Li Bai, having retired to Mount Lu, admires a waterfall at Incense Burner Peak. This is another of his most famous poems.
望廬山瀑布
日照香爐生紫煙，
遙看瀑布掛前川。
飛流直下三千尺，
疑是銀河落九天。
Gazing At A Waterfall On Mount Lu
Sunlight illuminates Incense Burner Peak raising purple smoke
From afar I see a waterfall suspended before the river
Flying, flowing, plunging down three thousand feet
Could it be the river of stars falling from highest heaven?
Translation notes
This poem is probably one of the most frequently translated Chinese poems. It was even painted by the great Japanese artist Hokusai, in his series A True Mirror of the Imagery of Chinese and Japanese Poets. However, the scene was already recognisable to the Japanese literati in the early sixteenth century, when it was pained by Soami. And this isn’t the first poem in the collection where we visit Mount Lu.
It’s such a famous poem, that perhaps even the translation notes are well known. On the first line, we have sheng ziyan 生紫煙 which literally means ‘to cause purple smoke to be born/exist’. Burton Watson, one of the best and most famous translators of Chinese poetry into English, has ‘kindles violet smoke’ here. I prefer ‘raising’ because generally after something is born, it rises or is raised.
In the second line gua 掛 can mean to hang, to suspend, or to droop down. I like suspend because it better conveys the idea that this wall of water can appear as if it is static, which is then further explored in the following line.
I translated the third line quite literally. I played with the idea of ‘flying with the current’ but ultimately I think the stream of words I ended up with does enough to convey the power of what Li Bai is trying to convey. I’ve perhaps been a little creative in my translation of zhi xia as ‘plunging’, when it literally means ‘straight down’. However, when read in English ‘straight down’ seems to indicate a direction absent of the movement conveyed by the other characters in the line.
We already know Li Bai has a vivid imagination. The question is, what is he imagining in the final line? Yinhe 銀河 in Modern Chinese means the Milky Way, but is literally comprised of two characters that translate to ‘silver river’. Li Bai would not have known the concept of the Milky Way, but would have recognised the river of stars appearing to fall in the dark night sky that we now call the Milky Way. In his mind, they fall from a place that he calls ninth heaven (jiutian 九天). This is the outer edge of heaven, reserved for the grandest spirits and deities. It is also the furthest point in the deep sky that can possibly be imagined. I went with ‘highest heaven’ here to give a sense of the metaphysical and an idea of the edge of distance. Meanwhile, Watson preferred ‘the ninth height of heaven’.