish a conversational, intimate tone in modern American poetry. Ezra Pound's
Cathay
put him at the center of the revolution in modern verse. All these qualities, plus an extraordinary lucidity of image, made him extremely popular in China as well, both in his day and to this day. A number of his poems are in the Han dynasty
yuefu
form, which allowed him to indulge in radically irregular lines that gave his imagination free play. He was an influential figure in the Chinese cult of spontaneity, which emphasized the poet's genius in extemporizing a poem: “Inspired, each stroke of my brush shakes the five mountains.”
Among the many legends about Li Bai, the most enduring is the account of his death. Like Ishmael in the crow's nest, wanting to penetrate the illusory world that he saw reflected in the water, Li Bai was said to be so drunk in a boat that he fell overboard and drowned, trying to embrace the moon reflected in the water.
Since the “man in the moon” is a woman in Chinese myth, the legend of Li's death takes on an erotic meaning, mixing thanatos and eros. As in
Moby-Dick
, to “strike through the mask” and see the face of truth is to embrace death.
Unless otherwise noted, the following poems by Li Bai were translated by Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, and Chou Ping.
My hair was still cut straight across my forehead
and I was playing, pulling up flowers by the front door,
when you rode up on a bamboo horse
and danced round the bench, monkeying with the green plums.
And we lived together in the village of Zhanggan,
two small people without hate or suspicion.
At fourteen I became your wife,
so bashful I never laughed.
I lowered my head and faced the dark wall.
You called me a thousand times but I couldn't look at you.
At fifteen my tortured brow calmed
and I wanted to be with you like ashes in dust.
I'd die waiting for you, embracing a pillar,
so why must I climb the widows' tower?
At sixteen you left
for Qutang Gorge where floodwaters crush against Yanyu Rock
and I haven't touched you for five months.
Now I hear monkeys screeching into the sky
and mosses drown the place by our door
where your feet sank in the earth when you left,
moss so deep I can't sweep it away.
It's a windy autumn. The leaves are falling early.
In the eighth month butterflies dart in pairs
through high grass in the west garden.
They hurt my heart.
I grow older, my face ruddy with pain.
If you are coming down through the Three Gorges
please write me
and I will come out to meet you
even as far as Long Wind Sands.
The jade steps are whitening with dew.
My gauze stockings are soaked. It's so late.
I let down the crystal blind
and watch the glass clear autumn moon.
When you sail far past Jingmen
you enter the land of Chu
where mountains end and flat plains begin
and the river pours into a huge wilderness.
Above, the moon sails, sky mirror,
and clouds weave and swell into a sea mirage of terraces.
Below your wandering boat, water from the home you love
still sees you off after ten thousand miles.
Sunlight steams off purple mist from Incense Peak.
Far off, the waterfall is a long hanging river
flying straight down three thousand feet
like the milky river of stars pouring from heaven.
Whose jade flute secretly soars in the night?
Spring wind scatters sound all over Luoyang.
The midnight flute keens a farewell song, “Snap the Willow Branch.”
Thinking of my old home and garden, I break.