Chinese poet Li Bai's poems transcend cultural divide(1)
VANCOUVER, May 17 (Xinhua) -- The poems of Li Bai (701-762) were celebrated Monday night in Vancouver when works of the famed literary master were recited in 10 languages as part of the ongoing Asian Heritage Month in the Canadian city.
Staged by the World Poetry Extravaganza, a group that works to promote appreciation of the great poets of the world, the life story of Li Bai in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the peak period for Chinese poetry, was recounted in Richmond, a neighboring satellite city to Vancouver where Chinese make up nearly 50 percent of the 193,000 population.
With about 1,000 poems saved for posterity, Li Bai's extravagant imagination and striking imagery have made for some memorable poetry as he often used metaphors to explain the unexplainable.
Jan Walls, a retired academic who holds a doctorate in Chinese literature, said he first encountered Li Bai as an undergraduate before he could read classical Chinese. He explained to audience about the poet's great love of wine and how in caricatures he is always depicted looking up, toasting the moon.
While the poet's works have been kept alive for centuries in China, they did not reach a Western audience until 1862 following a French translation. In 1901, H.A. Giles produced an English translation, while in 1915 Ezra Pound, the famed expatriate American poet, came out with a Japanese translation "Cathay."
The 70-year-old Walls said he was particularly attracted to Li Bai's works because of his sense of humor and sense of romance, calling him one of China's greatest poets along with Du Fu and Wang Wei. Li Bai, a great traveler in his time who wrote wherever he was, was "commemorating events in an unforgettable language, no matter if it is in English, Chinese or whatever language you translate it in," he said.
