In Which I Learn About Chinese Poetry

My roommate and I had a long discussion last night about poetry. I picked up a book of Li Po's poetry and showed it to her. She had no idea who I meant at first. His name is now translated as Li Bai--so once we got that figured out things went a little bit smoother. She learned to recite some of his poems in school. She emphasized the brevity of the poems. Each line is only five or so character, and there are only four or five lines... But each character has a rich connotative meaning that can be difficult to translate. She was very excited to see that, in one of the books I chose at random at the library, the poem was shown in the original Chinese characters on one page and the English translation across from it. We talked about some of the metric devices of poetry. In Chinese there are four different ways to end a word, different ways to emphasize a sound. These form a pattern rather like the scansion of poems in English. She diagrammed a poem for me and I recited something in iambic pentameter for her. There are aspects of poetry that are the same across cultures, and that makes me very happy.