Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon 4, Li Bai

Thoroughly worried, ten-million times—
I have fine wine, three-hundred cups.
Though there’s more worries and less wine,
Wine drains our worries, to never return.
And so I understand wine-saints:
A heart wine-loving opens the self.
They turned down grain and slept on Shouyang,
Which kept that hungry Yan Hui starved,
And these days there’s men loath to drink—
But what’s the use of worthless fame?
A crab-claw, yes, is an elixir—
A mound of dregs, this is Penglai—
So I must drink down this fine wine
In moonlight, high on a terrace, drunk.

月下独酌 之四
穷愁千万端，
美酒三百杯。
愁多酒虽少，
酒倾愁不来。
所以知酒圣，
酒酣心自开。
辞粟卧首阳，
屡空饥颜回。
当代不乐饮，
虚名安用哉。
蟹螯即金液，
糟丘是蓬莱。
且须饮美酒，
乘月醉高台。

A wine-saint is someone not greatly affected by heavy drinking. The “they” of line 7 are Bo Yi and Shu Qi, two disciples of Confucius who rather than serve the unworthy Duke of Zhou, resigned official positions (and the resulting income customarily paid in grain) and retired to Mt. Shouyang—Li Bai is apparently insinuating that they’d been supporting Yan Hui, Master Kong’s favorite disciple, though that detail’s not related in the Analects. The point about the crab claws escapes me (I suspect either traditional medicine or esoteric Daoist practice is involved), but Penglai is a mythical mountain-island of immortals in the eastern ocean, which he drunkenly conflates with a pile of dregs from unfiltered wine (which I should mention is made from fermented rice, so we’re essentially talking about sake). I do like how at the end of the cycle we’re finally brought back to the moon.

Grammar neepery: a) Unlike in English with its many/more and few/less distinctions, Chinese uses the same words to compare countable and uncountable nouns. b) In moonlight is literally “using (the) moon.” Possibly I should note that as an idiom.

---L.