"He was always deemed too free-spirited to be a safe candidate for office. Even Jin’s restrained tone can’t obscure Li's extravagant life, which saw the poet ping-pong between pawning clothes for cups of wine and having the Emperor serve him a ladle of soup. In times of disappointment, his faith kept him afloat. He wrote, 'Heaven begot a talent like me and must put me to good use / And a thousand cash in gold, squandered, will come again.' Sometimes his confidence seems close to egomaniacal: when a summons from the imperial court came, he gloated, 'laughing out aloud with my head thrown back, / I walk out the front gate. How can a man / Like myself stay in the weeds for too long?'"
From "Ha Jin’s Self-Revealing Study of the Chinese Poet Li Bai," a New Yorker review of "The Banished Immortal."
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But what was his social credit score?
"Heaven begot a talent like me and must put me to good use / And a thousand cash in gold, squandered, will come again..."
"...laughing out aloud with my head thrown back, / I walk out the front gate. How can a man / Like myself stay in the weeds for too long?"
KInda Trumpian, if Trump were to write poems about himself.
Alas, we only get Tweets.
"I've been bankrupt, but I just get back at it. Others who let that stop them: sad."
"The media and the Democrats? I'm still here. Oval Office - no corners, but nice. MAGA."
I am Laslo.
He was always deemed too free-spirited to be a safe candidate for office.
I heard somewhere that he was almost late for work a couple of times.
Manic and high verbal ability?
Sounds about right.
I like it. Ancestor worship takes a way-back machine. If we did that, we could make Trump into a Julius Caesar, and impatiently await the Ides of February.
Between Li Bai and Du Fu, his rough contemporary, I like Du Fu better, but I can't say I know either of them well. Du Fu has always stuck in my memory for that poem he wrote about being stuck in the office dealing with paperwork on a hot summer day. But in fairness to Li Bai, my familiarity with his poetry comes almost 100% through Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.
I don't know Mandarin Chinese, let alone Classical Chinese (I can match up A translation with the original characters based on meaning, but can't actually read), so I can't really appreciate the poems on the poetic level -- they might as well be prose for all I can appreciate them. I have occasionally looked for Japanese books with the kambun and then the modern translations for famous Chinese poems in the literary canon, but I haven't found one that seems really appropriate for me (most of what I find seems a bit too scholarly). Because English word order is closer to Chinese than Korean or Japanese are, it would probably not be too hard to create a kind of English-style kambun for interpreting Classical Chinese. But in practice, we don't use Chinese characters at all for English, and the demand just isn't there -- the audience for Classical Chinese anything in the English-speaking world is basically limited to specialists who are going to put in the time to learn Chinese anyhow.
Military history fans should check out Ha Jin's novel War Trash. War Trash is about a Chinese soldier taken prisoner by the Americans during the Korean War, and his time in the POW camp, caught between warring factions of communist & non-communist Chinese POWs. It's also about how Mao's government betrayed its "volunteers" who fought for it in the Korean War.
Jin's novels are not translations. He, like Joseph Conrad, is a non-native speaker of English who writes in it very well. Translations from Chinese to English can often be dicey things.
Oops,
I guess that should be "Ha's novels" not "Jin's novels".
He drank wine into the night? How unconventional.
Minor point: why are Jin et al. "rootless"? Uprooted, perhaps. But the self-disclosing autobiographical biography of a Chinese poet by a Chinese poet would seem to demonstrate the strength of roots.
"But what made him a poet might have ruined him as a politician. He lived unconventionally—drinking wine into the night, wandering around after curfew, mingling with people from all walks of life... He was always deemed too free-spirited to be a safe candidate for office. "
Sounds like Trump if you replace the drinking with Tweeting.
Poet that he is, Trump needs his "Executive Time" to the dismay of the UniParty who he continues to thwart.
Poetry IS translation. Of dreams into words.
Every rendition, even into the poet's native tongue, is a failure. An approximation, scratched out by a stranger with whatever tools are at hand.
Less abstractly, I encourage everyone to learn another language than their "own." Several is better. And then? Work to translate poetry from one into the other. It will humble you.
In my case, Dante. It is like trying to reduce music to words. His words for his people were perhaps only words. But for us? We see the sense and we see also a hint of what is beyond the words.
Li Bai appears prominently in Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven under the name Sima Zian. Lead me to further exploration of both Li and Du Fu. I was totally charmed that two Tang Dynasty poets spoke to me in a way modern poets do not. Of course, I read them in modern translations, so who is to say that the original poetry would so affect me.
Great post and comments. I approve.
Li?
Dunno. Don't care.
But wait till "ye" runs.
Fu I loved the high wind and the hill.
Alas, he died of alcohol.
And Li Po also died drunk.
He tried to catch a moon in the Yellow River.
Poetry is frozen truth.
Poetry has life.
Poetry sings.
I am a poet who doesn't trust poets.
A prophet who doesn't trust prophets.
A cynic who knows God speaks.
Mo killed competing poets.
I will read it. Thanks!
How much was a Tang politician what we consider a politician today? Weren't they more advisors and administrators?
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