Li Po (May 19, 701 – November 30, 762), a Chinese poet, is considered one of the greatest poets of the Tang dynasty, along with Tu Fu and Bai Juyi, and of all Chinese literature.
WE FIGHTED (FOR) SOUTH OF THE WALLS…
Last year we fought a war for the sources of the Mani Streams,
This year we fought a war for the bed of the Garlic Stream,
We have washed our swords in the waves of Antiochus,
We have grazed our saddle horses in the snows of the Pamirs,
Our expeditions cover thousands of miles
Until the men of the Three Armies are left without heels and grow old,
But the Huns see killing as plowing their fields,
Their yellow groves are full of nothing but white bones!
The House of Ch'in built the Wall to keep them out,
The House of Innkeepers must keep the lanterns burning,
The lights are on and they never go out
Because these expeditions never end:
On the front line, hand in hand, they will die anyway,
The horses will fall, their pain a cry to Heaven,
Crows and hawks take the undergarments of their riders
And they fly to the dead trees with the pieces in their beaks...
Where captains and men dye the grass red
Our general has no plan in his head:
Isn't it true that you knew that war is an ominous tool?
That has never been used except by fools?
NOTE:
By Arthur Cooper
'We fought (for) the South of the Walls, we died (for) the North (Land) of the Fortifications' is the beginning of a Han dynasty ballad, translated by Arthur Waley, 'Fighting the South of the Ramparts', in his collection Chinese Poems (1946). Many other poems in later periods have borne the same title. The melody, probably lost since the time of Li Po, was one of the 'Eleven Melodies of Songs for Flute and Harp', listed by the Han Academy of Music; and the first verses quoted are typical of dance songs where the accompanying words have no precise meaning... The verse was so well-known that an ancient scholarly work gave it a mystical meaning: City imperial (same word as for mur) was at the same intermediate point between heaven, symbolized by the South before which the throne falls, and Earth, symbolized by the North; while the Emperor has the divine mandate to mediate between them!
The 'Stream' and 'Stream' in the first two lines are pretty free (the Man River is in the far northwest and the Gudhra River is the Pamir River), but it seems that Li Po intends to make the names sound trivial and absurd. 'The Waves of Antiochus' means, at least in the Han period where the poem is conventionally set, the Mediterranean itself. However, Li Po may have been suggested to him from somewhere much earlier, like 'Timbuktu' and the name of another place similarly transcribed in Chinese, in the Far West of his native land. Pamir in the translation is carelessly used for the T'ien Shan, the Heavenly Mountains, which divide China from Turkestan.
The Huns, Chinese Hsiung-nu, were a warlike nomadic people of Central Asia, similar in lifestyle though not exactly the same as the Hunnic tribes who had invaded Europe in the 5th century. The wall is, of course, the Great Wall, about 1.500 miles long (or twice that, with its bends and branches), built largely during the Ch'in dynasty, 3rd century BC, with forced labor, including political prisoners. The lanterns were a sign of a state of war: their failure to light at the appointed time indicated that the post had fallen into enemy hands.
The neighing horses and the cawing of crows are details of the old ballad, but Li Po adds to them an even greater Goya-like horror in his compact visual language.
The reader may find it interesting to compare this anti-war poem with that of Tu Fu, The Ballad of the Army Chariots, as well as another poem by Li Po himself, The Ballad of Yü-CHang. While both of Po's poems are effective in vividly depicting the atrocities of war, neither can be described as 'political poetry', just as neither suggests any positive politics. This may here be a vague defence of the 'Maginot Line' policy; but for all its power of language it is quite incoherent, compared with Tu Fu's anti-war poems, which deal with concrete scandals or policy errors about which something can and should be done. However, both poets have in common one purely political point: their disapproval of the expansionist policies that the dynasty had begun to pursue, which had led, in 751, to a devastating defeat of the Chinese armies by the Persians and Arabs; and, indirectly, to the weakening of the central civil power.
'The Three Armies' in this poem and in the poem The Ballad of the Chariots… is an old expression for mass forces: a poem also used by Mao Tse-tung. The last couplet of lines is taken from Lao Tzu's book, or Tao Te Ching, the oldest Taoist classic.
/Taken from Li Po and Tu Fu, “Poems”, (Selected and translated by Arthur Cooper), Penguin Books Ltd, 2013
/Translation: Gazeta Express
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