The Moon Pool Read online

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  The Moon Pool

  by Alexander Goldstein

  Copyright 2016 Alexander Goldstein

  All rights reserved

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with other persons, please refer them to the link you have used for picking it up. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. Thank you for respecting the creative work of this author.

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  Contents

  Author's Note

  The Tang-period Poet Li Bai's Legacy

  The Moon Pool Selected Verses:

  Stillness of Water

  The Worldly Wholeness

  Tea Drinking Impact

  My Rose Garden

  Its Majesty Time

  My Last Memory

  The Core of Serenity

  My Old Boat

  A Poet's Way

  The Unnamed Verse

  Still Perplexed

  No Kidding

  Heap Over

  As Something Else

  At the Crime Scene

  Contemplating the Milky Way

  A Yokel

  Never-Sleeping Buddha

  Uninhibited

  No Bitter Remorse

  Unanswered Questions

  To Freedom!

  Platonic Love

  An Agreement

  This

  Apart

  The Strata

  The Pivot

  Retirement

  Serenity

  Refinement

  Still in Retreat

  On the Werewolf Mountain

  The World's Disorder

  WWW or the Way to Win the World

  Cultivation of Life

  Equality

  A Weekly Cycle

  Relativity

  On High

  Daybreak of Parting

  A Fair Lady of My Dreams

  Two Banks of One Stream

  On the Eve of Mid-Autumn Feast

  Reminiscences

  The Charm of Early Autumn

  I'd Want

  A Song of Release

  The Lamp

  At Home

  My Mind

  In the Middle

  Wild Nature

  Above the World

  The Moon's Nature

  The Crane Song

  Happiness

  Man's True Nature

  The Lunar Hub

  The Moonlit Mind

  Rock-Steady in the End

  About the Author

  Endnote

  ". . .This or that way but we always

  Learn from them, the poets of old--

  They are infinitely precious for us;

  And young men are absolutely right

  Of being interested in their wisdom,

  Which is neither dry nor out-of-date." --Alex Stone

  Author's Note

  These collected poems have been inspired by the works that the Tang-period poet Li Bai (701-762 CE) left after him as a great cultural heritage, and of whom I will have more to say on the pages below. It was with him that this book began; without him, none of what follows after this essay would have been written.

  Fortunately or not, but I am not alone in this regard, as there are so many famously known creative figures in the West who have also been inspired by the poetic works of Li Bai who lived and created on the other side of the world around twelve hundred years ago, but whose influence in some inexplicable way continued to grow in China and abroad.

  The Tang-period Poet Li Bai's Legacy

  (a short essay in place of preface)

  唐李太白之遗物

  Li Bai is so influential in the West partly due to Ezra Pound's versions of some of his poems in the collection entitled "Cathay," the name by which China was known to medieval Europe (Pound transliterated his name according to "Rihaku" in Japanese, which is "Li Bai" in Chinese). Li Bai's life in the flourishing period of the so-called 'Golden Age' in China's history and his interactions with nature and friendship, his love of wine and his acute observations of the old society enriched his best poems. Some of them, like "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter," as Ezra Pound entitled it from a word-for-word translation largely based on the work of Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), which recorded the hardships and emotions of common people, were the striking examples of the liberal but poetically influential adaptations of Japanese versions of Li Bai's poetry expressed through the talent of American poet in the 20th century.

  There is another musical setting of Li Bai's verse by composer Harry Partch, whose Seventeen Lyrics by Li Bai for intoning voice and adapted viola (an instrument of Partch's invention) are based on the texts in "The Works of Li Bai" translated by Shigeyoshi Obata. In Brazil, the songwriter Beto Furquim included a musical setting of the poem named "A Quiet Night Thoughts" (see my retranslation below) in his album "Muito Prazer."

  In 2013, Gareth Bonello (aka the Gentle Good, which is one of the Buddha Gautama's name) released a Welsh-Chinese folk album "The Immortal Bard," whose lyrics were inspired by and based on Li Bai's biography. The album was partly recorded in Chengdu, Sichuan, with local musicians.

  Australian composer Stephen Whittington's second string quartet work composed "From a Thatched Hut" is based on Li Bai's poetry (a detailed study of it, including history and analysis, has been made by the composer himself).

  The ideas underlying Li Bai's poetry has a profound impact in shaping American Imagist and Modernist poetry throughout the 20th century. Also, Gustav Mahler integrated four of Li Bai's works into his symphonic song cycle "Das Lied von der Erde." These were derived from a free German translation by Hans Bethge published in Anthology named "Die chinesische Flöte" (Chinese Flute). Hans Bethge based his version on the pioneering translation into French by Saint-Denys.

  It would be enough to name Derek Walcott, Charles Bukowski, Charles Wright, James Wright, Hermann Hesse, John Steinbeck, Simon Elegant, Guy Gavriel Kay, MacDonald Harris, Philip Jose Farmer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Annie Dillard and many other authors whose works this or that way refer to the Chinese poet, his irrepressible lifestyle and transcendent creativity. As I know, a number of poetic works of Mao Ze-dong were written under the living influence of Li Bai's poetry; even a crater on the planet Mercury has been named after him.

  In China, some four centuries later after Li Bai's death, just regarding his poem "Drinking Alone under the Moon," for example, the Song-period poet Yang Wan Li wrote his long work alluding to this title (as well as to two other Li Bai's poems translated below) implemented in the same 'gu-feng' or old-style of versification.

  It sounds obvious but, again, we learn more about the world literature by studying the evolution of poetry through the centuries; as a result, we find out more of the world's history, evoke our interest and understanding of the ancient writers and of humanity in general.

  The following three poems of Li Bai translated and represented herein as the preface to my collection of poems are unfolded around the common subject of the Chinese literature -- the moon and its imagery. Together with the reader, we are going to unveil some unnoticed (if not to say 'misunderstood' or even 'wrong interpreted') moments of the poet's legendary life.

  Poetry analysis and its translation from the language like archaic Chinese, which is the foreign language for the contemporary Chinese as well, i
s not scientifically exact, it is somewhat subjective to how it affects the translator's academic knowledge and daily experience. Yet, I find it very difficult to put a lot of credit on those representatives of the Old School (most of them are the famously known scholars of the academic elite) who do not try to dig deeper about the poets of antiquity, and to reveal their motivations and find out those who affected them.

  But before offering my translation and give a conceptual explanation of the presented poems, it is necessary to make a fairly brief digression in order to brush through some milestones in the lifespan of one of the most well-known and at the same time semi-mythical personage in the cultural history of China.

  Li Bai (701-762 CE), also known as Li Tai Bai (his courtesy name translated as "Grand White," literally Venus) or Qinglian Jushi (the literary pseudonym which means "a resident of the Blue Lotus Town," as long as his growing years he spent in the place called 'Qinglian') or his many nicknames, such as Immortal Poet, Poet of the Transcendental, Wine Immortal, Poet-Knight-Errant, Poet-Hero, or simply Li Bai (he generally referred to himself as 'Bai' meaning 'white' or 'clear'). He was born somewhere in present-day Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, or, probably, in Tiaozhi, a state centred near the modern Ghazni, Afghanistan. These areas extended along the ancient Silk Road and the Li family were likely merchants there; and, according to some researchers, their trading was quite prosperous.

  Legends say that while Li Bai's mother was pregnant with him, she had a dream of a great white star falling from the sky. This seems to have contributed to the idea of his being as a banished immortal (one of his nicknames) who arrived in the world for a certain mission. The fact that the Grand White Star is synonymous with Venus helps to explain his courtesy name of Tai Bai.

  When the boy was five years old or so, the family under the lead of his father, Li Ke, moved to Jiangyou, the place near modern Chengdu in Sichuan province, the cradle of the Daoist sect of Heavenly Masters (tian-shi dao) with the notable Daoist centre in the Maoshan