From David Hintons’ translation of Li Po – The Selected Poems of Li Po:
It’s April in Ch’ang-an, these thousand
blossoms making a brocade of daylight.Who can bear spring’s lonely sorrows, who face it without wine? It’s the only way.
Success or failure, life long or short:
our fate’s given by Changemaker at birth.But a single cup evens out life and death, our ten thousand concerns unfathomed,
and once I’m drunk, all heaven and earth vanish, leaving me suddenly alone in bed,
forgetting that person I am even exists.
Of all our joys, this must be the deepest.
Extracts 