The Works of Li-Po/Preface

by Shigeyoshi Obata

PREFACE

This is the first attempt ever made to deal with any single Chinese poet exclusively in one book for the purpose of introducing him to the English-speaking world.

Li Po has been the best-known Chinese poet in the Orient for the last one thousand years or more. In America his name has only recently been made familiar to the poetry public through the translation of his poems by eminent contemporary poets. But as the Bibliography at the end of the present volume indicates, Li Po — variously designated as Le Pih, Ly Pé, Li Tai-pé, Li Tai-po, et cet. — has been known more or less to Europe during the past century. A prominent place is accorded the poet in all the French and German anthologies of Chinese poems, which have appeared from time to time. He is included among the Portraits des Célèbres Chinois in Amiot's Mémoires (1776-97), while Pavie's Contes Chinois (1839) has a nouvelle of his life. Excellent studies and translations have been made by two German scholars, Florenz and Bernhardi, in their monographs on the poet.

In the English language, there is Mr. Edkins' paper "On Li Tai-po," which was read before the Peking Oriental Society in 1888 and was published in that Society's Journal in 1890. Mr. Edkins was perhaps the first Englishman to pay special attention to our poet, though his translations are trite and barren. Professor Giles' Chinese Poetry in English Verse and History of Chinese Literature came out respectively in 1898 and 1901. While his dexterous renderings of Li Po and other poets have since been generally accepted as standard English versions, they fail to create an appetite for more of their kind owing probably to the professor's glib and homely Victorian rhetoric which is not to the taste of the present day. Mr. Cranmer-Byng is elegant, but somewhat prolix. His two books, A Lute of Jade and A Feast of Lanterns, have many gorgeous lines, suffused, I fear, with a little too much of Mr. Cranmer-Byng's own impassioned poetry. These three men be- long to the old school of translators, who usually employ rhyme and stanzaic forms.

Then, in 1915, Mr. Ezra Pound entered the field with his Cathay, a slender volume of a dozen or more poems mostly of Li Po, "translated from the notes of the late Professor Fenollosa and the decipherings of Professors Mori and Ariga." In spite of its small size and its extravagant errors the book possesses abundant color, freshness and poignancy, and is in spirit and style the first product of what may be called the new school of free-verse translators, who are much in evidence nowadays. I confess that it was Mr. Pound's little book that exasperated me and at the same time awakened me to the realization of new possibilities so that I began seriously to do translations myself. Mr. Waley omits Li Po from his first book, but includes in his More Translations a few specimens from a group of poems that he published in the Asiatic Review, in which he avers that he does not regard Li Po so highly as others do. On the other hand, Miss Lowell devotes her recent delightful volume, Fir-Flower Tablets, largely to our poet, with a selection of eighty-five poems by him. Mr. Bynner's translation of what he calls Three Hundred Pearls of Tung Poetry, has been announced for early publication, in which Li Po will be represented by some twenty-five poems.

Now to the Western literary world, generally speaking, much of Chinese poetry remains still an uncharted sea for adventure. The romantic explorer who comes home from it may tell any tale to the eager and credulous folk. Not that yarns are wilfully fabricated, but on these strange vasty waters, dimly illumined with knowledge, one may see things that are not there and may not see things that are really there. Such is certainly the case with Li Po. For instance, Mr. Edkins speaks of a poem (No. 72) which he entitles "A Japanese Lost at Sea," as being "unknown in China" but having been preserved by the Japanese. He adds with the pride of a discoverer that the poem was given him by a Japanese in 1888, whereas as a matter of fact the same poem has for these centuries had a place in any Chinese edition of Li Po's complete works. Take another example. Due to the devious and extremely hazardous nature of his method of translation, Mr. Pound gathers two different poems of Li Po into one, incorporating the title of the second piece in the body of his baffling conglomeration. Even Mr. Waley registers his fallibility by a curiously elaborate piece of mistranslation in the Asiatic Review. Speaking of Li Po's death, he quotes from Li Yang-ping's Preface a passage, rendering it as follows:

When he was about to hang up his cap (a euphemism for dying), Li Po was worried . . .

which should read, to follow Mr. Waley's manner,

When I was about to hang up my cap (a euphemism for resigning from office), Li Po was sick. . . . "Kua Kuan," a quite common Chinese phrase, meaning to hang one's cap, that is, one's official cap, is never used as a conceit for dying. In her Introduction to Fir-Flower Tablets, Mrs. Ayscough is right in rejecting the tempting morsel of legend about Li Po's drowning, which has been accepted by Professor Giles and others. But on the same page she makes a misstatement to the effect that Li Po after his return from exile went to "live with his friend and disciple, Lu Yang-ping, in the mountains near Kiu Kiang." The fact is Li Yang-ping (not Lu Yang-ping) was then magistrate of Tang-tu, the present city of Tai-ping in the province of Anhwei, at a considerable distance from the Lu Mountains, which are in Hunan. Nor does she seem to be conversant with the notorious bit of China's literary history regarding the "Eight Immortals of the Winecup." They acquired their enviable fame in the taverns of Chang-an during Li Po's sojourn in that metropolis. Tu Fu's celebrated poem (No. 125) will serve as an evidence. The group never lived in the mountains together as Mrs. Ayscough makes out. Again she blunders glaringly and inexcusably in writing, "China's three greatest poets, Li Tai-po, Tu Fu, and Po Chu-i all lived during his (Ming Huang's) long reign of forty-five years," for elsewhere in her own book the years of these poets are correctly given to be respectively, A. D. 701-762, 712-770 and 772-846.

By citing these few obvious errors committed by zealous scholars and daring poets, I do not mean to discredit their brilliant achievements, which I fully appreciate, and to which I am heavily indebted in the execution of my work. Only I feel it my duty to indicate to my reader the still very imperfect state of what is accessible to him in the way of a Li Po literature in English. And conscious of my own failings, I offer him my book in all humility although I have profited by the contributions of my predecessors, and although I feel that in the limited scope I have chosen, my work is generally adequate.

I am a Japanese. I pretend to no erudition in Chinese literature. But I have been all my life a student and lover of Chinese poetry, or as much of it as I can read. In my boyhood I learned some shorter pieces of Li Po by heart. And during these past years of my study and travel in America I have always carried with me a small edition of his works. These translations were made at intervals, over half of them having been finished before the spring of 1916. It is more than a year since the entire collection was completed and I began to look for a publisher. A few of the poems were published in the Wisconsin Literary Magazine, a student publication at the University of Wisconsin where I did my graduate work in English during 1917-1918. One poem (No. 9) was printed by a friendly editor in 1919 in the now defunct Art and Life. All the rest is presented to the public for the first time.

For the historical and biographical matter in the Introduction I drew only on the most reliable Chinese sources such as the writings of the poet himself and his contemporaries and the two Books of Tang, while I referred constantly to the works of European historians and translators. As to the poems themselves, they represent only a little more than one-tenth of the works of Li Po preserved in the standard Chinese edition, but I have tried to make the selection as varied and representative as possible and included, consequently, a number of popular pieces which have been translated by more than one hand. I have honestly tried my best to follow the original poems closely and to preserve the peculiar emotional color of each poem, waiting for the moment when I was in the right mood to take up a particular piece. For the elucidation of the difficult passages I depended largely on Japanese and Chinese commentaries, and consulted freely, wherever possible, existing European translations; and I had also the assistance of my Chinese friends. But I wish to have my reader understand that many of my versions are far from being literal. A literal translation would often leave a Chinese poem unintelligible unless supplied with a great amount of exegesis, and I did not wish to empty all the rich content of the original into footnotes. I have amplified or paraphrased on many occasions. I have omitted unimportant words here and there. I have discarded, or translated, a number of proper names because, some way or other, Chinese syllables refuse to sing in company with English words. I have dropped all the phonetic marks, which indicate some tonal peculiarities in certain words like T'ang yun, feng, etc., but which serve only to mystify a non-initiate like myself or my reader. But after all these and other things I have done, I am inclined to believe that my renderings are often simpler and more exact than other extant versions, which I have studied and which I have listed at the end of the book.

In conclusion, I acknowledge my heavy obligations to all my European and American precursors in the field and to my many personal friends who have aided me in various ways during these years of protracted toil. I mention specially my Chinese friend, Mr. Yu-lan Fung, who went over the entire manuscript and furnished me with valuable criticism and corrections,and also Mr. Lo and Mr. Yang who did for me the Chinese titles of the poems, which appear at the margins of the succeeding pages. Finally my deepest gratitude is due to my old friend, Arthur Harcourt Mountain, without whose enthusiastic interest and frequent companionship and collaboration this book might have never been brought to completion.

Shigeyoshi Obata.

February 3rd, 1922.