The River Merchant's Wife

"While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa."

The River Merchant's wife is a Chinese poem written by an 8th century Poet, Li Bai, and it was translated into English a century later by Ezra Pound, an 18th century English poet. Human emotions , such as the human experience of sorrow at separation, and the human experience of love can transcend time and Ezra Pound demonstrated that poetic image does not lose anything in translation between languages nor was it bound by time, but poetry can be effectively communicated through time and across cultures, accruing meaning in the process.

However, Pound's work has significance not only for its
cross- cultural innovations, but for the "cross-chronological"
breakthrough notion that the human response to the world links us all, so that an Englishman in the twentieth century can share and learn from the human experience of an eighth century Chinese river-merchant's wife.