5: Sharing Wine and the Night with a Recluse Beneath Zhongnan Mountain, by Li Bai

Apologies for a late post! In my defense, I've been in London the last four days, wandering about with friends and enjoying some pints -- a past-time which Li Bai, whose poems I turn to this week, would have respected. So, without further ado:

005李白:下终南山过斛斯山人宿置酒

暮從碧山下, 山月隨人歸,
卻顧所來徑, 蒼蒼橫翠微.
相攜及田家, 童稚開荊扉.
綠竹入幽徑, 青蘿拂行衣.
歡言得所憩, 美酒聊共揮.
長歌吟松風, 曲盡河星稀.
我醉君復樂, 陶然共忘機.

Twilight from a green mountain falls; the
mountain moon follows their return,

but lonely they walk upon the path, a
gray, gray slash on a blue-green ridge.

Watch her led to the house in the fields: a
child opens the chaste-wood gate.

Green bamboo lines the quiet way;
green vines brush the gown.

With happy words achieve at last this rest,
beauty and wine all shared and scattered.

The pine-tree wind sings long songs,
melodies exhausted by sparse river stars.

I am drunk, and you are once more happy,
joyful, all the seeds of care forgotten.

---

mù cóng bìshān xià, shān yuē suí rén guī,
Twilight from green mountain down, mountain moon follow person return
què gǔ suǒ lái jìng, cāngcāng héng cuìwēi.
however lonley which comes path, gray gray across blue green hillside
xiàng xié jí tiān jiā, tóng zhì kāi jīng fēi.
watch taken by the hand to the farmer's house; a child opens the chaste-tree gate
lǜ zhú rù yōu jìng, qīng luò fú xíng yī
Green bamboo enters the secluded path, Green radishes are brushed aside by the gown.
huān yán dé suǒ qì, měi jiǔ liáo gǒng huī.
Happy words receive this rest, beauty wine for a time share and scatter
cháng gē yín sōng fēng, qǔ jìn hē xīng xī.
Long songs hum pine wind, melodies all river star sparse
wǒ zuì jūn fù lè, táo rán gǒng wàng jī
I drunk you again happy, happy and carefree all forgotten (root cause, seed)

39: Women In and Around Chinese Poetry

You may have noticed that one of the tags on the Four Seasons: Spring translation is "female-voiced poetry". Like Du Fu in The Beautiful Woman, Li Bai in his Midnight Four Season Songs is impersonating, or at least focusing on, the voice of, a young woman. This was (and continued to be) a common practice among male Chinese poets, going back at least to Qu Yuan's Li Sao, and possibly as far back as the Book of Songs, which includes many poems in a woman's voice that may (or may not) have been recorded or composed by men. Not that there weren't a number of well-known women writers of poetry; indeed, in the case of Midnight Four Season Songs, the female-centric poems of a male author are patterned after the much older work of a female poet. That Li Bai would and even could make this choice is of great significance; it means that by his day (8th century CE, the High Tang), the activity of men engaging in explicit literary impersonations of women had grown to involve the work of women themselves -- all to say nothing of the way such literary gender games naturally interacted with works of other genres (eg in the frontier or garden poem). Never a simple matter, the use of a female voice in a poem by a man became a sort of nexus of layered representation. On the one hand, Li Bai, the quintessential "poet of personality" known almost more for his image and lifestyle than his work (remember his many names), is inevitably closely linked to the appearance of his work as a powerful figure in his own right, a sort of inevitable, ghostly overlay above the text itself. On the other hand, unlike in some of his other more famous poems, here he writes not of himself but of a series of women, in the style of a specific woman. What are we to make of this?

There is an enormous amount to say about the topic of women in Chinese poetry, and I won't attempt to go any further in one post. For more, I recommend the book Women Writers of Traditional China, by Kang-yi Sun Chang and Haun Saussy.

39: Midnight the Poet, and Silkworms

A few notes:

The Midnight of the title refers not (or, given that this is Medieval Chinese, not only) to the time of night, but to a person. Specifically it refers to a woman of the Jin Dynasty (265-420) who took Ziye, here translated as "Midnight", as a pseudonym and under that name authored a series of poetic songs known by the same name: Midnight Four Season Songs (子夜四时歌). Though her work is much longer than Li Bai's (compare Ziye's and Li Bai's) and of quite different subject matter, Li Bai's poems explicitly take Ziye's song-poems as their model. Both Li Bai's Midnight Four Season Songs and the original also go by the name "Midnight Wu Song" (子夜吴歌), since the original Four Season Songs were in the Han "Music Bureau" (乐府) style, and would have been sung to the "Wu tune" (they were "吴声歌曲").

The silkworm is a potent symbol throughout Chinese literature, so it bears mentioning a few facts about it. While there exist wild silkworms, the silkworms that are used to produce most silk (bombyx mori) are a domestic creature bred by and entirely dependent on humans. Their primary food is the leaf of a white mulberry tree, though they can eat leaves of other types of mulberry trees. Mulberry trees take decades to mature, which combined with the skill involved in breeding and caring for the silkworms creates high barriers to entry, even in ancient China where such skills were originally developed. Indeed, silk-making was a jealously guarded industry, especially once Silk Road trade had begun to take off in the Han Dynasty (see History of Silk). During the Tang Dynasty, special land-use laws carved out exceptions from the then-standard "equal-field system" for land where mulberry trees grew, since it could be used to produce silk -- testifying both to the special status of silk producers and the economic importance of the silk trade vis-a-vis other industries. Silk manufacture's cultural pedigree was unique: by the mid-Tang (early to mid 8th century CE), silk had been produced in China for millennia, and in large amounts since the Han. Only since around the 6th century CE had it begun to be produced in other parts of the world, escaping the efforts of Chinese silk interests to prevent the knowledge from leaving China. From all of this we can infer that when the young woman of the poem gathers mulberry leaves, she is raising silkworms, and if the silkworms go hungry she has either left them or imagines leaving. They, like small children, cannot feed themselves, and depend on their 'mother' -- a metaphor relevant also for the fact that silkworm raising in Imperial and pre-Imperial China was often associated with women rather than men.

39: Midnight Four Season Songs: Spring, Li Bai

Taking a cue from Max's series of four Zhang Jiuling poems (starting here), I'm starting a series of four by Li Bai. There's a whole lot going on here, from big new themes like the Tang frontier and female-voice poems by men, to some fascinating references to folks like Xi Shi and Ziye (her original work here). Hopefully I'll also get into some of the settings of these as well, and describe places like Yumen Guan and Chang'an. Now, poetry:

Midnight Four Season Songs: Spring

In Qin the young girl Luofu

gathering mulberry at grassy water's edge.

White hands on dark green stalks,

Red ornaments flashing in the bright day.

The silkworms hunger, the lady yearning to go.

Of five horses departing, none will leave a trace.

子夜四時歌：春歌，李白

秦地羅敷女，採桑綠水邊。

素手青條上，紅妝白日鮮。

蠶飢妾欲去，五馬莫留連。

Qín dì luófū nǚ，cǎisāng lǜshuǐ biān.

Sùshǒu qīng tiáo shàng，hóngzhuāng báirì xiān

Cán jī qiè yù qù，wǔ mǎ mò liúlián.

4: On Oranges and Government

What is Zhang Jiuling getting at in this week's poem? In the first three Poems of Encountering, his focus progressed from the purely natural world, to the intersection of the natural world and the lonely hermit, to the hermit himself. Then comes this fourth poem, which returns from the hermit to nature again, but reads differently to me than the first poem with its careful opposition of kingfishers and swans.

The Fourth Poem of Encountering begins with Zhang meditating on the red tangerine. In the tradition of Qu Yuan, he uses the tangerine to comment on politics and politicians: in the fair-weather climate of the Imperial court, he says, it is truly remarkable that a man in a position of influence could remain uncorrupted, or evergreen. When Zhang asks why the tree is secluded, he means, why keep such a person away from court? Why would you exile him to Hubei province, to live out his life as an isolated scholar? Why can honest men not survive in government?

The fourth verse takes an abrupt turn from this simple and well-trod metaphor to questions of cosmic significance. Fate creates the conditions of the world. All actions are tied to other actions. The universe is an immense network of cause and effect, where events set the stage for their own recurrence. Violence creates pain, pain creates anger, anger creates violence again, naturally and without end. Children growing recreate their parents in themselves. This is Zhang's answer to the question, why can honest men not survive in government? In the end, fault does not lie with a political faction, or a rival. Honest men can't survive in government because all actions have consequences.

This understanding transcends the simple framework of the First Poem of Encountering, where envy, and human attachment to high office are the problems, and detaching oneself from those is the solution. The final couplet of the Fourth Poem anchors this cosmic statement in reality: A tree grows and bears fruit. In Chinese, we call a "result" 结果 jiéguǒ; the second character literally means "fruit." The honest man acts, and his actions achieve results. Yet his growth to maturity, and his actions, cast shadows. The shadow and the tree and its fruit cannot be separated from one another. They are all part of the same great system. Consequences are born in the moment of action.

The common narrative of the exiled official describes a man wrongfully accused, betrayed, and set aside to watch his country destroy itself. Zhang, in these poems, tells a different tale, in a kind of triumphant realism: the exiled official has done his honest work, and he has been set aside. His sacrifice is complete. This is the heart of the Encounter of the poem's title: the encounter of courage and honesty with their necessary consequences. For the rest of his life, the honest man may struggle to accept the consequences of his choices, but he could not have acted any other way. The tangerine grows in secluded valleys, but at least its heart does not wither in the cold.

4: Alluding to Qu Yuan

This poem is a great example of the intertextuality Matt mentioned last month, and a good introduction to Qu Yuan 屈原, a master of Chinese verse -- arguably the first master of verse, as he is apparently the first Chinese poet to have his name directly associated with his works. Qu Yuan lived some three centuries before the Common Era, during the period of history called the Warring States, when the territory that is now the Chinese heartland was ruled by, well, warring states. The fiefdoms that took power as the Zhou declined were eventually devoured into seven large nations, and Qu Yuan worked as a high minister for the king of Chu, one of the seven.

At the time of Qu Yuan's life, another of the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of Qin, was growing ever more aggressive, the ruling family's ambitions given strength by the rise of a philosophy of meritocratic totalitarianism (more or less) called Legalism, which a philosopher friend of mine describes pithily as "Evil Daoism." Qin scored a sequence of decisive military victories, and seemed a threat to all seven kingdoms, including Chu. Qu Yuan advocated an alliance between the six kingdoms against Qin, but he was betrayed for his trouble and sentenced to exile in Hubei province. Exiled and beset by deep depression, he composed poetry. If you think this sounds familiar, you're absolutely right. Many Chinese poets have walked the path of exile and literature; Qu Yuan is noteworthy, though, because even if he did not walk it first, he is the first one we remember. He is, quite literally, the one they made the holiday after.

Oh yes: in his depression, Qu Yuan wrote a sequence of poems about government, loyalty, duty, and sorrow, that have been the touchstones of Chinese romantic verse for two millennia. Then he walked into a lake carrying a heavy rock, and drowned. Villagers raced out in their fishing boats to save them, but they were too late. Unwilling to let such a great man be devoured by the beasts of the water, they threw rice and dumplings into the lake: eat this, but leave his body unharmed. When that failed, they beat the water with their paddles to frighten hungry fish away. Every year to this day, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month of the Chinese calendar, people around the world race their dragon boats into the lake to save Qu Yuan, and always fail; they throw rice into the water so the fish will not devour him.

It looks sort of like this.

In the end, Qu Yuan proved right. The combination of the political control granted by Legalism, and the military leadership and ambition of a ruling family rightly measured against the early Caesars and Phillip and Alexander of Macedon, proved too much for the other six kingdoms. In 221 BCE, the Qin unified all China under a single banner, and commenced a rule infamous for bloodthirsty suppression of dissenting opinion, bookburning, and the murder of scholars. The Qin lasted for only fifteen years before they were toppled by a peasant rebellion led by the charismatic Liu Bang, who founded the Han Dynasty, but they left deep marks on China.

One of Qu Yuan's poems was an extensive poem praising the red tangerine, called 橘颂 júsòng, "Tangerine Ode." Here, Qu Yuan praises the tangerine for the same reasons as Zhang Jiuling (perhaps I should write that the other way 'round, of course), citing the value of its remarkable constancy. Reading this poem biographically, you hear Qu Yuan's lament for the world of human affairs, where constancy is not so highly regarded, or rewarded.

Zhang takes this poem as his base, establishing the scene and alluding in the same breath to Qu Yuan, with whom all his readers would be familiar. Then he asks why the tree is so secluded, thereby raising the question: why has he been banished? Why was Qu Yuan banished, for that matter? Why are men of good faith banished from the halls of power?

I'll get to those questions, and the poem's overall meaning as near as I can fathom it, tomorrow.

4: Fate and All It Encounters

I had trouble translating this week's poem, which was a shame considering that it's the last we'll hear from Zhang Jiuling for a while. One of the lines that bothered me the most was the following couplet:

運命唯所遇，循環不可尋

which I ultimately translated as:

Fate and everything it meets: a
wheel whose end we cannot seek.

There are some things that bother me about this translation, including the almost-rhyme between meet and seek, which feels ugly to me. Then again, there's a similar vowel rhyme in the original, between yù, the last character of the first line, and xún, the last character of the second line, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it.

The first line is the only instance in these four poems of the character 遇 yù, which as you might have noticed is one of the two characters used to name the whole set: 感遇四首, the "Feeling / Encountering Four Poems," which I've translated as "Four Poems of Encountering" and has been translated elsewhere (esp. by Witter Bynner) simply as "Thoughts," which I feel doesn't express the complexity of 感遇. I translated 遇 in the poem as "meet" rather than "encounter" for metrical reasons.

The second line, though, is the source of my confusion. Broken down into its components, it reads: 循環 (circle, cycle) 不可 (cannot, must not) 尋 (seek). How does a cycle we cannot seek square with "fate and all it meets"? Or a cycle that cannot be sought? Seems unlikely: fate is all around us, inescapable. What, then, are we to make of this line?

There is a tight parallelism between the two lines, which helps:

運命 唯所 遇
循環 不可 尋
(noun) (adverb) (verb)

It seems clear from this that the cycle is (or is closely connected with) fate; I tried to emphasize this by enjambing the two lines in English. Moreover, the two adverbial phrases are opposite in meaning, at least as I read them: 唯所 includes all possibilities, while 不可 denies possibilities. Then, if we think of 遇 as the ongoing process of meeting, might not 尋 be the ultimate result of seeking? In Japanese, 尋 means "to fathom" (according to my dictionary), and 尋找 in Chinese can mean "to find" as much as "to seek." So, is it possible that the cycle, rather than being impossible to find, is simply impossible to follow through to the end (because it is endless)? And then, y extension, can fate cannot be worked through to the end?

Maybe. Then again, maybe I'm just crazy.

4: Some Changes Around Here

One of the great things about this project has been the feedback we've received from people who have studied Tang poetry a great deal longer than we. Matt's attracted most of that feedback, because he's more social about his interests than I am--I'm one of those writers who regards society like a sheer cliff over deep water: if you jump off and know what you're doing, you know you'll have an experience like no other, refreshing and exhilarating and rewarding, but before you jump you always have this creeping feeling that you're about to make a horrible mistake. Despite this, I get to benefit from the conversations Matt has, because he tells me about them.

As a result of Matt's chat with his friend Lucas, I'm trying out two experiments with this poem. First, I've placed the character-by-character translation below the full translation, for reasons I outlined in my response to Matt's excellent post on the questionable value of character-by-character translations. Second, I've posted the verse in traditional Chinese characters, rather than the simplified characters we've used thus far. Look at the difference between the two "spellings" of our poet's name, Zhang: 張 is what it looks like in traditional, as opposed to the simplified 张. Note the extra lines on the right side.

Chinese characters have thousands of years of history behind them, rising out of the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty (1600 BCE) through their codification under the Qin (221 BCE) and beyond. These developments were sometimes matters of convenience, and sometimes of political import. Confucius regarded 正名 zhèngmíng , the rectification of names, as a key responsibility of good government - he was referring to the proper use of language in general, but it's good to bear this in mind when thinking about the import of language and writing in Chinese history. Anyone who's seen the movie Hero by Zhang Yimou has seen the import that character forms can have: the heroes of that film die (essentially) on behalf of a character set.

Traditional characters have roughly the same forms as those of the clerical script used in the fifth century CE. In the late nineteenth and early 20th century, Chinese scholars and statesman concerned with the country's modernization advocated a shift away from traditional characters, which they judged to be too complex to write and, more importantly, too difficult to teach. China at this point had a very low literacy rate compared to Western countries, and the thought was that public education required simpler characters. In the darkest of the "sick man of Asia" days, some scholars even advocated for abandoning the Chinese language altogether, in favor of the more "modern" language of (I kid you not) Esperanto.

To make a very long story unconscionably short and open the gates for gross overgeneralization, the Qing dynasty fell apart at the beginning of the 20th century, and early attempts at democracy devolved into the autocratic Guomindang on the one hand and the revolutionary Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the other. Then the Imperial Japanese invaded and brutalized as much of China as they could get their hands on, while the Guomindang resisted with organized and the CCP with guerrilla warfare. The Japanese lost the war, but the CCP didn't stop fighting - the Guomindang lost control of China to Mao's CCP soon after, ultimately taking refuge (as Ming Dynasty loyalists did before them) on the island of Formosa, or Taiwan. To this day, the heirs of the Communists control the mainland, and the now-representative democracy that succeeded the Guomindang controls Taiwan.

The government of the People's Republic of China (set up by the CCP) undertook a number of reforms soon after their victory in 1949, including the simplification of the character sets, along lines proposed at the beginning of the century. The simplified forms, like 张 instead of 張 or 说 (speak) instead of 說, or 爱 love instead of 愛, were not created wholesale: many were cursive abbreviations of the traditional characters, used in private correspondence and in calligraphy, while some, like the change in the character for "love," removed elements of the initial composition (to quote a writing group friend, the science fiction writer John Chu, the simplification process "took the heart (心) out of love.")

Nevertheless, as the PRC propagated its simplified characters, the Taiwanese government, eager like many governments in crisis to preserve its authority with appeals to traditional values, held firm to the traditional character set. Meanwhile, overseas Chinese communities continued to use the characters that they always knew. Entering Chinatown in New York or Boston or San Francisco, you're more likely to encounter traditional Chinese than simplified, though this is starting to change. The simplified / traditional character debate is politically fraught, concerning the obvious tensions between the PRC and Taiwan, but also the PRC's relish in the glories of China's past, and the legally-enforced use of "standard" characters and "common" dialect. Those interested in the subject can check out Wikipedia's page dedicated to the debate.

This isn't a soapbox, nor is it a political blog (though if we're to believe Aristotle, man is a political animal, so we shouldn't ever expect politics to be far from any subject of human concern). I'm a man of peace, and limited understanding, and I think that if we're trying to translate these poems accurately we should present them as their poets originally conceived them, in traditional characters.

tl;dr: You'll notice more lines in the Chinese around here in the next few weeks. Do not adjust your television set.

4: Fourth Poem of Encountering, by Zhang Jiuling

A few changes to format here; I'll discuss them tomorrow. For now, enjoy my meager attempt at our last Zhang Jiuling poem for a little while!

004张九龄:感遇四首之四

江南有丹橘，經冬猶綠林。
豈伊地氣暖，自有歲寒心。
可以薦嘉客，奈何阻重深。
運命唯所遇，循環不可尋。
徒言樹桃李，此木豈無陰。

Zhang Jiuling: Four Poems of Encountering, Number Four

The Southlands have a red tangerine, that
endures the winter in still-green groves

In a realm of such mild weather
it has a heart to bear the cold.

You might give it to noble guests;
Why is it secluded so deep?

Fate and everything it meets: a
wheel whose end we cannot seek.

Someone says: tree, peaches, plums,
how can this wood not have shadows?


Jiāngnán yǒu dān jú, jīng dòng yóu lù lín.
River south has red tangerine, endure winter still green forest
qǐ yí dì qì nuǎn, zǐ yǒu suì hán xīn
how this place air warm, self have severe cold heart
kě yǐ jiàn jiā kè, nài hé zǔ zhòng shēn!
may be present good guest, nevertheless how kept heavy deep
yūn mìng wéi suǒ yù, xún huán bù kě xún.
luck / life (fate) think so encounter, cycle not can search
tú yán shù táo lǐ, cǐ mù qǐ wú yīn?
disciple say tree peaches plums, this wood how could not (shade, yin)?

On the Nature of Character Translations

Recently my friend Lucas suggested that character-by-character translations of Chinese poetry, like the ones we offer, are generally misleading and confusing to lay readers. A couple nights ago at dinner I was asked about such translations and also found I had a much harder time than I would've thought explaining why we publish them. I'm not done with them necessarily, but I think it's very much worth a discussion.

Why do we do them? I generally take the following two reasons most seriously. For my part, before any consideration of the reader, I find it helpful in my process of close reading. It forces me to think actively about each character, not just rely on a higher-level understanding of the 'sense' of a line. Where character-by-character translations relate to close reading, I associate the practice with the book 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger (which I have enjoyed a lot, but find less and less useful the more translating I do; most of the translations in it just aren't very good).

The other argument is that such translations might help the lay reader better understand the 'relationship' between the original and the translation -- they highlight the process of translating and in particular the distance between these two languages. Readers can examine the translator's art-in-progress, and better understand the nature of the choices he or she makes. All elements of translation that may normally be ignored.

I think objections to this kind of 'intermediate translation' deserve to be taken seriously, though. For one, it may be completely wrong to see character-by-character translations as legitimately representative of an intermediate step in the translator's process. Translation requires not only an engagement with the meaning of each individual character, but a series of parallel engagements with phrases, and verses, and the poem as a whole. Grammar is not something one considers wholly separately from individual words. It cannot be that distinct. The meanings of words affect instantly their position vis-a-vis other words, and a word's place in a phrase or in the context of the poem as a whole affects its individual meaning. When readers examine a character-by-character translation, they may imagine, then, that it represents how the Chinese "works" at a deeper level; that simply is not the case. Character-by-character translations are more properly conceived as reducing the original Chinese, by stripping it of its grammar and context, to a form more conducive to certain kinds of analysis (though potentially less conducive to the best, most subtle and complete analysis).

Further, Lucas points out that such 'word-for-word translations as intermediate step' are not generally done when translating other languages. Honestly, I think the reason word-for-word isn't done when translating other languages into English might have more to do with the relative youth of sinology as a field. Plus it's just so easy to work character by character compared to word by word in other languages, because it happens that Chinese does not conjugate or decline. That is, of course, an explanation and not a justification.

I remember when I first read "19 Ways", I pored over the character-by-character translation. Years later I read it again and thought, "I can't believe I ever looked at it like that, what a fool I was." And as I kept looking at it I thought again, "No, no, that isn't even right" (I think they had 但 as "but" instead of "only"). So I was potentially mislead both by the format and by their execution of the format. Maybe the solution is relegating one or two example character-by-character bits to an appendix, with appropriate caveats about the particular nature of character-by-character translation, for the obsessive lay reader. Perhaps it can be safely done if the caveats are well written. What do you think?

6: The Poet Transcendent, Banished from Heaven

In the middle of his life, the poet Li Bai, also known in the West as Li Po or Li Bo (both inexact reproductions of an 'old style' Mandarin) and to sinologists as Lǐ Bhæk (a reconstruction of the actual contemporary pronunciation of his name), met the famous elder poet He Zhizhang in the Daoist Temple of the Violet Pole, in modern-day Shandong. Learning that such a literary eminence was present, Li Bai introduced himself and presented several of his latest poems. He Zhizhang read at first slowly, then eyes sliding down the paper, then looked up in wonderment. “Can you be the Jin Star Taibai(1), descended from Heaven?" Thus did Li Bai become known as "the banished immortal" (谪仙), and later, the "Poet Transcendent" (诗仙).

Likely born in modern-day Kyrgyzstan, in a town then known as Suiye and within the sphere of influence of the Tang Empire, Li Bai grew up in the Sichuan town of Qinglian and read widely as a child, including many Daoist and astrological texts of a mystical bent. His association with the hermetic intellectual tradition, in particular its Daoist elements, prompted him to choose for his own "pseudonym" the name "Retired Scholar of Qinglian" (青莲居士), after the town where he grew up. As a boy and young man, he is said to have practiced martial arts, and bragged of his skill with a sword. In later years, after traveling the length and breadth of the empire, his wandering and youthful combats earned him the name "the Poet Knight-errant" (诗侠).

In casual description of Tang poetry, or of Chinese poetry generally, Li Bai and Du Fu are known as the greatest Chinese poets of any era, most commonly called the Poets Transcendent and Sage, respectively (诗仙 and 诗圣). Though the trajectories of their careers were quite different, they met twice and thought highly of each other, the younger Du Fu especially thinking enormously of Li Bai. In one poem, Du Fu placed Li Bai among other great poets of the age as one of the "Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup" (饮中八仙).

During the Tang, as for much of Chinese history, an educated man possessed many names beyond his surname. He was born with a "milk name" (乳名) given by his parents, acquired nicknames from his friends, was given a "courtesy name" (字) upon maturity, chose for himself a "pseudonym" (号) and possibly also a pen name, and if he had particular status, may have been given one or more additional nicknames and or posthumous names. Li Bai had more names than even the average Tang gentleman, but as he has faded into history they have only grown in number.

(1) The Jin Star (金星), also called Taibai (太白), refers to Venus. He Zhizhang's comment makes even more sense given that Li Bai's courtesy name was Taibai, chosen presumably for its connection with the same star.

6 - Li Bai, Drinking Alone Under the Moon

Terribly sorry for the delay! Here then, we have one of the most famous poems in the whole Chinese canon, or at least the first verse. Like many poems in the 300 Poems of the Tang (including Zhang Jiuling's Poems of Encountering) it was anthologized only in part, and I imagine there are many who never come across the other verses. This verse, however, stands alone quite well -- enjoy!

月下独酌

花间一壶酒,独酌无相亲。

举杯邀明月,对影成三人。

月既不解饮,影徒随我身。

暂伴月将影,行乐须及春。

我歌月徘徊,我舞影零乱。

醒时同交欢,醉后各分散。

永结无情游,相期邈云汉。

under moon alone drink

flower middle one pot wine, alone drink no mutual dear-friend

raise glass invite bright moon, face shadow become three people

moon since not understanding to-drink, shadow follows follows my body

temporary companion moon and shadow, make merry must up-to spring

I sing moon wavers/moves-back-and-forth, I dance shadow disordered chaotic

sober time with share joy, drunk after each separate scatter

forever bound-together not-limited sentiment wander, together meet far-away Milky Way

_____

Drinking Alone Under the Moon

Among the flowers my jug of wine,

I drink alone without companion

I raise my glass to the bright moon,

facing my shadow we are three

Moon knows not of drink, and

Shadow merely follows my body.

These temporary fellows, Moon and Shadow,

this happiness is made to end like the spring

I sing and Moon wanders

I dance and Shadow shakes

Still sober we are merry together,

though after we have drunk we will separate

Would that I were with you forever, no pain of parting,

together among the faraway stars