Taking a Li Bai Minute

I really need to finish up my conference paper. That's the next big task, and I've scheduled myself plenty of time for it. But, but....mwa, procrastination always ensnares me when I get near times that I have to finish papers. I'll do it. I will. But first, I'm taking a minute to look at a poem that one of my students brought up in his paper. He had one of his characters recite the following short poem by Li Bai (my translation admittedly reflects my mood as much as the Chinese text):

On a cloudy morning I said goodbye to Baidi,	朝辞白帝彩云间
Then rode a thousand miles, right on down to Jiangling.	千里江陵一日还
A single screech of monkey, crying on both sides,	两岸猿声啼不尽
Peaks and peaks of mountains, I passed them in my boat.	轻舟已过万重山

Li Bai's Homecoming

A page from the Baidu web helped me understand what the deal is with this poem (there is an excellent wikisource page as well). Li Bai was actually on the wrong side of the famous An Lushan rebellion against the Tang dynasty Emperor Xuanzong. Xuanzong probably wanted Li Bai dead, but for some reason -- I guess because he was a famous poet? Or also that Xuanzong was no longer popular enough? -- Li didn't get the death penalty, just exile out to Baidi, which was back then a little fort-type structure out on the southwestern frontier (picture above; odd, isn't it?). Once Xuanzong died, Li Bai got an official pardon.

Ah, That's Better

So this poem is taken to express his happiness that he was able to leave Baidi and return to the more civilized Jiangling, an ancient county and town 'many leagues' down the Yangtze river, in Hubei province (above, the outlandish city walls; from HL Wang's flickr). I wonder if Li Bai put the name of this town because it was the first place he came to that looked like a decent, civilized area, which might have made him feel that he was finally leaving the undeveloped frontier behind, and coming to some place he thought of as home.

Oh Fickle Fame

It's funny, I've always sort of resented Li Bai. I feel like it is because he is so famous -- too famous, but I realize I don't feel the same way at all about Du Fu, even though he is even more famous. This particular poem is so famous that at least one undergrad at the University of Minnesota thinks of it as a typical Tang dynasty poem. Reading it in Chinese, I can certainly see that it has wonderful concision -- it's just four lines long, and yet does quite convey the general emotional state of "whoopee, I'm going home!" But apparently a Ming dynasty critic called Yang Zhen praised it in these terms: "Cool winds and rain do cry down upon the ghosts and gods!" 惊风雨而泣鬼神矣！Uhm...wtf? Does Yang mean that the elements of place and scene come together to express something truly sublime, and/or spiritual? If so, I fail to see that, at least for now. I'll keep reading though.

Better-than-pure Studio?

The Baidu page cites something called Chao chun zhai shi ci 超纯斋诗词 "Exceeding-Purity Studio Poetry" as the source of the Yang Zhen quote. What's that? Worldcat doesn't have any books with "Exceeding-purity" in the title. A few google searches took me to some very strange dead-ends, including a Chinese email-hosting site and a Chinese middle school site. Other pages also give notes to poems and cite the Chao chun zhai shi ci, though. Perhaps it was a website that started off with one host and then moved to others in turn? I found something that might be the source, or some re-incarnation of this source with the same name, on the website of a vocational high school in Taichung. Weird, huh? Chao chun zhai shi ci 超纯斋诗词 is an extremely popular but extremely ephemeral knowledge base that people in China and Taiwan are using to read classical poems. I wonder if these kinds of sources are actually more important than scholarly ones...