[Dichtung]

Li Po
The Road to Shu's a Hard Road
The road to Shu's a hard road.
Ow! Aaaii, be damned!
Talk high? Say murderous!
The Shu road's hard.
Try climbing sky!

They say the Lords Ts'an Ts'ung and Yu Fu
founded a kingdom here; but it took
forty-eight thousand years to build the way
through
to get here from there, from settlement to
settlement,
up and over the border passes to get a thing
"built,"
anything in a place like here.

And west of here, there's the Great White
Mountain...
there the road's for birds only
toward the peaks of Omei.
The mythic five, the great muscled warriors,
died in sudden landslides
building the stairs of stone and the wooden ladders
that hooked it all together.

At the very top, six dragons guard the sun;
down in the gorges, back-swimming waves
seem to try to stall the river's getting on.
Yellow cranes can't fly across;
gibbons and monkeys, aspiring to rise,
sulk at their valley-mired fates.

Green Mud Mountain? It coils and winds.
Getting through the builders at the glacier's
base: nine turns to every hundred steps!
Touch the constellation "The Triad", pass by the
Well Stars, too,
gazing in awe, and clutching your chest,
even sitting down you'll be gasping for breath.

When will the traveler, heading west, turn back?
Those cliffs are just too dangerous to climb.
Birds cry mournfully in ancient trees,
males pursued by females flutter through the
forest,
listening to that cuckoo, crying to the moon,
voicing her sorrow at the empty mountain.

The road to Shu is hard,
harder than climbing the sky.

Bold men's faces pale on just hearing of these
perils!

Clustered peaks, barely a foot from the sky,
withered pine trees,
upside-down, hanging over
cliffs,
flying waterfalls cascade with deafening din.
Boulders roll and thunder into ravines far below.
With danger like this, after traveling so far,
I wonder why I wanted to come up here at all?

Sword Tower stands on one of the steepest
spots;
if one man guards this pathm ten thosand won't
break through.
But what if bandit wolves and jackals hold the
paths?
in daylight we may face down tigers,
but at night we must avoid the gnashing teeth
of blood-sucking serpents,
or end up lifeless,
dead empty sucks.

The dream of Ch'eng-tu, the Brocade City,
shines before me,
but is it as good as just going home?

The road to Shu is hard,
harder than climbing the sky,
but I'll crawl on wesyward with a heavy sigh

transl. by J.P. Seaton