"Li-Po" by José Juan Tablada

• Date: 1920
• Nation: Mexico
• Language: Spanish (translation by Javier Taboada)

This poem is considered a calligram, which is a purposeful arrangement of words that take on the shape of an image. In this particular poem, it takes on the form of a moon.

Octavio Paz described Tablada as, “one of the most fertile and questioning minds of his generation…his first volumes are close to the 'modernist' school… His later works belong to the contemporary Mexican school of poetry” (211)

José Juan Teodoro Tablada was born April 1, 1871, in Mexico city. He had seven sisters. He learned German and French in school, before being briefly sent to a military school by his father, who died when he was 17 years old. His first poems were published when he was 20 and he began writing for various publications the following year. He was introduced in the weekly “México Gráfico” as follows:

“José Juan Tablada, naciente bardo empapado en el modernismo de los neuróticos franceses. Baudelaire y Richepin, Rollinat y Paul Verlaine…”

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“José Juan Tablada nascent bard steeped in the modernism of the French neurotics. Baudelaire and Richepin, Rollinat and Paul Verlaine”

Between 1893 and 1899 (when he was in his mid-20s), Tablada published poems about Japan and Asia. He also painted his own copies of Japanese art. During this time, he continued to publish both poetry and journalism pieces. He also engaged with the Mexican Modernist movement, arguing on behalf of it and defending his own work. In 1900, he visited Japan for seven months.

In 1903 he married Evangelina Sierra (who he would separate from in 1913) and began writing a regular column for Revista Moderna de México. From 1906 - 1908 he was a professor of archeology at the National Museum. In 1909 he wrote a series of political satire columns. In 1911 and 1912 he visited Paris and then became a professor of literature at la Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. During this time he started working on a novel titled, “La Nao de China.”

In 1914, had to flee Mexico and settled in New York, due to the violence of the Mexican Revolution. Tablada had supported the short-lived government of Victoriano Huerta, which was opposed by revolutionary forces, including those led by Emiliano Zapata in the south (the Zapatistas) and Pancho Villa in the north. His house was ransacked and the draft of his novel destroyed. He returned to Mexico in 1917, the same year that he fell in love with his student, Eulalia Cabrera Douval, who he had been teaching French to.

In 1918, Tablada was made a diplomat by the Mexican government, married Douval, and traveled throughout South America. By 1919, they had settled in Bogata, where he published a book of Haiku-inspired poetry.

“Ahí escribe y dibuja las imágenes de su primer volumen de haikus, Un día… poemas sintéticos.

Editado en Caracas, Un día… es un hito en la poesía en lengua española porque introdujo el haikú japonés al idioma. La concisión de los poemas implica el abandono del preciosismo verbal y la retórica modernistas. Con este libro se suele decir que comienza la vanguardia en México.”

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“There he wrote and drew the images of his first volume of haikus, “One day… synthetic poems.”

Published in Caracas, “One day…” is a milestone in poetry in the Spanish language because it introduced Japanese haiku to the language. The conciseness of the poems implies the abandonment of the verbal precious and rhetoric of the modernists. It is often said that the avant-garde in Mexico began with this book.”

In 1919, Tablada also published a travel memoir of his time in Japan (nearly 20 years after the voyage had taken place). The following year, in 1920, he published the book that is excerpted in Serpent and Fire.

Editado en Caracas, con pie de la Imprenta Bolívar fechado el 6 de enero, Li-Po y otros poemas reúne sus poemas ideográficos, tanto de corte caligramático como futurista. Con ellos, Tablada sitúa a la poesía mexicana en la vanguardia internacional.

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Published in Caracas, with a stamp from the Bolívar Press dated January 6, “Li-Po and other poems” brings together his ideographic poems, both calligrammatic and futuristic. With them, Tablada placed Mexican poetry in the international avant-garde.

Tablada worked intensely for the rest of his life. He moved between Mexico and New York, collaborated and published feverously, continued to study Asian poetry and culture, championed Mexican poetry, and was inducted into the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (in 1928). He published articles in English in 1929, organized conferences about Mexican culture, and was given a position at the Mexican Consulate in New York in 1933. He visited Havana in 1939, and contributed to the creation of an anthology of his best poetry, which was published in 1943. Tablada died in 1945, in New York, from a heart attack. His remains were repatriated to Mexico, where he is interred in the Rotonda de las Personas Ilustres.

This section is summarized from the extensive Cronología by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Filólogicas. All quotes appearing in this section come from that website, with English translations performed by the Wiki author, with corroboration from Google Translate.

Higginson and Harter explain that, “Haiku in the West begins at the beginning of the twentieth century, with attempts to write haiku in French during a visit to Japan by Julien Vocance, Paul-Louis Couchoud, and others. They published a book of the efforts in 1905” (49). This was followed by a “decent anthology of Japanese literature in French translation” that was published in 1910, in Paris.

It is easy to see how Tablada fit into this timeline of discovery and cross-cultural creative pollination. Higginson and Harter devote a page and a half to him, clarifying that he was a, “Mexican poet and diplomat who visited Japan in 1900 and was much impresssed with its art and poetry, but seems to hae discovered the haikai in Paris during 1911 and 1912” (53). They further identify him as “a major figure in modernismo” (54) and describe his style of haiku as using “vivid metaphors to capture some essential characteristic of an animal or object” (54) and “approach[ing] the ecstacy of experience that joins an especially Spanish quality to the emotionalism of some Japanese haiku” (54). They reprint three of his haiku – two in Spanish and one written in French.

Given that Tablada is known for his interest in Japanese culture, the introduction of Li-Po, a classic Chinese poet, raises some questions. Was Tablada engaging in orientalism or combining cultures that he perceived as exotic? We looked for possible connections.

Matsuo Bashō (1644 - 1694) is credited as the originator of the haiku form. He “is considered The First Great Master of Haiku, or simply The Master” (Higginson & Harter, 12). Bashō was influenced by 7th - 9th centrury (T'ang dynasty) Chinese poets, including Li-Po (who is called Rihaku in Japanese). What follows in this section is more speculative than the rest of our wiki post. Japanese court poetry (specifically the form of waka) may have been the an important intermediary between these styles, but we would need to read more on this topic, perhaps starting with An Introduction to Court Poetry by Earl Miner.

It is also possible that we should be looking at the French for the source of the connection or confusion. Judith Gautier's (mis)translated of Chinese poetry “Le livre de jade” (Book of Jade) was first published in 1867 original available on Project Gutenberg, but it was expanded and reissued in 1902 and edited again for a 1908 version Yu 2007). (A 1901, English translation of Gautier's translation is available through Internet Archive) Yu argues that despite Gautier's lack of accuracy in translating, her book had an immense cultural impact. It seems possible that Tablada may have encountered some Chinese poetry through her or through the zeitgeist that she inspired. The preceding section was speculative.

Li Po (also known as Li Bai or Li Bo) was a Chinese poet who lived 701—762, during the Tang Dynasty. According to David Young, Li Po has long been revered by the Chinese “for his gaiety, freedom, sympathy and energy” in Tang poetry, becoming “a sort of archetype of the bohemian artist and puckish wanderer” (45).

Raised in the mountainous region of Szechwan, Li Po was well read in Confucian classics, such as the Shijing (The Classic of Poetry), and from a young age showed “a lifelong interest in mediation and spiritual discipline ” (49). While Li Po was considered a genius by some, he failed to take the civil service examination–an examination which selected candidates for state bureaucracy–and spent most of his youth traveling around China. Eventually, Li Po’s natural talents brought him into the Emperor’s court where his personality and poetic gifts granted him a position at the Hanlin Academy and as a court poet. During his time in the capital, Li Po befriended another celebrated Tang poet by the name of Du Fu (also known as Tu Fu). This friendship extended into a famous literary group preserved in Du Fu’s poetry as the “Eight Immortals to the Wine-cup” (Obata 12).

Li Po later became known as the “Old Wine Genius,” a title given to him much in part to his continuous indulgence and glorification of alcohol. Li Po’s drunken and unruly behavior eventually led to his expulsion from court, leading him back to the life of a jobless wanderer where he died in relative poverty. But while Li Po’s indulgent behaviors led to his social and financial downfall, his use of intoxication as metaphor in his poems produces an elevation of life that is unlike any other of the Tang greats. As Young puts it, “poetry, like good wine, should help us get perspective on ourselves and put the cares of the world aside,” and it is this very metaphor that makes Li Po stand out amongst his contemporaries (46). Li Po’s “presentations of himself as drunkenly enjoying some natural setting is thus a cleverly unpretentious way of presenting transcendent states of mind and being” (46). Likewise, Li Po’s poems inhibited a structural state of intoxication as they tended to “scatter in several directions” (48).

In addition to his metaphors of intoxication, much of Li Po’s writing centralized on themes of friendship and their partings as well as his “willingness to cast poems in the voices of people other than himself” (48). As Young concludes, “Li Po has an intuitive grasp of the genius of his language and its possibilities for poetry, and it is his exploitation of this understanding that allows us to return again and again to his apparently simple and unpretentious poems for refreshment, imaginative exhilaration, and a sense of their capacity to outlast the limitations of the life and circumstances that produced them” (52).

Li Po’s writing has inspired many poets over the centuries, including Ezra Pound and James Wright. A digital copy of a 1922 translation of his work into English can be found here.

José Juan Tablada's poem pays homage to Li Po through an extended use of language and imagery found in Li Po's poem “Drinking in Moonlight” (also known by various other titles such as “Drinking Alone with the Moon”). This poem has numerous translations, and forty one of them can be found at this site. For comparison, two translations are included below:

I sit with my wine jar
among flower
blossoming trees

no one to drink with

well, there’s the moon

I raise my cup
and ask him to join me
bringing my shadow
making us three

but the moon doesn’t seem to be drinking
and my shadow just creeps around behind me

still, we’re companions tonight
me, the moon, and the shadow
we’re observing
the rites of spring

I sing
and the moon rocks back and forth

I dance
and my shadow weaves and tumbles with me

we celebrate for awhile
then go our own ways, drunk

may we meet again someday
in the white river of stars
overhead!

Translated by David Young (1990)

Amongst the flowers is a pot of wine
I pour alone but with no friend at hand
So I lift the cup to invite the shining moon,
Along with my shadow we become party of three

The moon although understands none of drinking, and
The shadow just follows my body vainly
Still I make the moon and the shadow my company
To enjoy the springtime before too late

The moon lingers while I am singing
The shadow scatters while I am dancing
We cheer in delight when being awake
We separate apart after getting drunk

Forever will we keep this unfettered friendship
Till we meet again far in the Milky Way

Translated by Ezra Pound (1915)

Li-Po, Y Otros Poemas (Li Po and Other Poems) was Tablada's second book of poetry influenced by poetry from China and Japan. His first Un Día . . . (A Day . . .) was published one year earlier (1919). It contained 37 poems, making it chap-book length. In 1922, he published a second full-length collection of Haiku-inspired poetry, El jarro de flore, (The Vase of Flowers). All three of these “experimental” works have been translated into English and placed in one volume by A. Scott Britton: The Experimental Poetry of Jose Juan Tablada: A Collection in Spanish and English

The excerpt that is printed in The Serpent and the Fire occurs across three pages in the original text, interrupted by facing pages that are mostly blank:

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1. Extensive biography of Tablada, explaining his contributions to the development of Haiku in Spanish
2. Complete original text in Spanish from Hathitrust
3. Biography, "José Juan Tablada. Vida, letra e imagen," by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (in Spanish).
4. Biography of Li-Po (also known as Li Bai) from PoetryFoundation.org

Books consulted:

1. Higginson, William J., and Penny Harter. The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Teach, and Appreciate Haiku. McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1985.
2. Obata, Shigeyoshi. The Works of Li Po: The Chinese Poet. Dutton Press, 1922. HathiTrust, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x000132344&seq=10.
3. Paz, Octavio, editor. An Anthology of Mexican Poetry. Translated by Samuel Beckett, Indiana University Press, 1971.
4. Rothenberg, Jerome, and Javier Taboada, editors. The Serpent and the Fire: Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present. University of California Press, 2024.
5. Young, David. Five T'ang Poets. Oberlin College Press, 1990.