BRIGHT MOON, WHITE CLOUDS - LI PO trans. J.P. SEATON

Always good to read more poetry, especially Chinese poetry, given daddy Xi’s imminent ascendancy. You’ll want to familiarize yourself with our new overlords’ taste in poetry. Jokes aside, I’ve had Li Po on my radar since reading that Du Fu collection a year or so ago since the two were friends in real life and since they’re both considered the pinnacle of classical Chinese poetry. I dig the general vibe of both of their oeuvres. They both write these shorter poems about travelling around China, trying to get jobs as Tang-era bureaucrats, ideally the job is court poet, that will allow them time to hang out and drink and write poetry and be in nature. There’s lots of talk of old friends and missing people and seeing folks off on their journey or being drunk and looking at the moon. All of this is quite relatable to me, it’s amazing that these poems are from 700 CE, aka hundreds of years before even something like THE INFERNO and manage to feel pretty modern to me. I too love to get drunk and look at the moon and miss my friends. This book also has lots of references to “apes,” my favorite being the line, “”Mountain Lords” we called the apes when we got them drunk.” which might be a weird translation thing (does China have “apes” or “monkeys”?) but I really enjoyed it. Drinking in the mountains alongside the apes sounds like a great time. The poems are all very short and packed with Taoist vibes, the whole book reads very quickly. The essays at the beginning and end are also quite informative. The beginning one is more of a straightforward overview of Li Po’s life, the milieu he lived in, his influences and the effect he’s had on Chinese poetry over the past 1300 years. The ending essay is even more interesting, it focuses on the translation itself by taking a few poems and showing how he translates the poems literally, as in word-for-word, before taking us through his thought process w/r/t rendering them in literate, poetic English. We’re able to see the insane nuances that cannot be rendered in English. For instance, the way the ideograms of the various words contain elements of one another and thus contain a level of resonance and artistic subtlety that has no English equivalent. He gives us multiple translations of a number of verses that do vary wildly and show just some of the artistry involved in the original. If only I knew more Chinese to really understand what Seaton is getting at. Either way, Li Po, especially when paired with Du Fu, is amazingly relevant for being almost as old as Islam. Li Po’s persona during his life (he was famously over 6 feet tall, so I naturally have an affinity for a fellow tall-king) was “banished Immortal” which truly is something to still strive for. 1 perfect Tao.