6 STAR RIVER: the Milky Way.
CREATION: literally “create change” (tsao-hua), the force driving the ongoing process of change—a kind of deified principle.
8 HUI YUAN: A major figure in the history of Chinese Buddhism, Hui Yüan (334-416) emphasized dhyana (sitting meditation), teaching a form of Buddhism which contained early glimmers of Ch’an (Zen).
LING-YUN: Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433), the great pre-T’ang poet (see Introduction). When he first visited Hui Yüan in the Lu Mountains at his Tung-lin Monastery (see following poem), Ling-yün’s “heart submitted to him reverently.” Hsieh Ling-yün thereupon joined Hui Yüan’s spiritual community, and Buddhism became central to his life and work.
KALPA: In Ch’an, the term for an endlessly long period of time. Originally, in Vedic scripture, a kalpa is a world-cycle lasting 4,320,000 years.
10 CH’I: universal breath or life-giving principle.
HSI-HO: Hsi Ho drove the sun-chariot, which was pulled by six dragons.
LU YANG: Lu Yang’s army was in the midst of battle as evening approached. Fearing nightfall would rob him of victory, Lu Yang shook his spear at the setting sun, and it thereupon reversed its course.
12 Translated by Ezra Pound as “The River-Merchant’s Wife,” this poem is a modernist classic. Indeed, translated under his Japanese name (Rihaku) in Pound’s Cathay, Li Po was an important part of the modernist revolution Pound engineered. Nevertheless, there is no reason to think the husband is a river-merchant. The wandering Li Po was likely thinking figuratively of his own wife.
This poem is in the yüeh-fu form. Originally, yüeh-fu were folk songs, often critical of the government, which were collected by the Han emperor Wu’s Music Bureau (“yüeh-fu” means “Music Bureau”) to gauge the sentiments of the common people. Hence, as poets later adopted the form, using a common person as the poem’s speaker became a convention. As here, the speaker is often a woman left alone by her lover (cf. 20-21, 29, 65). See also p. 58 and note.
15 MENG HAO-JAN: the eldest of the great High T’ang poets.
20 CLOUDS-AND-RAIN LOVE: From the legend of a prince who, while visiting Wu Mountain, was visited in his sleep by a beautiful woman who said that she was the goddess of Wu Mountain. She spent the night with him, and as she left said: “At dawn I marshal the morning clouds; at nightfall I summon the rain.”
28 CH’IN: ancient stringed instrument which Chinese poets used to accompany the chanting of their poems. It is ancestor to the more familiar Japanese koto.
30 CHUANG-TZU… BUTTERFLY: This story, in which Chuang-tzu can’t decide whether he’s Chuang-tzu dreaming he’s a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he’s Chuang-tzu, is found at the end of Chapter 2 in the Chuang Tzu.
EASTERN SEAS… WESTERN STREAMS: After China’s rivers flow into the eastern sea, they ascend to become the Star River (Milky Way) and flow back across the sky to descend again in the west, forming the headwaters of the rivers again.
33 Wu was an ancient kingdom in southeast China. The Wu emperor referred to in this poem is Fu Ch’a, whose weakness for beautiful women had disastrous consequences (much like Hsüan-tsung’s infatuation with Yang Kuei-fei, which gives these poems a layer of topical political comment). The legendary beauty Hsi Shih was sent to Fu Ch’a by Kou Chien, ruler of Yüeh, Wu’s rival kingdom to the south. Once Fu Ch’a had succumbed to her pleasures and neglected his kingdom, Yüeh invaded and conquered Wu (472 B.C.), a subject taken up in the following poem.
36 T’AI MOUNTAIN: There are five especially sacred mountains in China, one for each of the four directions and one at the center. T’ai, in the east, is perhaps the most revered of these mountains, and its summit the destination of many pilgrims. The T’ai Mountain complex includes many lower ridges and summits, one of which is Heaven’s Gate.
41 Li Po’s way of life often led him to inns and winehouses where courtesans entertained guests with a popular song-form called tz’u. Probably imported from Li Po’s native central Asia, tz’u had been considered unfit for serious poets. Not surprisingly, Li Po was the first major poet to ignore this convention. Each tz’u had a different song-form, and poets would write lyrics that fit the music, which meant using quite irregular line lengths. Here, the title of the original tz’u is “Ch’ing P’ing,” hence: “Ch’ing P’ing Lyrics.” Tz’u thereafter grew in importance as a serious poetic form, eventually becoming the distinctive form of the Sung Dynasty.
47 SPIRIT: It was thought that in sleep one’s spirit could go off to visit someone else’s dreams.
48 SPIRIT IN SAD FLIGHT: Although the spirit can go some distance during sleep or when a person suffers some emotional trauma, after death, it can travel long distances.
52 FOUR-RECLUSE PASS: Toward the end of the Ch’in Dynasty, four sages known as the “Four White-heads” retired to Shang Mountain near Lo-yang in protest of the tyrannical government. When the Han Dynasty replaced the Ch’in (206 B.C.), they still refused to leave the mountain. SOUTH MOUNTAIN: Calling up such passages as “like the timelessness of South Mountain” in the Book of Songs (Shih Ching, 166/6), South Mountain came to have a kind of mythic stature as the embodiment of the elemental and timeless nature of the earth.
58 Another kind of yüeh-fu, the traditional form for poems of social protest, which allows rather extreme metrical irregularities. As is often the case with T’ang Dynasty yüeh-fu, it is set in the Han Dynasty—a convention used when the poem was likely to offend those in power (here the protest would be against the expansionist militarism of the government). The speaker here is a soldier.
HSIUNG-NU: war-like nomadic peoples occupying vast regions from Mongolia to Central Asia during the Han Dynasty. They were a constant menace on China’s northern frontier.
60 CH’IN: see note for p. 28.
61 SILKWORMS… SLEPT THREE TIMES: Silkworms, which feed on mulberry leaves, go through three or four cycles of feeding and sleeping each spring and summer before spinning their cocoons.
68 HSIEH T’IAO: 5th-century poet remembered for his landscape poems.
74 CHAO: A native Japanese, Chao went to China as a young man to complete his education. He remained there and rose to high office. In A.D. 753, he tried to return to Japan, but his ship was blown off course and wrecked. Chao survived, but when Li Po wrote this poem, it was apparently thought that he had perished.
91 PHOENIX: The mythic phoenix appears only in times of peace and sagacious rule, which was certainly not the case during the An Lu-shan rebellion when this poem was written.
WU… CHIN: The ancient kingdom of Wu and the Chin Dynasty both had their capitals at Chin-ling.
93 HSIEH AN: One of Li Po’s favorite historical figures, Hsieh An (A.D. 320-385) lived as a scholar-recluse until the country’s difficulties required that he enter government service. North China had already fallen to invading “barbarians.” When their armies advanced on the south, Hsieh led an outnumbered Chinese army that repelled them, thereby saving China from being completely overrun.
94 NORTHERN DIPPER… SOUTHERN WINNOW: constellations.
95 KINSMAN: Li Yung, who was executed on trumped-up charges by Li Lin-fu, the notorious prime minister who was currently doing such damage to the country.
97 9/9: the 9th day of the 9th month, a holiday celebrated by climbing to a mountaintop and drinking chrysanthemum wine, which was believed to enhance longevity.
99 GEESE: traditionally associated with letters from loved ones far away.
100 THREE GORGES: a set of three spectacular gorges formed where the Yangtze River cut its way through the formidable Wu Mountains, forming a two-hundred-mile stretch of very narrow canyons. Famous in Chinese poetry for the river’s violence and the towering cliffs alive with shrieking gibbons, travel through them was very dangerous. The three gorges are: Ch’ü-t’ang Gorge, which begins at Kuei-chou; Wu Gorge; and furthest downsteam, Huang-niu Gorge, the first Li Po would encounter on his journey upstream.
101 SHUN: last emperor of China’s legendary Golden Age (regnant 2255-2208 B.C.). After his death, the world began to decline.
109 BLACK OX … WHITE CRANE: animals the immortals typically rode in their celestial journeys.
110 MOON-RABBIT: According to popular myth, there is a rabbit on the moon under a cinnamon tree. There it pounds a balm of immortality using, among other things, sap and bark from the tree.
TIMELESS FU-SANG TREE: The sun is, also according to popular myth, ten crows— one for each day of the week. Each day, one sun-crow rises from the vast fu-sang (mulberry) tree in the far east. After setting, it waits in the tree’s branches until its turn to rise comes again, ten days later.
123 SOUTH MOUNTAIN: see note for p. 52.