{"id":4440,"date":"2019-01-23T20:30:25","date_gmt":"2019-01-23T12:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4440"},"modified":"2019-01-21T08:58:18","modified_gmt":"2019-01-21T00:58:18","slug":"elia-on-ha-jins-life-of-li-bai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4440","title":{"rendered":"Elia on Ha Jin’s life of Li Bai"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"The<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Ha Jin \u54c8\u91d1 has written a biography of Li Bai \u674e\u767d, The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai, <\/em>newly published by Pantheon–and Gina Elia has reviewed it for SupChina<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At points, her review gets into the intricate issues of what different contexts do to and for our readings of specific texts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I, for one, feel that this understanding of Li Bai the man, rather than Li Bai the legend, causes the beauty of his poetry to resonate all the more. For example, Ha Jin explains that Li Bai wrote his poem \u201cPlease Drink\u201d while in the midst of a lovely moonlit night he spent with two friends drinking, joking, and shouting out improvised lines of original poetry to one another. The scene represents a rare moment of levity and delight for Li Bai in a life largely full of failure and disappointment. My favorite part consists of the last few lines of the poem, which reads, \u201cLet us buy wine and enjoy it at any cost. My dappled horse and gorgeous fur robe, let your boy take both to the shop and exchange them for good wine so we can drown our sorrow of ten thousand years.\u201d Before I read Jin\u2019s book, I read these lines as a pleasantly-worded ode to the delights of drinking. Reading it again in the context of Li Bai\u2019s personal life, it takes on a more nuanced and bittersweet air to me. Now it speaks to me as an observation of the fleeting and transient nature of moments of joy in life, which is otherwise mostly fraught with difficulties.<\/p>

But for all of Jin\u2019s valiant attempts at excavating the man from the myth under which he\u2019s buried, it is admittedly difficult to separate fact from legend when discussing someone who lived over a millennium ago, and Jin occasionally does fall under the trap of mythologizing his subject. Take the poet\u2019s ethnicity, for instance. There\u2019s plenty of evidence that suggests Li Bai may have been born in Suyab, Kyrgyzstan, and that his family relocated to Sichuan when he was a young child. After explaining this, Jin writes, \u201cThe truth is that the poet has long been uprooted from any specific place and belongs to the world,\u201d a lovely turn of phrase implying that this important part of Li Bai\u2019s family history is irrelevant to appreciating him as a poet.<\/p>

Yet in the next paragraph, Jin insists that it\u2019s fair to consider Li Bai Chinese at least in his heart, since he wrote about China as his home throughout his life. The author says, \u201cFor our purposes, it is entirely reasonable to assume that he was an overseas Chinese \u2014 a Chinese from a foreign land \u2014 if not a half Chinese.\u201d For our purposes? What purposes? The attempt here to urge readers to consider Li Bai Chinese \u2014 in essence, if not in reality \u2014 perhaps reveals a bias of the author.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Click here <\/a>for the full review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ha Jin \u54c8\u91d1 has written a biography of Li Bai \u674e\u767d, The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai, newly published by Pantheon–and Gina Elia has reviewed it for SupChina. At points, her review gets into the intricate issues of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3,814],"tags":[1184,903,508],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8srwF-19C","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4516,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4516","url_meta":{"origin":4440,"position":0},"title":"On Ha Jin on Li Bai","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"March 29, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Lauded Chinese-American novelist and poet Ha Jin \u54c8\u91d1 has written a biography of Li Bai \u674e\u767d, The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai, newly published by Pantheon. Han Zhang on \"Ha Jin\u2019s Self-Revealing Study of the Chinese Poet Li Bai.\" Because it's by an award-winning author, the biography has\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/5c50d48c36b0283b1309a055\/master\/w_727,c_limit\/Jin-Li-Bai.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4877,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4877","url_meta":{"origin":4440,"position":1},"title":"Madeleine Thien on Chinese Translation and “Poems Without an \u2018I\u2019”","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"September 28, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"\u2018\"Poems Without an \u2018I,\u2019\" Madeleine Thien on Li Bai and Du Fu in Ha Jin and David Hinton The new issue of the New York Review of Books features \"Poems Without an \u2018I,\u2019\" Madeleine Thien's review of three books, The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai [\u674e\u767d] (Pantheon, 2019)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xichuanpoetry.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/thien_2-100820.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xichuanpoetry.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/thien_2-100820.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xichuanpoetry.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/thien_2-100820.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xichuanpoetry.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/thien_2-100820.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xichuanpoetry.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/thien_2-100820.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xichuanpoetry.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/thien_2-100820.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2133,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=2133","url_meta":{"origin":4440,"position":2},"title":"A Closer Look at Yunte Huang’s SHI","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"August 1, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Gina Elia: A Closer Look at Yunte Huang's SHI Huang\u2019s book of translations, SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry, clearly identifies itself as, in part, a response to the Fenollosa\/Pound argument concerning Chinese poetry and its proper translation. However, the primary purpose of the work, as Huang states in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jacket2.org\/sites\/jacket2.org\/files\/imagecache\/wide_main_column\/shicover_0.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3516,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=3516","url_meta":{"origin":4440,"position":3},"title":"Tranter on China in Tranter","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"June 27, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Australian poet John Tranter has published an essay titled \"China: The influences of Eastern poetry and calligraphy,\" in which: A persuasive theory equates the English-language poets of the Elizabethan age (Shakespeare, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Marlowe, Raleigh, Campion, and others) with the Chinese-language poets of the T\u2019ang (or Tang) dynasty (618\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2572,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=2572","url_meta":{"origin":4440,"position":4},"title":"Translating Chinese poetry is hard","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"April 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"\u566b\u5401\u56b1\u5371\u4e4e\u9ad8\u54c9! At Language Log, Victor Mair posts (pictured here) a handwritten translation of a famous Li Bai \u674e\u767d poem, whose translator \"said he was caught doing English homework in a Chinese class by his Chinese teacher. The teacher was angry and punished the student by making him translate Sh\u01d4 d\u00e0o\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/%7Ebgzimmer\/libai.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4075,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4075","url_meta":{"origin":4440,"position":5},"title":"Chinese Poetry of the Cup?","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"May 21, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"As part of its Mingbai series (\"a daily newsletter that drops knowledge on things 'everyone in China knows, but almost nobody outside the country knows'\"), SupChina has posted a feature on \"Chinese poetry of the cup.\" First it introduces baijiu \u767d\u9152, \"the Chinese king of liquors ... made primarily with\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/supchina.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/Li-Bai-111-drinking-alone-British-Museum-812x500.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4440"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4440"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4449,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4440\/revisions\/4449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}