Theatrical release poster for the 2017 film Legend of the Demon Cat, in which the poet Bai Juyi is one of the main characters
For Joseph and Samuel Li Dreyer
“Why should my thoughts turn to my native land?
For in this place one could well end one’s age,”
the exiled poet Bai Juyi observes
in Arthur Waley’s English version—
it's More Translations from the Chinese,† my
copy bought in 1919 by A. Crawford Craig,
whose soaring signature the fly leaf bears
(he's no ancestral relative to me,
but of my Shanghai grandsons’ distant kin).
My compatriot the poet Frank Prince,
who fought in the great war my father fought,
cherished Waley’s work, imitating it.‡
“Now and then I make a new poem / When
the poem is made, it is slight,” Po-Chü-i
(Waley spells Bai Juyi’s name thus, old-style) sighs,
“flavorless / A thing of derision
to almost every one.” Rendering
Bai’s poems with varied rhymes, Prince sets
“free will within predestination,” per Graves,
Robert, a writer to whom I'm long-linked.§
“To no one else would I dare speak my heart
. . . my wild words are addressed to my nephews
and nieces,” Bai Juyi says (somewhere above).
To my Shanghai grandkids, ditto, from America with love.
† The citations of Bai Juyi here are respectively from “The Beginnings of Summer” (815 CE); “Illness and Idleness” (812 CE); and “A Mad Poem Addressed to My Nephews and Nieces" (835 CE), in Arthur Waley, More Translations from the Chinese (New York: Knopf, 1919).
‡ F. T. Prince, “The Yuan Chên Variations,” in Later On (London: Anvil Press, 1983).
§ Robert Graves writes in “Observations on Poetry 1922–1925” in The Common Asphodel (1953) that rhyme “must come unexpectedly and yet inevitably, like presents at Christmas, and convey the comfortable sense of free will within predestination.” He notes in his memoir Goodbye to All That (1929) that the poet Swinburne “when a very young man, had gone to Walter Savage Landor, then a very old man, and been given the poet’s blessing he asked for; and Landor when a child had been patted on the head by Dr Samuel Johnson; and Johnson when a child had been taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne for scrofula, the King’s evil; and Queen Anne when a child . . . ,” . Since my dear friend Rab Shiell was a disciple and guest of Graves’ on Majorca, I consider myself to be a member of in this distinguished succession.