A Few Stabs at Li Bai

 

 

     My title is ironic.  With very little knowledge of Chinese (only a year of formal study) I have some sense of how the language works and sounds and I am able to use a dictionary, but that is about it.  As I approach a sophisticated literary tradition as that of Tang China with such limited resources, little wonder if I am uncertain whether I am honoring the poet or injuring him.  The fact is, though, that some earlier poets have published their versions of great Chinese poetry with no knowledge at all of the language in which they are written – Amy Lowell, for example – and that some of the very best – I am thinking of Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth -- had quite sketchy skills.  While my few comments on allusions and images are those of an amateur, I hope they lead, at least, back toward the lines of poetry. 

 

 

 

I.

Passing the Time

 

I saw just wine and missed the sun’s decline -- 

new fallen petals on my clothes appear --

I stand up drunk, the moon is in the stream,

far off birds sing, few people stop by here.

 

 

     Li Bai, of course, has a reputation as a drinker.  The role of wine in Chinese poetry is familiar to Westerners from ancient Greek lyrics where drink is praised as a palliative for the harsh circumstances of life.  Not noticing the approach of night suggests the poet’s temporary escape from mortality.  Though his is a secular sort of meditation, his goal differs little from disciplined contemplatives.  The flower petals that cover his clothes are a further reminder of the impermanence of things as well as indicating a lengthy trance.  At the same time, the beauty of flowers leads to the birdsong of the last line, both endorsements of the charm of the transient world.  The final phrase reinforces the poet’s isolated perspective.   The image of the moon’s reflection in water may imply a tipsy, “up-side-down” state, but it is as well a conventional topos for the ambiguous reality of the phenomenal world, most familiar from the story of the poet’s death.  The expression “mirror flower water moon” (jìnghuā shuǐyuè) is an idiom (in Japanese as well) for an illusion or mirage.

     I use just regular old rumbling iambic pentameter and preserve the second and fourth line rhyme. 

 

 

II.

Question and Answer on the Mountain

 

You ask me why I live in this green height.

My heart at ease, I answer with a smile,

The petals from the peach trees flow downstream.

Alone, no people here, just earth and sky.

 

 

    European poetry has both praise of landscape and contemplative poetry, but lacks the Asian tradition of writing by those who have retired from active life.  This verse suggests the author’s motive, though he does not answer when asked, but only smiles.  The reader, however, hears that his heart is “at ease.”  The fallen peach tree petals again remind the reader of mortality, but peach flowers are also associated with springtime and romance in poems from the Shijing, the Classic of Poetry and in other poems such as Cui Hao’s “Written in a Village South of the Capital.”  Peach orchards were also associated, however, with Daoist utopias in texts such as Tao Yuanming’s 421 C. E. account of the Peach Blossom Land.

     The petals are carried then by the water’s current in a motion echoing that of the Dao in general which is repeatedly described as resembling a stream.  See Dao De Jing 8, 32, 34, 61, 66 and other passages.  The poem ends with everything vanishing, leaving the solitary contemplative eye undistracted, suspended in the cosmic void.

     I have here settled for an enhanced assonance of an elusive rhyme. 

 

 

 

 

III.

Lament of the Staircase

 

The fine jade steps have grown quite pale with dew.

My gauzy stockings, drenched with dewdrops soon.

I pull my filmy curtain down and see

the lovely sight of that full autumn moon --

 

 

     The figure of the lady lost in romantic longing is familiar to lovers of Indian miniatures.  The cultivated taste of the persona is evident from her restraint, the elegant indirection of her lament.  The steps suggest white jade (though they are likely made of marble), so the paleness of their appearance covered with dew is natural.  White jade also suggests the woman’s fine complexion.  The dew may suggest tears, but weeping is not mentioned.  Dew-drops are also used as an emblem of impermanence. 

     The reader may speculate that the glorious moon represents a noble lover.  While the breath-taking sight of the full moon may simply suggest a grander view, it may also raise associations with the myth of Cháng'é who was said to have gained immortality but was thereby obliged to leave her beloved husband, reinforcing the theme of separation.  “Floating clouds, morning dew” (fúyún zhāolù) is an idiom expressing ephemerality.  Though the verses primarily refer to love-longing, the metaphysically-minded might see the “filmy curtain” as the veil of maya and enlightenment in the marvelous face of the moon.

     My concluding dash does not correspond to anything in the original, but is meant as an indication of all that is unsaid.  

 

     The extent to which the poem is composed by reshuffling conventional elements is evident by examining other “palace lament,” such as this by Xie Tiao, a poet whom Li Bai praised.

 

 

Jeweled Stairs' Grievance

 

In the evening, your highness, pearl curtain;

Fireflies come again to rest.

Long night sewn silk gown,

I think of my lord; where can he be?

 

 

     This poem is one of those translated by Ezra Pound.  His version and his explanatory notes which seem to me, with their cadences, still a part of the lyric, remain powerful today.

 

The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance

 

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,

It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,

And I let down the crystal curtain

And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

 

Notes:

Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.

Notes from Recent Reading 28 (Verne, Waley, Hurston)

Master of the World (Verne)

     This late and hasty story suffers from a number of defects: stiff, lifeless diction, a sudden unmotivated denouement, the inclusion of odd geographical data, and a pronounced tendency toward repetition that makes the reader suspect the author was paid by the word. A sequel to Robur the Conqueror in which the antagonist had been better-intentioned, the would-be Master of the World appears here as a standard mad scientist, threatening somehow that he can enslave the world with his combo car-boat-submarine-airplane constructed on his remote island. A faint foreshadowing of the fear of insane authority Kracauer saw in Caligari does little to animate the character.
     At the conclusion, the hero is a captive of Robur, sailing aloft in his marvelous machine when suddenly, in an event altogether without prior trace or present significance, the craft crashes, the villain dies, and Inspector Brock (of the American “national police”) is cast unconscious into the sea from which his “helpless body” is rescued.
     Incidentally the story has some quaint aspects perhaps worth mentioning. Though written the year after the Wright brothers’ actual flight at Kitty Hawk, Verne imagines an airship with wings that beat like a bird’s. The book is set in the United States motivating side comments by Verne confirming the American scene such as the sighting of possums and plenty of gamblers.
     This one I will not include even among the titles I mean to read to my granddaughter.


The Poetry and Career of Li Po (Waley)

     The poet (whose name is also transliterated as Li Bai and Li Bo or Ri Haku from the Japanese form) has proven the most popular Chinese poet in the West, perhaps the only one generally educated people could have named fifty years ago. His reputation is certainly due in part to the accessibility of his extravagant romanticism, his celebrations of drinking, and his general Bohemianism. Yet Waley’s book, which was published in 1950, may also have played a role at a time when Li Po could strike the common reader as something of an Asian Dylan Thomas.
     Waley’s book includes a good many first-rate translations of the sort one expects from the mn who did more than any other individual to spread knowledge of East Asian culture in Europe and the United States. (How important to me were his Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, his version of the Tao Te Ching (Dàodéjīng), his Monkey!) He also tells the poet’s story well, in a way that is wholly understandable to those who know little of Chinese literature and history while including sufficient references to indicate his own scholarly responsibility. The book is a delight and an entertainment.
     And just as Waley was a magnificent popularizer in the best sense, the series in which the book appeared from George Allen & Unwin, the Ethical and Religious Classics of East and West, represents a cosmopolitan faith in culture and truly liberal education almost lost today. The series, “which originated among a group of Oxford men and their friends,” following the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, sought to encourage “a deeper understanding and appreciation of other peoples and their civilizations.” They aimed their series specifically at “the ex-Service man who is interested in the East, the undergraduate, the adult student, the intelligent public generally.” Yet the works are all by experts, Archer on Krishna, Arberry on Sufism, Conze on Buddhism. These writers delivered the real thing, no condescending simplification, no New Age mush, but the wholesome nourishment of some of the most sublime thinking our species has attained.


Seraph on the Suwanee (Hurston)

     Zora Neale Hurston would likely have been annoyed though not surprised that the first thing everyone must say about Seraph on the Suwanee is that it centers on white people. Hurston was notoriously dismissive of racial politics – a Republican, she opposed integration and even Roosevelt’s New Deal – in in this book race seems to matter little. The increasingly affluent Jim Meserve seems to wholly accept personal and working relations with a black family, and his son becomes a jazz musician who plays in such a way that he says “you could almost think it was colored folks playing that music.” The society of the shrimpers with whom he works likewise seems strangely egalitarian for the period. Most powerfully, the tensions of the plot are entirely unrelated to issues of race, and the language used by Arvay and others, while looking quite authentic (she was of course a trained anthropologist) is virtually identical, word for word in some cases, with the vernacular used by her black characters.
     Hurston also goes against the grain on gender issues. Though her Their Eyes Were Watching God readily accepts a simple feminist reading, Seraph on the Suwanee ends with its heroine apparently finding peace and fulfilment by accepting the absolute authority of her husband. In fact Arvay is so agonized by anxiety, depression, and feelings of worthlessness that she is an unlikely candidate for a resolute action heroine.
     The book is beautifully written, the colloquial dialect alone makes the volume worth reading. Powerful image systems at work as well.