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    A Study Guide for Li Po's "The Moon at the Fortified Pass"
    A Study Guide for Li Po's "The Moon at the Fortified Pass"
    A Study Guide for Li Po's "The Moon at the Fortified Pass"
    Ebook42 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for Li Po's "The Moon at the Fortified Pass"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Li Po's "The Moon at the Fortified Pass," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535838467
    A Study Guide for Li Po's "The Moon at the Fortified Pass"

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      A Study Guide for Li Po's "The Moon at the Fortified Pass" - Gale

      12

      The Moon at the Fortified Pass

      Li Po

      750 BC

      Introduction

      Li Po (also spelled Li Bai, Li Bo) is one of the great poets of the Chinese canon. Along with Wang Wei and Tu Fu, he is considered one of the three greatest poets of the T'ang Dynasty, the golden age of Chinese poetry. While much of Li Po's biography is shrouded in mythology and is strangely absent from the extensive census records of the Chinese empire, it is generally agreed that he was born in 701 CE, somewhere in the central Asian states outside China's western borders, and that he died in 762 CE.

      Li Po was known for drunkenness and spontaneity in his poetry and was particularly famous for his grass script poems, which were written in a single rush of inspiration, in a calligraphic style that is flowing and sometimes difficult to read. In this sense The Moon at the Fortified Pass is not typical of his work. The 1920 translation is done by Witter Bynner, and the notation indicates that it was written for music. A poem written for music or yüeh-fu, was a specific type of poem, and one that historically took on themes of war and injustice. Although Bynner renamed his volume The Jade Mountain, it is essentially a translation of Three Hundred T'ang Poems, a slim volume that was for centuries used as a textbook for Chinese schoolchildren. The original organized the poems by type of poem, ruled and unruled, ancient and modern. Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu, on whose text the translations are based, rearranged the collection by poet and organized those poets alphabetically.

      However changed, this translation gives readers a strong sense of what one of the central texts of Chinese poetic history was like, and which poets were included.

      A more modern translation of the poem is available. Titled Frontier-Mountain Moon, it is available in The Selected Poems of Li Po, translated by David Hinton, New Directions, 1996, p. 26.

      Author Biography

      Li Po was born in 701 CE and much of his biography is swathed in legend and myth, some of it of Li Po's own making. His reputation is that of a wild man, one unwilling to live by convention or rules, a wandering poet who was often drunk, and who, while drunk, spontaneously created some of the most beautiful and lasting poems in the Chinese canon.

      Although his exact birthplace is unknown, scholars generally agree that his family came from the Central Asian territories outside of what was then China. Li Po is said to

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