四首诗

The imperial examination system in which Bai Juyi excelled selected qualified candidates for civil service positions through anonymized standardized tests. It encouraged scholarship in the empire, while both lending legitimacy to and serving as a check on the hereditary aristocracy. As poetry constituted a large portion of the exam, a phenomenon akin to a “poetry-writing arms race” was triggered in Tang society (618–907). The four poems featured here are written in a formal style called regulated verse, but they were composed for a coterie of intellectuals that were accustomed to such language. In regulated verse, not only do lines rhyme, the tones of the characters do too as well as alternate in a melodic manner. Line length and the number of lines are also defined so that each poem can be divided internally into couplets featuring grammatical and thematic parallels.

While not true of all Tang Dynasty poets, Bai Juyi is alleged to have written with the common person in mind and was even known to rewrite passages deemed overly obscure. In translating these poems, I rendered them in plain English to reflect that intent. As a reader, Bai's sentimental and sometimes wistful voice, as well as his bittersweet relationship with the people in his life, remind me of a line from the movie Annie Hall: “The food at this place is really terrible [. . .] Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” I borrowed a New York sensibility to bring these thousand-plus-year-old poems to a contemporary audience, and to recreate hints of the lyrical, measured language and parallelism woven so deftly by Bai Juyi into the original works.