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Post by Blue on May 23, 2013 14:57:00 GMT
A very nice poem with no hidden meaning, but a nice description of the scenery. One would just have to use one's imagination or refer to a picture of a majestic waterfall. Of course I shouldn't take Li Bai's poem too literally, but I wonder if it is possible to take a picture of the Milky Way juxtaposed with a waterfall . . . . . .
望廬山瀑布---李白 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
Interesting that the ninth heaven is the highest level of heaven (versus the seventh heaven we've all heard about). And of course the Chinese concept of the Milky Way is a Silver River (or more precisely, Quicksilver River also known as the Mercury River . . . . . . the Qin Emperor literally used a lot of mercury in his tomb to emulate the Milky Way!)
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Post by Blue on May 23, 2013 17:15:16 GMT
Actually, if you search google images using those Chinese characters, you will see a lot of pictures of waterfalls! So here we see the Milky Way falling down on the side of the mountain from the Seventh Heaven. I wonder how the poem would change if a rainbow is also included in the description . . . . . . .
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Post by Blue on May 23, 2013 17:46:38 GMT
Too bad I never learned how to write poetry and have a hard time interpreting its riddles. But maybe it's never too late . . . . . . Maxine Hong Kingston wrote prose for nearly all her life, but tried to experiment poetry in the previous decade. I was part of the audience listening at her attempts in poetry at UC Berkeley back in 2004:
Funny that UC Berkeley placed a Viewer Discretion Advised warning in the youtube video, but there are parts of the video in her speech that could make the warning somewhat understandable.
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Post by edcat7 on May 23, 2013 23:05:49 GMT
Before I started my musical journey I had a strong urge to learn all of the poems from the 300 Tang Dynasty poems. I learnt about 6, averaging at one a week. It does come in handy impressing people, especially since they think I'm a banana.
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Post by Blue on May 24, 2013 16:50:44 GMT
One would notice of course that Li Bai's poems are often carved on dizis and xiaos.
Many dizis have this:
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Post by davidmdahl on May 24, 2013 20:40:48 GMT
Before I started my musical journey I had a strong urge to learn all of the poems from the 300 Tang Dynasty poems. I learnt about 6, averaging at one a week. It does come in handy impressing people, especially since they think I'm a banana. I am sure that there are personal benefits to memorizing poetry that go beyond impressing idiots. Why would you want to impress anyone who mistook you for a tropical fruit? Actually, I like bananas, and frequently have them in my breakfast oatmeal. I pretty much never read Chinese poetry while I am eating my oatmeal and banana, although that might be a better way to start the day than reading about the world's troubles in the daily newspaper. It is probably a good thing to have poetry in your head when you approach playing music. Besides the cultural context, you might be reproducing the sorts of things in the head of the composer. You might even consider a tune to be a poem of sound. Keep up the good work. Best wishes, David
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Post by Blue on May 25, 2013 10:36:56 GMT
Since we are now on the topic of bananas . . . . . .
My father still has the memory of arriving the northern Taiwanese harbor of Keelung as a refugee from the Chinese Civil War. (Actually, he was born in ones of the caves in Chungking (Chongqing) when the Japanese were conducting a bombing raid over that city in World War II). When the boat docked at Keelung, there were vendors selling bananas and lifting them on a poll to the boat for the refugees to purchase. That's the first time my father ate a banana and he bas been hooked on it ever since.
Occasionally there is a bumper crop of bananas in Taiwan, driving the price heavily down; or maybe neighbors with a farm send more bananas to my parents as a gift than they can consume. So what do you do? You make loads of banana bread with walnuts, pecans, and chocolate chips. So yes: Taiwan is a banana republic simply because it produces a lot of bananas (not implying or invoking the usual definition of a banana republic). Curiously there is not a single Banana Republic store in Taiwan; the fastest one to travel by airplane would probably the ones in Tokyo! (Some people in this forum might roll their eyes if I tell them that I shopped at Gap and Banana Republic when I recently was in London as well as the Banana Republic in Milan simply because I haven't returned to the US for eight years.)
Meanwhile I'm gorging myself my litchis, spending up to US$20 per week for 5.4 kilos or 12 pounds of that fruit (sharing some of it with co-workers and relatives of course). Now in Costco Taiwan, there are very cheap California blueberries that I'm also splurging on; in a couple of weeks there will be Pacific Northwest blueberries and Rainier cherries! The in August when I finally get to visit Berkeley again, I will go to farmer's market and buy organic grapes whose skin easily dissolves in your mouth so that you don't need to separate the skin from the flesh of the grape.
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Post by ziman on May 25, 2013 18:22:58 GMT
Sometimes, poetry can have a more direct connection to our music too-- many Chinese pieces are associated with poems. It always feels nice knowing the poem while playing the music, then you can feel what the piece is trying to express.
Some pieces have particularly intriguing stories. One that I've always found interesting is the story of Guan Shan Yue / Moon over the Mountain Pass (关山月). The melody of that song was said to have been originally a military song (横吹曲), a type of piece typically used in ancient China to motivate troops. Li Bai later wrote the poem Guan Shan Yue to reflect on the terrible human cost of war, but at the time, his poem wasn't set to the melody we know today.
I don't know who was eventually responsible for uniting the poem and melody, but anyhow, I think it was a stroke of genius. For those who know the poem, the text of Li Bai's poem becomes an ironic, bitter rebuke to the "heroic military march" that is the melody. So subtle, yet so brilliant.
I have another rather funny experience regarding Guan Shan Yue-- one time, when I was playing this song during a performance, a middle-aged American gentleman kept exclaiming "oh, how gentle! How elegant!" ...that made me feel like telling him, ahem, good sir, maybe you should have listened a little more carefully when I was explaining what the song was about a few minutes ago.
Or perhaps he should have taken note of the day on which I chose to perform that piece--
It was Veterans Day.
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Post by Blue on May 26, 2013 2:55:12 GMT
ziman, curiously Memorial Day (which isn't Veteran's Day, though) happens to be around the corner. 關 山 月 明月出天山,蒼茫雲海間。 長風幾萬里,吹度玉門關。 漢下白登道,胡窺青海灣。 由來征戰地,不見有人還。 戍客望邊色,思歸多苦顏。 高樓當此夜,歎息未應閒。 One translation: I don't agree with "China marches its men" as the translation for "漢下白登道." A more accurate translation would be "The Han march its men." Anyway, there are more healthy ways of protesting one's government actions in another territory rather than to do the horrible thing that recently happened in London. (And to think that I probably passed by that region back in April).
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Post by Blue on May 26, 2013 2:56:13 GMT
Li Bai poems that have been affecting me a lot lately include:
You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain; I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care. As the peach-blossom flows down stream and is gone into the unknown, I have a world apart that is not among men.
問余何事(意)棲碧山 笑而不答心自閒 桃花流水杳然去 別有天地非人間
All the birds have flown up and gone; A lonely cloud floats leisurely by. We never tire of looking at each other - Only the mountain and I.
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jock
Intermediate
Posts: 44
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Post by jock on Jul 16, 2014 7:32:36 GMT
The scenery which Libai described is in Jiujiang city, Jiangxi province. I have been there once, and I have the same feeling as the poet. It is like a beautiful picture.
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