Landscape and Couplet of Chinese Verse
Ike no Taiga Japanese
Not on view
Ike Taiga juxtaposes a landscape of towering mountains of an almost impossible steepness with a four-line poem by the Tang-dynasty poet Li Bai, celebrating the spirit of solitude found within unspoiled nature. A pathway leads from close to the lower margin into the center of the composition and draws the viewer into the pictorial space. It seems to invite us to imagine ourselves in the place of the lonely wanderer shown in the center of the image. The man is likely meant to be the poet himself, since the walking pole is an iconographic convention for representing Li Bai. The poem reads:
The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
—Trans. Sam Hamill
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