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Li Qing Zhao (1084 – ca. 1155), also known as Yian Jushi (Chinese: 易安居士) was a Chinese poet and essayist during the Song dynasty. She is now considered one of China’s greatest poets. Li’s life was full of twists and turns and her poems can be split into two main groups – the dividing line being when she moved to the south. During the early period, most of her poems were related to her feelings as a young woman. They were more like love poems. After her move to the south, they became closely linked with her hatred of the war against the Jurchens and her patriotism. She is credited with the first detailed critique of the metrics of Chinese poetry and was regarded as a master of the ‘subtle and concise style’. Here work has been widely translated in the West by, amongst others, the American poet, Kenneth Rexroth.
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Mildred Faintly is a transgender woman who writes book reviews for the SF/Fantasy literary magazine 96thofoctober.com. She earned a doctorate in classics under another name in another life. This rendered her entirely unemployable and for some years not very good company. She finally found work as a high school math teacher. Now retired, she enjoys the life of a literary recluse in a bamboo grove somewhere in New Jersey, sipping tea, practicing her calligraphy, and plucking plaintive notes on the pipa.
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Li Qing Zhao: Three Poems translated by Mildred Faintly
THAT ONE EVENING
I’ll never forget that one evening
when I tippled in the riverside pavilion,
watching the sun set. It was late,
and I was so sunk in drunkenness
I didn’t know my own way home.
Content with time so well spent,
boating back, I found myself befuddled
in the muddy profundities
of a dense lotus patch.
There must be some solution, I reasoned,
in all this water, and continued to guess
at a path with my addled paddle. At last
With a mighty exertion
of mental as well as physical power,
I managed to amaze
a flock of egrets into leaping skywards
with vast slow flap of wide white wings.
*
常記溪亭 . . .
常記溪亭日暮。
沈醉不知歸路。
興盡，晚回舟；
誤入藕花深處。
爭渡，
爭渡，
驚起一灘鷗鷺。
***
THE GOLDEN LION
The golden lion, figured on the lid
of the incense burner, is rearing up ready to roar
amid fragrant furls of smoke
—though now its coals are ash, its bowl is cold.
The quilts on the bed
are a red silk rumpled tumult.
I’ve gotten sluggishly up.
I comb my hair. That’s as much as I manage.
Dust covers the treasure box
that holds my cosmetics and the rest.
Sun peers in through the space between the shade
and the top of the window frame.
I dread awakening, feeling, remembering
all the bitter little details.
I almost speak—I stop,
I am not all I was.
It’s not that I’ve succumbed to sickness
or to wine, or to November’s melancholy.
He’s on his way to whence he came.
For grief that he must leave, we drained
so many parting cups
and sang so many parting songs
and suddenly was come the dawn,
he could no longer stay,
and he was gone—
and he was truly gone . . .
gone, like the path back to the Peach Grove Utopia
in Tao Yuwan Ming’s fable,
where never came care, and time was not —
a place now no more to be found
than the fairytale cloudy tower in Chin
where the lovers Shao Shih and Nong Yoo
expressed their wedded harmony in flute duets
that lured a phoenix down from the azure
to waft them from their terrace to heaven.
Only this river that flows past my house
still thinks to visit me.
I stare at its passage,
I stay and watch it go,
and every day adds another
unavailing drop of sadness
to my well of loneliness.
*
香冷金猊 . . .
香冷金猊, 被翻紅浪,
起來慵自梳頭.
任寶奩塵滿.
日上簾鉤,
生怕離懷別苦
多少事.
欲說還休, 新來瘦,
非干病, 酒, 不是悲秋.
休, 休. 這回去也,
千萬遍陽關也,
則難留.
念武陵人遠,
煙鎖秦樓.
唯有樓前
流水應念我.
終日凝眸, 凝眸處.
從今又添一段新愁。
***
WIND RUFFLES THE LAKE
Wind ruffles the lake,
sending ripples into the distance;
autumn darkens the days.
Here and there,
is yet a flower,
a rare flare of red petals,
an evanescing scent.
Flash of sunlight—glory on the waters
that mirror surrounding mountains.
These things speak to everyone
of the world’s infinite,
unstinting goodness
—in a way that seems to speak to you alone.
Time cost the lotus its showy corolla;
now fat little seeds peep from its pod.
Tangled ferns, tall grass on the sandy bank;
dew makes them glisten like they’ve just been rinsed.
The dozing egret’s hunched up,
head at rest atop retracted neck;
gulls, their heads turned back and tucked
between wings, sleep in the sand,
it seems I don’t so much as merit a glance
from these, defiantly at ease—
compared to me
fleeing home from so cold a morn.
*
湖上風來 . . .
湖上風來波浩渺。
秋已暮;
紅稀, 香少.
水光,山色,與人親
說不盡
無窮好。
蓮子已成,荷葉老,
清露洗
蘋花汀草;
眠沙鷗鷺不回頭
似也恨
人歸早。
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The High Window 