Of
the three great
poets of the Tangdynasty,
Li Bai (Li Po in older texts) is probably the one most
familiar to western readers. He was born in 701 in Gang
Xiao Sheng, a territory of China, and when five years
old followed his merchant father
to Sichuan. He may well have been of central
Asian stock, or a descendant
of an unsuccessful rival for the dragon throne. Of an independent
and bohemian
nature, and well-off, Li Bai never sat the shin-shih
examinations, nor bothered much about finding a position,
but by impressing
the many scholars who befriended him with his poetry, he was
brought to court notice in 742 and appeared before Emperor
Hsüan-tsung. He became a member of the Han-lin
Academy, an appointment that lasted only two years. The
association between China's most gifted literary magician
and its dilettante emperor was not a happy one, and Li Bai
was exiled from court on several occasions, the result of
dubious political connections and the poet's distaste
for tradition and authority. Many poems praise the light-headed
simplicity that wine
brings, and their author sometimes appeared less than sober
before the Son of Heaven. Li Bai continued his wanderings,
and in 755 he joined the force led by the emperor's 16th son,
Prince Lin, a move probably forced on him by the troubled
times of the An Lushan rebellion. Lin was defeated, captured
and executed. A similar fate was ordered for Li Bai, but the
poet was reprieved, exiled to Yunnan, and pardoned before
arrival when the old emperor died. There are many legends
surrounding Li Bai's death, but he probably died at Dangtu,
possibly of cirrhosis of the liver or mercury poisoning, in
Anhui province in 762.
Li
Bai's
poetry
An
enormous
quantity of poetry
was written throughout the Tang
period, and its greatest exponents illustrate the three
fundamental
strands of Chinese thought: Confucianism,
Taoism
and Buddhism.
Du Fu was more Confucian, looking
steadfastly at life, even its most harrowing aspects, with
an understanding stoicism. Duties and responsibilities are
what make the virtuous man, who learns from correctness
in family relationships to adopt proper attitudes to society.
Wang Wei was a Buddhist mystic,
viewing the world with a detached compassion. Life is an
illusion, and its ensnaring passions and appetites keep
us from our better natures The mercurial Li
Bai exemplified the Taoist attitude: his sudden inspiration,
brilliant improvisations and unmatched technical felicity.
The Tao, unknown and unfathomable, is behind the flow of
pattern and process in the universe, which we can abstract
into concepts but not fully comprehend. Some 1,100
of Li Bai's poems survive, and are noted for their rich
imagination, fantasy, taoist and alchemical
interests. Li Bai was a strong character, making a vivid
impression on everyone he met, but he was also boastful,
callous, dissipated, irresponsible and untruthful. His saving
quality is the poetry, which is as unforgettable now as
the man was in life.
Chinese
poetry
Chinese
is notoriously perplexing
to Europeans,
particularly in its writingsystem,
use of tones and tone patterns, etymology,
concision
(no conjunctions, articles or plurals) fluid relationship
between nouns and verbs, free word order, and allusion
to previous
events or poems
(often hundreds
of years in the past. Metre does not follow our western
notions, moreover, but runs something like tum tum tum
ti tum tum xi tum tum tum ti tum tum, where xi
marks the exclamation syllable and caesura, tum is
a full word and ti a particle. Then there are problems
of understanding: educated Chinese can read these poems
fairly readily, but they are often at a loss to explain
exactly what they mean. Worse still, Chinese characters
link up nicely in compounds
that have no literal equivalents in English. Finally, Chinese
poetry takes many forms, all of them a good deal more complicated
than this brief summary can cover, so it's not surprising
that translations tend to employ free verse, drawing support
from the idiomatic and sometimes beautiful renderings of
Ezra
Pound, Arthur Waley and Kenneth Rexroth. Unfortunately,
classical Chinese poetry is nothing like free verse. Allusive,
compact and musical, it follows very demanding rules on
number of characters to the line, rhyme, parallelism and
tonal arrangements. Li Bai wrote in many forms, including
regulated verse, but he preferred the rhapsodic fu
and yuefu
quatrain styles
without their onerous restrictions.
