Translator's Note

Yu Xuanji (魚玄機, c. 840–c. 868) is one of the most interesting poets in premodern Chinese literature, combining late Tang lushness with rare frankness in a woman poet’s voice. Nearly fifty of her poems remain.

Yu was raised in Chang’an, the Tang capital, and at sixteen she became the concubine, or secondary wife, of a recent imperial examination graduate named Li Yi (李億). Some stories say that famous poet Wen Tingyun (溫庭筠, 812–870) met Yu while she was doing laundry and took responsibility for her education. Yu separated from Li Yi after only three years, when he took up an important position at court that moved him closer to his wife. Yu then entered a Daoist nunnery, and her poetry of this period reflects her hopes for spiritual transcendence, but eventually she returned to Chang’an; it was there, Jia Jinhua writes, that “she gave free rein to her romantic nature, aware of the freedom her status as a Daoist nun and ‘semi-immortal’ accorded her but conscious also of the double-edged nature of that freedom.”¹ 

Yu’s poetry is even more fascinating than her biography. As Jia writes, “she did not, as many other female poets did, try to imitate the voice of male poets or use the conventional women’s voice constructed by the male tradition; instead she spoke in a straightforward, truthful manner, creating her own distinctive voice to express her genuine feelings of love, joy, leisure, sorrow, lament, regret, and dissatisfaction.”² My translations try to convey this distinctive voice and its genuine expressions. In my eyes, contemporary English translations of classical Chinese poetry tend to fall between two extremes—with scholarly translators prizing philological accuracy and sometimes even taking a perverse pride in not letting their writing be informed by conventions of contemporary Anglophone poetry, while more creative attempts at experimentation often fall short of that goal. My own experiment represents an attempt to bring philological rigor and compelling creative writing together. Scholarly and literary audiences do not have to be at odds: both are looking for precision of image together with compelling, and compellingly fresh, phrasing. Combining accuracy with renewed attention to contemporary anglophone poetics, I hope to provide new access to Yu’s idiosyncratic lush frankness.

Works Cited

¹ Jia Jinhua, “Yu Xuanji,” in Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, Volume II: Tang Through Ming 618–1644, eds. Lily Xiao Hong Lee and Sue Wiles (Routledge, 2015): 569.

² Jia, 571.

Lucas Klein

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