About this book

Li Bai, born in China in 701 during the Tang dynasty, is one of the most important poets in Chinese history. According to the Wade-Giles transliteration, we called him Li Po. In pinyin, his name is Lǐ Bái. He is also known as Li Bo. His courtesy name is Taibai (太白), which means “Great White” and refers to the planet Venus; his art name is Qinglian Jushi (青蓮居士), which means “Householder of Azure Lotus.” His nickname is Zhé Xiānrén (谪仙人), which means “Banished Immortal.” Ezra Pound called him Rihaku, a romanization of the Japanese pronunciation of his name, 李白 in Kanji, or りはく in Hiragana.

Li Bai was the ninth grandson of Emperor Xingsheng (Li Hao, King Zhao of Liangwu), and was the same clan as the emperors of Li and Tang Dynasties. He was cheerful and generous, loved to drink and write poems, and liked to make friends. He died in 762.

About a thousand of his poems have survived; many more have been lost. Here we have just 100 of them.

One story told about him is that in a boat on the Yangtze River he drowned after trying to embrace the reflection of the moon.

I have chosen the poems of Li Bai because of my admiration for a loose translation of 長干行 (“Song of Chánggān”) by Li Bai. This is “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” by Ezra Pound, which Pound included in his book Cathay, published in 1915.

The cover features a portrait of Li Bai.

How this book is organized

The book has three pages for each poem and its translations. Language codes label the links in the header. Zh is the language code for Chinese.

  1. En: My poem (in English)
  2. Zh+literal: The original Chinese poem, with a literal translation on its right
  3. En+Zh: My poem, with the original Chinese poem on its right

Links and shortcuts

In any page, you can click on or touch links to jump around in this book.

You may find the following keyboard equivalents to be convenient. Here I use the symbol ⌥ for the option key on Mac/OS or the alt key on Windows, ⇧ for the shift key, and ⏎ for the return (enter) key. Arrow keys are ◄ (left), ► (right), ▲ (up), and ▼ (down).

Keyboard shortcuts for navigating this book
Context Keys Jump to / Behavior
cover ⌥ ◄ Books by Tom Sharp
⌥ ▲ About Tom Sharp
⌥ ► about this book (this page)
⌥ ▼ contents
⇧ ⌥ ▼ contents
contents ⇧ ⌥ ▲ cover
⌥ ▼ select the next item in the contents
⌥ ▲ select the previous item in the contents
⌥ ► open the selected page
⌥ ⏎ open the selected page
poem ⇧ ⌥ ▲ contents
⌥ ◄ contents
⌥ ▲ open the previous page
⌥ ► open the original + literal translation, translation + original, or translation in rotation
⌥ ▼ open the next page

The poet

Tom Sharp, self portrait

Tom Sharp is a Native American of Aleut heritage, a member of Seldovia Village Tribe. He is the author of numerous books, including Spectacles: A Sampler of Poems and Prose, Taurean Horn Press (ISBN 0-931552-10-9), a novel, Hans and the Clock (ISBN 979-8580172484), The book of science, SciFi (ISBN 979-8694935210), Things People Do (ISBN 979-8687425568), The book of beliefs (ISBN 979-8683553593), The I Ching (ISBN 979-8573510620), Images (ISBN 979-8577560515), Aleut Artifacts (ISBN 979-8575608998), Aleut Words (ISBN 979-8582103394), and First Nations (ISBN 979-8682924769).

You may email tom/AT/liztomsharp/DOT/-c-o-m-/ to share comments on this work.

Tom Sharp’s initials