Asian Cha

𝐍𝐄𝐖 @asian.cha 𝐄𝐒𝐒𝐀𝐘 | Will Buckingham reviews Timothy Billings’s 𝑇𝑤𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑦-𝑁𝑖𝑛𝑒 𝐺𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑏𝑦𝑒𝑠: 𝐴𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑡𝑜 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝑃𝑜𝑒𝑡𝑟𝑦 (Fordham University Press, 2025), which reveals the challenges and pleasures of translating Chinese poetry through different versions of Li Bai’s farewell poem.

/ Somewhere beyond the city walls, two travellers are saying their farewells. They are friends, and once they have said goodbye, they do not know if they will see each other again. This is long before Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat. It’s the Tang dynasty, after all, and distance means something in a way it doesn’t these days. Once the travellers have said goodbye and headed over the horizon, that may be that.

Far off, beyond this scene of parting, there are mountains. They are bluish or greenish, or perhaps of some darker hue. It is surprisingly hard to say. There is a river, too. The river is white, or bright, or somewhat frothy, or else it glimmers. There is something about the sunset as well (perhaps one of the travellers is heading off into it), about tumbleweed, about drifting clouds. And there is a certain amount of waving, for this is, of course, a farewell.

The travellers, it seems, are on horseback. Or else they are standing beside some horses. Or beside a single horse. Or, at the very least, horses are somehow involved in the story. Perhaps the horses, however many there may be, have nothing to do with the travellers at all, and have simply wandered into the frame of the poem in search of fresh grass to graze on. At any rate, the last word comes straight from the horse’s mouth: with a final whinny, Li Bai’s celebrated poem “Seeing Off a Friend” draws to a close. /

𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗: https://chajournal.com/2026/10/14/li-bai-farewell/
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