from Autumn River Songs: 1 by Li Po

Long like autumn, all desolute silence,
Autumn River will return you to sorrow.

Unable to gauge this wanderer’s sorrow,
I climb Ta-lou Mountain to the east

and gaze west into Ch’ang-an distances.
Looking down at the river flowing past,

I call out to its waters: So how is it
you’ll remember nothing of me, and yet

you’d carry this one handful of tears
so very far—all the way to Yang-chou?


translated by David Hinton

4 thoughts on “from Autumn River Songs: 1 by Li Po

  1. “all the way to Yang-chou?” I can feel this one. (Maybe I should explain that when I was in the Army I started doing a course in Mandarin and one of the instructors used to talk us through some ancient poets to give us an idea of their different way of expressing themselves.)

    • Li Po, like many of the ancient Chinese poets, spent most of his life traveling while in exile from the court. I identify strongly with that sense of exile/separation found in so many of these poets’ lines.

      • I have Chinese in my life going back to childhood and my Chinese foster brothers as well as my mother’s collection of Chinese art but the introduction to the poetry came when I stumbled upon Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of both Chinese & Japanese poetry in a college bookstore in 1967. That’s when true affinity began.

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