Fantasia on a theme by Li Bai

Botticini, Assumption of the Virgin

Dreaming of a Visit to Tianmu Mountains: A Song on Parting
Li Bai

The sailors speak of Yingzhou Havens,
Though in between the spray and swell they’ve not been found;
A southerner spoke of Tianmu Mountains,
Which can be seen, through haze and dawn’s inconstant cloud.
“The Tianmu Mountains reach the sky! They surge into the sky!
No sacred peak — not one of five — nor Red Wall are as high!
Its neighbour mountain, Heaven’s Steps, clears forty-eight thousand feet;
Before Tianmu, it shrinks away towards the south-east side.”
His words sent me away, down south, past Mirror Lake—it seemed
That I jumped over the moon in the water while I dreamed.
The lake-moon shone on my shadow form
And led me to the River Shan,
Whose water lapped as clear and chill
As hooting cries the gibbons sang,
And a hut stood by the river, still,
Where Master Xie’s ascent began.
As Xie once did, I strapped on mountaineering clogs
And climbed the switchback ladder into clouds and fog,
And yet I saw the sea-line sun from halfway up that face,
And heard the sound of heaven’s cock-crow echoing through space.
A thousand crags, ten thousand turns, I walked a shifting track,
Till hypnotised by mountain flowers I rested by a rock,
And gazed at them till suddenly the night was black.
Then boomed the bear, howled the dragon, roared the rocky spring,
They trembled every forest, oh, the peaks were trembling,
The clouds were deepest purple, oh, the rainclouds broke
The water’s surface crumpled, oh, and hid in smoke.
The cloud-splitters struck,
The high passes cracked,
The rocky firmament
Burst open at a stroke,
Before my eyes, infinities of velvet night yawned,
The moon and sun were glittering on gold and silver halls,
The rainbows were their mantles, oh, the storm wind was their mount,
The Lords in the Clouds, oh, one by one came streaming down.
A tiger played the strings, oh, a phoenix pulled their cart,
Like fields of planted hemp, oh, immortals beyond count.
My soul quailed, my spirit broke
With a long shriek, I fearfully woke
To see nothing but pillow and mat
What came before gone like mist—
And are the pleasures of the world not just the same as this?
In history, has every single thing not flowed away?
So now farewell, my comrades, oh, I may return some day.
My milk-white stag I leave at pasture in these verdant hills,
Until the day I ride again to some more august place,
But I won’t bow and scrape to powerful men, nor be at the mercy of their wills,
And never be allowed to show my feelings on my face.


李白  梦游天姥吟留别

海客谈瀛洲，烟涛微茫信难求。
越人语天姥，云霞明灭或可睹。
天姥连天向天横，势拔五岳掩赤城。
天台四万八千丈，对此欲倒东南倾。
我欲因之梦吴越，一夜飞度镜湖月。
湖月照我影，送我至剡溪。
谢公宿处今尚在，渌水荡漾清猿啼。
脚著谢公屐，身登青云梯。
半壁见海日，空中闻天鸡。
千岩万转路不定，迷花倚石忽已暝。
熊咆龙吟殷岩泉，栗深林兮惊层巅。
云青青兮欲雨，水澹澹兮生烟。
列缺霹雳，丘峦崩摧。
洞天石扉，訇然中开。
青冥浩荡不见底，日月照耀金银台。
霓为衣兮风为马，云之君兮纷纷而来下。
虎鼓瑟兮鸾回车，仙之人兮列如麻。
忽魂悸以魄动，恍惊起而长嗟。
惟觉时之枕席，失向来之烟霞。
世间行乐亦如此，古来万事东流水。
别君去兮何时还？
且放白鹿青崖间，须行即骑访名山。
安能摧眉折腰事权贵，使我不得开心颜！

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Li Bai at his craziest. This is supposed to be a farewell poem, but Li does none of the formal business of praising his friends, or telling them how sorry he will be to leave. Instead, he dives into a fantastic vision-dream he once had, and uses it to comment obscurely on his situation in life.

His situation was this: he had achieved great fame and success, and lost it all. Appointed by the emperor himself to be a court poet in Chang’an, he had lasted only a year, then messed up the politics, failed to be nice enough about the emperor’s consort, and was ejected. He travelled, spent some time at his estate in Shandong, but was restless, and now he was leaving again. In this poem, he is apparently answering the obvious question put to him by his Shandong friends: What’s next for you? Are you going back to the capital?

The answer was no. He had been to the capital; he had seen the great and the good. But he was not going there now. Li Bai was no longer one of the mythic lords of Chang’an, who ruled over China, and so he would no longer be riding a white stag.

Notes:

Tianmu Mountains: These are real mountains, down south in Zhejiang.

Yingzhou Havens: Mythical mountains out in the eastern oceans. The most famous of the Yingzhou mountains was Penglai.

Red Wall: Another real Zhejiang mountain, near to Tianmu.

Heaven’s Steps: Not a reference to how high the mountain is, but because the mountain is facing a constellation consisting of stars arranged a bit like a stairway. This is a real mountain, positioned to the southeast of Tianmu. I think the image here is that Mt Heaven’s Steps is craning its neck backwards to look up at Tianmu, so it kind of falls over backwards, thus falling down in the southeastern direction. Not sure about this, and the pictures I’ve seen online of the mountains don’t show any clear shape that might inspire such a metaphor. Perhaps it’s a bit of fancy by Li Bai, or a bit of conventional local mythology that has since been lost.

Mirror Lake, River Shan: Real geographical features, in the right geographical area.

Master Xie: Xie Lingyun, a poet of the 4th-5th centuries. He visited and wrote about Tianmu.

Mountaineering clogs: Special clogs apparently designed for or by Xie Lingyun, with grooves in the sole so the hiker could add extra thickness at the heel when going up, and at the toe when coming down.

Switchback ladder: A path zigzagging steeply upwards.

Sea-line sun: The sun on the horizon, rising in this case.

Heaven’s cock-crow: The crow of the ur-rooster, Platonic ideal of all cocks, which lives in the sky and wakes the world.

Hid in smoke: I think Li Bai is describing here the effect on water during torrential rain. The raindrops hit the surface of the water so hard and so frequently that the air just above the surface becomes filled with flying droplets. It looks like a thin layer of mist hovering just about the lake/pond/river.

Cloud-splitters: Lightning.

Rocky firmament: The rocky gates of the heavens.

Lords in the Clouds: The Lord in the Clouds was actually one specific immortal, with a very ancient provenance. He was hymned in Qu Yuan’s Songs of the South, more than 1,000 years before Li Bai. But here the term is used in a more general way, to refer to all of the gods and goddesses in the heavens.

Milk-white stag: A fabulous beast that the immortals might ride - but the immortals are also a metaphor for the great and good of the court in Chang’an. When Li says he’s leaving his white stag for now, he means he’s not going back to the court on this trip.

Bow and scrape: Here he explains why not. He can’t return to the capital because he won’t fake affection for the powerful.

Here’s Cinix with the reconstructed reading:

It’s worth noting that Cinix gives this a very level reading. He’s working on getting the pronunciation right, rather than on the feeling of the piece. But this poem has the word ‘song’ right in the title, and from the way it reads, I’m fairly sure this would have been sung. One can only imagine Li Bai thrashing away at his qin to recreate the violence of the storm in the middle.