Preface to "Emperor Li Yu, A Life in Poems"

by Brett Rutherford

TO THE READER

After almost two hundred years of glory and accomplishments, the great Tang Dynasty of China collapsed in 907 CE. The culture of Tang lingered on in the Southern Tang kingdom, however, ruled by three generations of the Li family. In Southern Tang, the grand traditions of art, music, poetry, and painting thrived, and Buddhism flourished.

Li Yu, the last ruler of Southern Tang, did not inherit his father’s military inclinations, and when he assumed the throne at a young age, the realm was shrinking as provinces were ripped away by rival states, the most rapacious of which was the new Song dynasty. Tributes, gifts, and hostages made the tension between Song and Southern Tang more and more fraught with peril.

A poet, dreamer, and pacifist, Li Yu was totally unsuited to rule in a time during which China was being split into “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.” Isolated in his palace compound, he devoted himself to writing poetry, and enjoyed not only the favors of his Empress and concubines, but also entered into a scandalous love affair with his wife’s younger sister.

Li Yu invited poets and artists from all the war-torn states to Southern Tang, where he housed them as honored guests in their own palace of the arts. More and more Buddhist temples and monasteries dotted the landscape.

The poem cycle, Emperor Li Yu, A Life in Poems, relates the tragic fate of Li Yu, his Empress, and the “other woman,” the kind of royal soap opera that fascinates because the outcome is the end of an entire nation. Only 39 poems of Li Yu survive, and every word of them has been woven into this narrative cycle. They are regarded as among the saddest and most emotional poems written in China, and they are sad because this poet, who had everything a mortal could wish for, lost everything.

Captured by the Song armies after the siege of Nanjing, Li Yu became a state prisoner, shown off and ridiculed as a former king and would-be emperor. When his new poems offended the Song Emperor, he was ordered to drink poison.

 

Empty Is the Past

 by Brett Rutherford

     after Li Yu, Poem 38

Does some persistent bumblebee
come to my fluttering eyes
expecting dream-nectar?

How disappointed
     he must be!
I am a sour well,
    a soap-work,
    an iron forge,
    a leather tannery.

I haven’t a good word
    or thought or prayer
    for anyone.

Sorrow I cannot escape,
     except in the dreams
that make me even more
     miserable.

What wakes me up?
What forces me
    to greet another day?

There is a thread
     that pulls my eyelids open,
made from dried tears
    that stick to my face
from cheek to beard.

O to stand atop
    an autumn terrace
with someone, anyone,
     beside me!

The Parasol Trees

 

by Brett Rutherford

     after Li Yu, Poem 29

People whose names I did not
even know — how I miss them!
Seldom did I ask of one
who served me: what province,
what town, what branch
of what respected family?

Alone, with no one
whose opinion I value
to ask for, no one
to command some small
and trivial favor from,
I am wordless. This one,
who keeps a safe distance
and bows, has large ears.
He is here to spy.
That one, who goes and fetches
for me, is greedy for bribes.
A grunt is their salute.
They joke with one another
in a dialect unknown to me.

I go to the grove’s west end;
my shadow follows. It is here,
in one break of the tree-line
I might stand and paint
the way the waxing moon hangs
a pendant hook. A star
it brushes in front of, shimmers —
perhaps it is a planet, a fellow
wanderer far from his own home.

Behind me, a formal courtyard
lined with parasol trees
hems autumn in, a prisoner.
Each wutong tree
     awaits its phoenix;
none come, and green
has faded to yellow.
Each leaf is wide enough
     to hold a poem,
each, in breaking away,
is a sign of parting.

Of this, I need no reminder.
I say “Return!” It says “No more.”
Hands full of these damp
and wingless birds, I try
to untangle them. Vein, stem,
and branchlet cling, clog,
and fall. Cold wind and frost
will sort them out. Dispersed,
they fall impaled on other trees.
Not one will ever see its brother
again. The trees themselves
will hoard small clumps, in niche
of bark and bole, like a mother’s
sickly and favorite children.

No use, sad colonnade
of parasol trees. No use!
We are held to the ground
by gravity, by paving stones
that hold us, root and heart.

The court spy regards me:
a madman, muttering
words incomprehensible,
stuffing his robes
with rotting, pungent leaves.
Li Yu, the lunatic!

Assignation (A Chinese Translation)

     after a Chinese poem “P’u Sa Man” by Li Yü

The flowers were bright

     (and might have lit my way like lanterns)
but the moon was diffused in light mist.
Cool, but not too cold,
that was the best night to go to my lover.
Trembling I trod the perfumed stones,
step upon step amid the night-blooms.
I held in one hand the golden-threaded shoes,
in the other his scroll of urgent summoning.

South of the newly-painted hall,

in the appointed place I met him.
His face was turned away and upward
as though he searched the moon face
or with his hawk-fierce eye some dove
asleep on a still and leafy branchlet.

At first, I leaned against him, shivering;

my pale arms could not encompass
the sweep of his cloaked broad shoulders.
He made a sound that might have been
my name, or a sighing exhalation.
I said, “I cannot come as often now,
so tonight you must love me twice as hard.”

Down South

     After the Chinese of Li Yü (d. 978 CE)

Down South, they know what to do with springtime.

There, when my thoughts turn away

     from duty and empire, I imagine myself,

where the spring is already in progress.

Pleasure boats are in every lake now,

     the er-hu fiddles a-hum, the flute girls

exchanging shy looks with the young scholars.

The green-faced rivers are drunk with willows,

towns dust-clogged with their yellow catkins,

more flowers abloom than eye or hand can capture.

Busy are those who love this blossoming,

    busier still their sleepless nights of loving.    

Pretending to Be A Fisherman

    After the Chinese of Li Yü (d. 978 CE)

1

My bark is but a leaf,

no oar

but the will
of the errant spring breeze,

this way, that way.

A loose line of fishing string,

on its end a light hook

might serve as rope

and anchor.

The destination:

that flower-covered islet.

The prize:

 an icy cask of wine.

Since nothing here is what it is,

but what it stands for,

one or ten thousand waves,

one or ten thousand realms,

what do they matter?

I do not need the island.

I do not, at the moment, crave

the plum green savor of wine.
I have my freedom.

2

Water, the chemist says,

is incompressible.

The delicate waves,

invisible and relentless,

a unity, break up
a thousand-piled layer

of warlike snowflakes.

They never stood a chance.

Now comes the onslaught:

cloud upon cloud upon cloud

of plum and peach and cherry

bannermen from Spring’s

inevitable and drumless army

throw themselves down

upon the snowbanks.

White mists enshroud

the waiting wine cask.
I sit with fishing rod and line.

One season has fought and won,

one season has held, and died.

I am doing nothing. This boat
is in a lake that was made for me,
the lake in my own valley
between two hills on which
I have identical pavilions.

Who else

could be as happy as I am?

[rev. 2022]