Li Shangyin is one of the foremost poets of the late Tang, but until now he has rarely been translated into English, perhaps because the esotericism and sensuality of his work set him apart from the austere masters of the Chinese literary canon. Li favored allusiveness over directness, and his poems unfurl through mysterious images before coalescing into an emotional whole. Combining hedonistic aestheticism with stark fatalism, Li’s poetry is an intoxicating mixture of pleasure and grief, desire and loss, everywhere imbued with a singular nostalgia for the present moment. This pioneering, bilingual edition presents Chloe Garcia Roberts’s translations of a wide selection of Li’s verse in the company of other versions by the prominent sinologist A. C. Graham and the scholar-poet Lucas Klein.
Author
Li Shangyin (c. 813–858), courtesy name Yishan (義山), was a Chinese poet of the late Tang Dynasty, born in Henei (now Qinyang, Henan). Along with Li He, he was much admired and "rediscovered" in the 20th century by young Chinese writers for the imagist quality of his poems. He is particularly famous for his tantalizing "no title" (無題) poems. Li Shangyin's career was rough, and he never obtained a high position, either because of factional disputes, or because of his association with Liu Fen (劉蕡), a prominent opponent of the eunuchs.
