The crow cawing at night by Li Po

The crow cawing at night
Li Po
Translated by Shih Shun Liu

By the city wall at dusk a crow had alighted;
It cawed again, again, as if it had flown home.
At her loom, a Ch’in-ch’uan girl was weaving;
Through her gauze window she could not help but hear
The bird, which sounded like someone talking.
She stopped in her shuttle, thinking of her absent lover;
Alone in her chamber, her tears fell like rain in torrents.

SELECTED BY RAMóN C. SUNICO

Li Po (also Li Bai) is one of the great classical poets of China. Written during the T’ang Dynasty, his poems are still studied and memorized by school children today.

This particular poem can be found in different English translations online. It has the qualities that I aspire to in my own writing: the use of concrete imagery, rather than rhetorical language, to trigger emotion in the reader; the application of silence and indirection, of softspokenness and restraint to the set the stage for the sudden explosion of emotion to end a poem. I also like it that the poem is a multi-sensory experience: the stark sight of a crow at dusk, the feel of gauze and loom and rain, the sound of birdcall, of housework, of weeping.

This poem deals with a favorite theme in Chinese poetry: separation, whether of lovers or family members or old friends, whether due to war or business or the simple desire to travel alone. In this particular case, the focus is on a woman who misses her lover. She is never named nor is her appearance described in any detail. We know only of her view of the wall, her general location, and that her room has a loom. The poem echoes with her loneliness, punctuated by the animal caw of a crow. At first glance, the woman seems to be busy: she occupies herself by weaving at her loom. But even she is set apart from the reader by a gauze window. We are told she is there, but we do not really see her. In other translations of the poem, we hear a disembodied voice, but again, we do not see her speaking (she has no-one to speak to). I chose this particular translation because the source of the heard but unseen voice is made both ore and less ambiguous, making it is possible to imagine her mistaking the voice of the crow for the voice of her absent lover. And it is this simple but oh-so-recognizable moment of mistaking the voice that is there for the voice that we miss that triggers the final sound of the poem: the sound of tears that overflows this finely crafted vessel of a poem.

ABOUT RAMóN C. SUNICO

Ramón C. Sunico is a teacher, editor, book designer and bilingual writer with two books of poetry and three books for children, the first of which Two Friends, One World, won the first ever Palanca Award first prize for Story for Children. Its Tagalog version also won. Before he returned to teaching, he managed Cacho Publishing House for over 2 decades. He pioneered in the production of bilingual, parallel-text picture books, now a standard in the industry. He wrote, designed, printed and bound his first book of poetry: The Secret of Graphite: Poems in 2 Tongues while doing his Praktikum in publishing in Augsburg. His works (poems, stories, essays, translations) have been published in anthologies, textbooks, periodicals, and websites here and abroad. He has won prizes for his poetry and stories for children from the Philippines Free Press and the Palancas, where he frequently serves as judge. The books he has designed and managed have been recognized with various awards. He has taught and is teaching for multiple departments at Ateneo de Manila University (Literature, Philosophy, Journalism and the Humanities). He is an Alagad ni Balagtas and served as a UP national fellow for Poetry. He was among the first to design books using the computer and moderated the first listserv, rp-books, on Philippine books and culture. After the fall of Marcos in 1986, as designer and editor, he helped Karina Bolasco conceptualize the Contemporary Philippine Poetry and Contemporary Philippine Prose series. More recently, he conceptualized and helped found the National Children’s Book Awards.