Sunday, July 24, 2011

Sunday Poem: Li Po's "In the Mountains on a Summer Day"



I've loved Li Po (and his contemporary Tu Fu) ever since I discovered them in my senior year of high school.  The textbook for the outstanding world literature course we were taught in that year introduced us to both poets.


Today's poem from the Academy of American Poets' poem-a-day mailing list is Li Po's "In the Mountains on a Summer Day" (from More Translations from the Chinese, trans. Arthur Whaley [NY: Knopf, 1919]):  

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-trees trickles on my bare head.

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