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Translated from the Chinese by Liang Yujing and Julian Farmer
Clear, the autumn wind,
autumn moon, bright.
Fallen leaves gather and scatter;
jackdaws roost and then are startled.
When shall we meet and stay close?
Love is hard, tonight, this moment.
Entering the gate of yearning,
I came to know its bitterness.
Yearning, if long, is a long memory—
even when short, it’s still without end.
This entanglement in the heart—
if we’d known that beforehand,
we might as well have never met.
Li Bai (701-762) was a major poet of the Tang Dynasty.
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