Poem to the Tune “Pure Peace”

By Li Bai

Translated from Chinese by Jeffrey Yang

This poem was written during the Tang Dynasty era (619 to 907 A.D.), also known as the Golden Age of Chinese Poetry. It was originally set to music, but that music has been lost.

May 1, 2004

Published in May 2004

China

Learn

A cloud is her dress a flower her face Spring
wind through the threshold stirs deep peony-dew
If unable to meet on a jade mountain peak
we’ll face at Jasper Terrace beneath the moon

“Nine Poems from Ancient China” are translated from one of China’s most popular collections of traditional verse, the Qian Jia Shi (“Poems of a Thousand Masters”) first compiled in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) by the poet Liu Kezhuang. Before he died in 1269 after some eighty-three years of living, Liu wrote: “I have complained that the work of recent writers is mostly shallow and commonplace. It lacks lofty and distant interests beyond the events themselves. The successful are tipsy with the inducements of favor and profit. The stymied dream of great deeds and fame. The matter/feeling appears in the words, and a thousand people all write the same poem” (translated by Michael Fuller). There is no cognate in these parts for such a collection of poems (Palgrave’s Golden Treasury is a stretch), as music and poetry have yet to be part of our standard education, and as the Chinese written language is the only language in the world that is the same today as it was three thousand years ago. In the Chinese, the poems follow the strict tonal patterns of “regulated verse” (eight lines of five or seven characters per line) and “detached verse” (four lines of five or seven characters per line), making melodies of such fluid complexity on par with a raga or Benedictine chant. The English translations emulate the overall rectangular fields (or seals) of the Chinese poems and retain the same number of lines. (Due to the difference in internet browsers, the lines in the translations may be a little off and not form perfect rectangles.) White space, as in many poems, serve as punctuation, breath, pause, degrees of rest, “In silence . . . the pulse of God’s blood in our veins” (Bunting). The overarching hope was to convey some of the music and precision of the Chinese in English.

A cloud is her dress a flower her face Spring
wind through the threshold stirs deep peony-dew
If unable to meet on a jade mountain peak
we’ll face at Jasper Terrace beneath the moon

Meet Li Bai

13th-century image of the poet Li Bai.

Watch the 2-minute video, “Li Bo: The “Outsider” poet,” from Columbia University, and find out why some critics call him a “wild man” in the 90-second video, “Unconventional Poetic Style.”

Meet Translator Jeffrey Yang

Below, you’ll find Jeffrey Yang’s reasons for placing spaces between the translated words, excerpted from his translator’s note for the poem (published in full beneath the poem itself).

The English translations emulate the overall rectangular fields (or seals) of the Chinese poems and retain the same number of lines. White space, as in many poems, serve as punctuation, breath, pause, degrees of rest . . . The overarching hope was to convey some of the music and precision of the Chinese in English.

Listen to the Poem

Listen to someone reading and singing the poem, and read a different translation of it.

"A flower her face"?

How do you imagine the woman in the poem? A five-minute video describes ancient Chinese makeup traditions, which sometimes included images of flowers on faces, and connects them to Disney’s Mulan.

Or, read some “Make-up Tips from the Tang Dynasty,” published on chinaculture.org.

For a contemporary fashion designer’s cos-play featuring the same era, look through the “ultra-retro photo shoot” posted by the blogger Shanghaiist.

Jueju: Saying a Lot in a Few Words

A statue of Du Fu, a fellow poet and friend of Li Bai. Photo by Somchai Sun. (CC 3.0 license.)

This poem is an example of a poetic form called jueju, which means “cut-off lines.” To write a jueju, a poet needs to create matching couplets with five to seven syllables per line. In such a strict form, each Chinese character (or English word) has to count. In creating jueju, poets try to see “the big within the small” (xiao zhong jian da)—finding emotional, philosophical and religious meaning in careful observation of a few images.

Interested in reading more jueju? “Poems for Parting,” by Du Mu, also on WWB Campus, is also in jueju form, and addresses a similar theme of longing for a loved one.

Then, read a few more translated juejus from Li Bai (also sometimes called Li Po):

“In Spring“—the third poem on the page
“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” in Ezra Pound’s famous, and loose translation

Finally, take a look at a jueju by Li Bai’s equally celebrated friend, Du Fu: “The River’s Blue, The Bird a Perfect White.”

Art & the Tang Dynasty

Tang dynasty-era statue of a woman, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Look at art from the Tang Dynasty: Standing Court Lady, a Phoenix-head ewer, Night-Shining White.

Or, look at art depicting the Tang Dynasty era, composed during later periods, when people were beginning to refer to the Tang and Song eras as China’s Golden Age. Landscapes after Tang Poems, Spring Play in a Tang Garden, and A Tang Palace—all created hundreds of years after the dynasty fell.

Imagining Mountains

The poem mentions a “jade mountain peak“—what was the poet imagining? Look at the painting Summer Mountains, from the Song Dynasty era. Dwelling in the Mountains is a modern painting that draws on dynastic traditions.

The English translation of the poem is shaped into a rectangular form, as it was in the original Chinese, and has the same number of lines. Each couplet, or set of two lines, expresses a different idea. The white spaces are meant to suggest pauses.

Li Bai

Li Bai (also known as Li Po, 701–62) is one of China’s most celebrated poets. He grew up in a town called Blue Lotus, in Sichuan Province, and wrote of his early years, “When I was fifteen, I was fond of sword play, and with that art I challenged quite a few great men.” After leaving home, he wandered the countryside, writing poems, meeting celebrities, giving away money, and marrying the first of his four wives His adult life included an interlude at the Emperor’s court, an arrest for treason, exile, and pardon. He lived through China’s Golden Age, as well as the wars and famines that followed.

After his poems were translated into English in the eighteenth century, they became models for English and American poets, who admired his conversational style and emulated his celebrations of friendship, nature, and wine. In the twentieth century, his work influenced such poets as Ezra Pound, Richard Wright, and Lorine Niedecker (“Swept snow Li Po . . .”)

Jeffrey Yang (translator)

Jeffrey Yang is the poetry editor for New Directions. He has published a limited-edition translation of Tang-Song Dynasty poems called Rhythm 226, and his translation of Su Shi’s East Slope is available from Ugly Duckling Presse. His own collections of poetry include An Aquarium and Vanishing-Lines. He is the editor of the anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems (2011) and Time of Grief: Mourning Poems (2013).

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