Li Shangyin

A one-of-a-kind collection of work by little-known Late Tang poetic master Li Shangyin.

Though the classical Chinese poet Li Shangyin is considered one of the foremost poets of the late Tang era, he has been strangely overlooked in English translation. Perhaps this is partly due to the esoteric nature of his work, which has been debated and analyzed for centuries. In Li Shangyin’s poetry, allusiveness is favored over direct explanation, and meaning unfurls through layers of mysterious images that slowly coalesce into an emotional whole. Interweaving an almost hedonistic aestheticism with a spare and frank fatalism, his poems paint a picture of simultaneous pleasure and grief, failure and desire, and above all, a singular nostalgia for the present moment. His unique collage-like blending of mythological, historical, romantic, and symbolic imagery continues to be influential among contemporary Chinese writers and scholars.

In this pioneering, bilingual edition of Li Shangyin’s work, Chloe Garcia Roberts has translated a wide selection of the poet’s verse, and has also included a section of translations by the prominent sinologist A.C. Graham and the scholar-poet Lucas Klein.

Li Shangyin (813–858) is one of the most celebrated voices of classical China, known for his passionate love poetry—rare in classical letters of the time. He had an unremarkable career as a low-level official in various capacities, which included county sheriff, classics professor, and collator in the Imperial Library. He turned to Buddhism later in his life and died a widower at the age of forty-five. While he enjoyed only a minimal amount of fame for his poetry during his lifetime, his work has maintained prominence for centuries and has enjoyed renewed popularity in contemporary China.

Chloe Garcia Roberts is the author of a book of poetry, The Reveal, and the translator of Li Shangyin’s collection of lists, Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes, which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. Her translation of Cao Wenxuan’s children’s book Feather is forthcoming from Archipelago Books. She studied Chinese at Wesleyan University; the ACC program in Beijing; and SOAS, University of London; and currently lives in Boston, where she is the managing editor at the Harvard Review.