A Love Letter for Li Zi’an 情書寄李子安¹

Chewing ice and eating bark, wishes unfulfilled,²

Jin River and Hu Pass in my dreams,³

I want to crack this Qin mirror in half. Sorrow is a fallen magpie.⁴

Let Shun play his zither. I grieve at the flight of geese.⁵

By the well paulownia leaves sound off  in autumn rain.

Under the window a silver lantern, dark from the morning wind.

Letters sent out into the void. Where would I go to ask?

I hold a fishing rod till the end of day, but this whole green river is empty.⁶

   

____

飲冰食檗志無功        晉水壺關在夢中

秦鏡欲分愁墮鵲        舜琴將弄怨飛鴻

井邊桐葉鳴秋雨        窗下銀燈暗曉風

書信茫茫何處問        持竿盡日碧江空

____

¹ Zi’an 子安 was the style name of Li Yi, whose concubine Yu was.

² Bai Juyi also has a line about chewing ice and eating bark, which became a common descriptor for faithful widows.↩︎

³ These places are in Shanxi.↩︎

⁴ The Classic of Gods and Oddities 神異經, attributed to Dongfang Shuo 東方朔 (206 BCE–8 CE), tells of a husband and wife who, when parting, split a mirror, each keeping half as a memento and symbol of fidelity; when the wife had an affair, her mirror turned into a magpie and flew to the husband to alert him of the betrayal. For this reason mirrors were often decorated with magpies engraved on their backs.↩︎

⁵ Emperor Shun 帝舜 was a legendary ruler of ancient China, traditionally viewed as living between 2294–2184 BCE. In “Eighteen Poems Presented to My Talented Brother on Entering the Army” 四言贈兄秀才入軍詩十八首, Xi Kang 嵇康 (c. 223–c. 262) has a couplet about his “eyes sending off returning geese,/hands strumming five [zither] strings” (目送歸鴻 手揮五絃).↩︎

⁶ In medieval China the belief was that fish could bring letters.↩︎