Laolao Ting Pavilion
What place under heaven most hurts the heart?
Laolao Ting, for seeing visitors off.
The spring wind knows how bitter it is to part,
The willow twig will never again be green.
Resentment Near the Jade Stairs
Dew whitens the jade stairs.
This late, it soaks her gauze stockings.
She lowers her crystal blind to watch
the breaking, glass-clear moon of autumn.
Li T'ai-po
tr. Hamil
Sitting Alone at Mount Jingting
Vanished are the birds upon soaring high,
Save a cloud solitary, floats freely by.
Tired not of reciprocating one another's gaze,
Thou, and thou only, Mount Jingting and I.
poem by Li Po, translated by Andrew W.F. Wong
Added by Dan Costinaş
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Amusing Myself
Facing my wine, I did not see the dusk,
Falling blossoms have filled the folds of my clothes.
Drunk, I rise and approach the moon in the stream,
Birds are far off, people too are few.
Waterfall at Lu-shan
Sunlight streams on the river stones.
From high above, the river steadily plunges--
three thousand feet of sparkling water--
the Milky Way pouring down from heaven.
Li T'ai-po
tr. Hamil
Summer in the Mountains
Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-tree trickles on my bare head.
Li T'ai-po
tr. Waley
Through the YangZi Gorges
From the walls of Baidi high in the coloured dawn
To Jiangling by night-fall is three hundred miles,
Yet monkeys are still calling on both banks behind me
To my boat these ten thousand mountains away.
Autumn River Song
The moon shimmers in green water.
White herons fly through the moonlight.
The young man hears a girl gathering water-chestnuts:
into the night, singing, they paddle home together.
Li T'ai-po
tr. Hamil
Self-Abandonment
I sat srinking and did not notice the dusk,
Till falling petals filled the folds of my dress.
Drunken I rose and walked to the moonlit stream;
The birds were gone, and men also few.
Li T'ai-po
tr. Waley
On Dragon Hill
Drunk on Dragon Hill tonight,
the banished immortal, Great White,
turns among yellow flowers,
his smile wide,
as his hat sails away on the wind
and he dances away in the moonlight.
Li T'ai-po
tr. Hamil