Li Bai's lied of grievance
The Reproach on Jade Steps
To the tune of Reproach on Jade Steps Li Bai As the night wears on On the steps of jade The silvery dew Climbs her stockings Go in and lower Your crystal curtain But she shimmeringly watches The autumn moon
This piece creates a lot of anxiety for the translator because there’s a powerful Ezra Pound version. It’s a great translation, in which Pound uses a weirdly understated, unpoetic diction to describe the classic romantic/poetic gestures of waiting long into the night for your lover, and then gazing at the moon, missing him. The clash of non-traditional diction with classic poetic tropes gives the translation its unique flavour.
It’s no criticism of the translation to note that it generates its poetic power in a completely different way to the original.
The first thing to note about the Li Bai poem is that it’s a lyric or a poem designed to be set to music. As always, we have no idea what the music was, so our interpretation must rely on a lot of guesswork. The name of the tune seems to comes from a poem by Xie Tiao written 250 years earlier, but even that was only part of a much longer tradition, dating back at least to the Han Dynasty. Li Bai was refining and ringing the changes on images that would have been very familiar to his readers.
The Xie Tiao poem goes:
In the evening palace, the pearl drapes are lowered,/The fireflies come out, and the fireflies rest./Through the long night, she stitches silk shirts,/And her thoughts of her lord know no end.
Li Bai took the fancy drapes, but turned them into a crystal shade. He replaced the fireflies with his beloved moon, but multiplied and scattered like fireflies as it is seen through the crystal blinds. He offers an explanation as to why the steps might be jade: the dew turns them into a jewel-like mirage. And he carelessly discards the virtuous stitching of Xie’s maiden, because in the face of beauty and emotion, Li Bai doesn’t care a fig about your ethics.
If you can, as a reader, I hope you’ll think of this poem like lieder, the German genre of classical music that uses poetry as a song text. Like the best lieder, this poem/song represents the encapsulation of long artistic traditions, brought to a shimmering peak of perfection.
玉阶怨
玉阶生白露，夜久侵罗袜。
却下水晶帘，玲珑望秋月。
To the tune of Reproach on Jade Steps
Li Bai
As the night wears on
On the steps of jade
The silvery dew
Climbs her stockings
Go in and lower
Your crystal curtain
But she shimmeringly watches
The autumn moon