essays, poems, cartoons – since 2007
“Li Po’s Restless Night: Improvisations on a Theme” is now available in e-Book and paperback formats. Ideal reading for those with restless nights in quarantine, “Li Po’s Restless Night” includes 101 original variations on a theme of Chinese poet Li Po, with an explanatory personal essay, “Florence and Li Po,” though the essay may make better daytime reading. There was a time when I was able to close my eyes and not open them again for eight hours. Then the moon rose.
In my essay put up by Berfrois this morning on variations on a theme of Li Po, a notebook of poems I’ve been working on for years, originally suggested by my reading and writing experience with my former student Florence, I make reference to a few books she gave me. Below, I’ve posted some pics of the books, which I still have in my library. Among her many experiences Florence shared with me, she told me that she and her husband had fought with the resistance in the mountains of the Philippines in World War Two.
Florence was an excellent cook. Each quarter, my classes devoted an entire period to a potluck meal to celebrate the closing of the term. Recipes learned in kitchens around the world ended up on my classroom tables for our refugee feasts.
Travel over to Berfrois to have a look at the essay on Li Po’s poem.
At the Rose City Used Book Fair yesterday, amid a bevy of well organized and decorous book nests, I bought another book of poems by the Chinese poet Li Po. According to the version scanned into Google Books, there were only 1,500 copies printed of the 1922 first edition.
My copy contains a “Note to the Orient Edition,” signed S. O., and dated Tokyo, November 3, 1935. The note reads, in part, “I have resisted the temptation to make revisions for the purpose of forestalling the charge of inaccuracy that may be raised by the Oriental reader. I firmly believe that my methods of translation described in the preface are well-suited to a work of this kind, which is primarily intended not for scholarly exactitude but for the poetic appreciation and enjoyment” (xi).
The note explains the title page, “The Works of Li Po The Chinese Poet: Done Into English Verse By Shigeyoshi Obata.” While the cover of the book reads “Translated into English Verse…” the sub-title on the title page, reading “Done into English Verse…,” suggests a purpose often at odds with scholarly or academic writing about literature. Obata wanted to produce something for reading pleasure. Yet there’s plenty here for the scholarly curious, including biographical notes and a bibliography showing where the reader will find other translations of the poems.
And what a pleasure Li Po is. I’ve been opening pages at random to the poems. Here’s one appropriate for this post, for I plan to read Li Po through our late spring and into summer, when I’ll hang my straw hat on a branch and let the afternoon breeze cool the curls of my hairy mind:
“A Summer Day
Naked I lie in the green forest of summer….
Too lazy to wave my white feathered fan.
I hang my cap on a crag,
And bare my head to the wind that comes
Blowing through the pine trees.”
The jacket flap of my copy explains that it is “…an unabridged reprint of the famous edition first published in Tokyo in 1935.” I’ve not found an image of my cover in a couple of cursory searches. It’s a hardback, no markings in the book, very good condition, the jacket cover in excellent condition all around. There is a signature in black fountain pen at the top of the map of China that lines the inside cover. The signature reads “Joseph,” but the last name I can’t make out. There are then, in the same black ink fountain pen, three vertically drawn characters in the upper right hand corner, falling between Manchuria and a unified Korea.
The Coming of the Toads 