The Clouds Float North: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji: Bilingual Edition (Wesleyan Poetry) by David Young

by Yu Xuanji

"Outside of her remarkable poems, we know next to nothing about Yu Xuanji," David Young writes. "She was born in 844 and died in 868, at the age of twenty-four, condemned to death for the murder of her maid...We owe the survival of her forty-nine poems to the ancient Chinese anthologists' urge to be complete."

The poems gathered in this bilingual (Chinese/English) edition will be read again and again for their beauty. The works preserve Yu Xuanji's passion, her sharp eye for detail, her often witty variations on familiar Chinese themes, all of which give the poems an immediacy one rarely finds in ancient, translated texts. Poems addressed to Yu Xuanji's husband and to other men (some famous poets) and women give us some sense of her relationships; the book also includes other traditional Chinese forms such as meditations on landscapes and occasional poems commemorating feast days. As noted in the introduction, the poetry also provokes us to think about the act of writing, about the culture and politics of the T'ang Dynasty, and about gender.

Genres: Poetry, China, Chinese Literature, Classics

Paperback

First published January 1, 868

About the author

Yu Xuanji (simplified Chinese: 鱼玄机; traditional Chinese: 魚玄機; pinyin: Yú Xuánjī; Wade–Giles: Yü Hsüan-chi, approximate dates 844–868/869), courtesy names Youwei (Chinese: 幼微; pinyin: Yòuwēi) and Huilan (simplified Chinese: 蕙兰; traditional Chinese: 蕙蘭; pinyin: Huìlán), was a Chinese poet and courtesan of the late Tang dynasty, from Chang'an. She was one of the most famous women poets of Tang, along with Xue Tao, her fellow courtesan.[1]

Her family name, Yu, is relatively rare. Her given name, Xuanji, means something like "Profound Theory" or "Mysterious Principle," and is a technical term in Daoism and Buddhism. "Yòuwēi" means something like "Young and Tiny;" and, Huìlán refers to a species of fragrant orchid. She is distinctive for the quality of her poems, including many written in what seems to be a remarkably frank and direct autobiographical style; that is, using her own voice rather than speaking through a persona.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crickets chirp on the stair-steps
they sound confused to me

in the misty courtyard, along the branches,
clear dewdrops hang

a moonlit night I hear faint music
coming from my neighbor's

if I went upstairs I could see the mountains
distinct even in the distance

a cool breeze comes to stroke me
as I sit on my bamboo mat

and I wish I had a magic lute
to help me get through this life

I feel like that philosopher
who wrote such lazy letters

wanting some way to express
the moods and thoughts of autumn.
*

nothing but magpies in the courtyard
chattering through spring sorrow

how could I hope to have any part
in the world of grand events

my own life at such a distance
and no place to tie up my boat?

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superlative, if all-too-meager collection of the lush, luscious poetry of this obscure Tang era (9th century) poetess. Frank and succinct visions of love, futility, futility, and love abound. I can recommend very much so!

[Eadweard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The chatter of orioles
breaks up my dream

I put on a little makeup
to change my tear-stained face

a young moon
shines through the bamboo shade

the smooth river fumes 
with late night mist

swallows are bringing mud in their beaks to pack their nests

bees are gathering pollen
from open flowers

I alone feel yearning
without any limit

reciting my own poems
staring up through the pines
----





Imagine a small poem
chanted a hundred times

each word bringing new feelings
sounding golden

my thoughts have climbed the wall
between our houses

I gaze into the distance
my heart's not made of stone

the Milky Way looks expectant
out there in the vastness

Hunan's rivers are waking up
the zither is fully tuned

every April the Cold Food Festival leaves me a little homesick

silent night, mellow wine
don't make me pour it alone
----





Looking for ways to defeat the sadness of staying at an inn

opening your love letter
admiring the elegant strokes

rain on Penglai Mountain makes the thousand peaks look small

wind in the Xiegu Gorge blows thousands of leaves into autumn

in the morning I read every word looking down upon jasper

at night, curled in my quilt and bed
I read it all again

I should take out my sandalwood casket and stow it safely away

but just for this moment, holding it, I can't seem to let it go.
----





Peach blossoms everywhere, 
pink color of spring

silver willows by every house
moon-bright

someone upstairs, trying on new clothes waiting for nightfall

somebody else, alone in her bedroom drowning in tenderness

the carp play around with the lotuses
under the moon

the sparrows call out to the rainbow
at the horizon

joys and sorrows, these are the dreams we have in this world

why do they always come to us
in pairs?
----





Several nights in this gorgeous pavilion and I began to have expectations

until my darling surprised me he had to be off on a journey

so I sleep alone and don't discuss the whereabouts of clouds

around the lamp, now almost spent, one lost moth is circling
----





Pleading, unable to speak

red tears, first one, 
then a pair, 

traveling down

[nananatte · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Clouds Float North ของ Yu Xuanji
เป็นรวมกลอนของกวีหญิงจีนยุคปลายราชวงศ์ถังค่ะ คุณ Yu Xuanji ไม่ได้โด่งดังชนิดเป็นยอดกวีเอก แต่เธอมีบทกวีที่มีชื่อเสียงอยู่หลายบทค่ะ เรามาอ่านเล่มนี้เพราะชอบคุณ David Young คนแปลเป็นภ.อังกฤษ(ตามมาจากเล่ม Du Fu)

ส่วนตัวคิดว่าเล่มนี้อ่านยากกว่า Du Fu ค่ะ ศัพท์ยากกว่า ใช้พรรณนาโวหารก็เยอะกว่า มีสไตล์ตัดพ้อแบบผู้หญิงเข้าไปผสมมากพอสมควร แต่เธอใช้การเปรียบเปรยชนิดไม่พูดตรงๆ ได้เก่งมากๆ ค่ะ ชอบตรงจุดนี้

Yu Xuanji เป็นภรรยาน้อยของข้าราชการจีนคนหนึ่ง ซึ่งสามีไม่ค่อยสนใจเธอเท่าไรหรอกค่ะ ต้องเดินทางไปทำงานต่างเมืองบ่อยๆ เธอเลยอยู่เฝ้าบ้านคนเดียว(กับบรรดาคนใช้) เสียเป็นส่วนมาก มีเพื่อนชายเยอะเหมือนกัน เพราะเขียนจดหมายไปหาเป็นกลอนอยู่หลายครั้ง ช่วงหลังเธอบวชเป็นชีของสายเต๋า เนื้อหากับอารมณ์ในกลอนอ่านดูแล้วจะรู้เลยค่ะว่าเขียนในช่วงไหน

เล่มนี้มี 2 ภาษา จีน-อังกฤษ
ทำให้ใน 1 หน้าเนื้อหาเยอะแล้ว ไม่สามารถใส่เกร็ดประวัติกับการวิเคราะห์ได้อีก เค้าเลยยกไปรวมไว้ทางด้านหลัง มันก็เลยพลิกไปพลิกมาอ่านยากนิดหน่อย

เราชอบบท '3 พี่น้องสาวสวย' ค่ะ มันแปลกดี เนื้อหาพูดถึงสามพี่น้องคนงามที่พึ่งย้ายมาอยู่แถวละแวกบ้านของเธอ ชื่อเรื่อง The Clouds Float North ก็มาจากวรรคจบของกลอนบทนี้ค่ะ :-)

[sarah]

“[…] take out your hairpin
by your reflection in the stream
and lie there in your bed
with books spread all around you
a little too happy to bother
rising to fix your hair.“

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me quite a few months to read through the poems in here despite it being such a short collection. It is wonderful to have a book of all the poems that survive of a 9th century woman poet. The poems are lovely. They deal with the issues of lonlieness, depression, lost love, and the great frustration of being a woman poet and scholar in a male dominated society where it is not possible to get the recognition you deserve. There are some absolutely beautiful turns of phrase.

I bought this edition because it is bilingual, my Chinese isn't to the point where I can read poetry without the help of an English version. But I was quite disapointed with the layout of this book. The Chinese text was in traditional characters in very small font at the bottom of the page, and for longer poems, on the following page. This meant a lot of flipping back and forth. It was also hard to see. I really think they should have made the characters bigger.

The poetry was beautiful and a fascinating glimpse into women's lives at the time. The biography of her life was brilliant so I will share it here,

"A woman of the Tang dynasty (618-907) from Chang'an by name Youwei second byname Huilan, She was fond of study and had some talent. She became a lesser wife of the official Li Yi. The love between them became decayed, and Xuanji became a Daoist nun in the Xian Yi temple. Because a novice died from a beating administered by Xuanji for disciplinary reasons, Xuanji was condemned and executed. She left one book of poems.

So much information and tragedy is such a few lines. I will savour this book and re-read it many times.

[Bethany · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poetry is rife from cover to cover with extremely potent images. From beginning to end, you are struck by the apparently riveting social world this female poet lived in, despite for many of the poems taking place in rural areas and despite the poet being a woman in a time where women didn't have very many opportunities.

What I especially love is the way she uses images from the natural world to express emotion and describe people she cares about. This, of course, is quite common in the poetry from Japan and China. I absolutely adore this book, and this poet. It's easy to read, easy to get through, but the images stick with you after you're done, even if you finish the book in twenty minutes.

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three Beautiful Sisters, Orphaned Young

❦

A little cave among the pines
where dew drips down

the sky above the willows
a great net filled with mist

when you can be like the rain
your heart will have strength to go on

and you won't be afraid to blow the flute
before you've fully mastered it

my mother would get upset
because I talked to flowers

and my lover was from the past
a poet who came to me in dreams

❦

[John Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might have become my favourite volume of poetry. There are only 49 poems here and all of them are quite brief and written in very simple language. My problem with poetry generally is that it tends to be written in a very dense and confusing way.

Poets often arbitrarily decide that the final word of each line has to have the same sound as the final word of some other line. At the best of times it's not easy to know what people are talking about, even in normal conversation. Imagine your interlocutor (who up until now has been communicating only with the most relevant, widely-used and suitable words) starts randomly substituting those suitable words for far less suitable words because of how they sound. Reading a lot of poetry is like trying to have a conversation with a lunatic, or a foreigner or someone with a severe speech disorder.

Long poems ramble on and on and you think "well, I don't know what this is all about and it's too long for me to go back to the start", so you read this long poem that makes no sense to you and it's too much effort to re-read it. "What was that all about? I suppose I don't really care". Most poetry is a dreadful waste of time.

For me, it is almost a pre-requisite of being able to enjoy a poet that their poetry must be short, clear, to the point and ideally should not rhyme. Fortunately, this describes the way that Yu Xuanji (and many ancient chinese poets) chose to write.

This is not to say that Yu Xuanji has one very clear meaning or idea at the centre of each poem. It's almost the opposite. The way she tends to write is with the intention of capturing the way she is feeling at that moment. Usually she is feeling lovesick. From these poems you get the impression that she spent most of her waking hours feeling lovesick. But she doesn't waste too much time just trying to convey that feeling. Rather, she talks blandly about the clouds and the trees and the river, the books strewn about the floor, the clothes she is wearing, the sound of the wind and the people talking next door. All she really does is paint the scene in small fragments. She will describe one thing with a few words, then another thing, then another. This is not like when Ted Hughes writes these dizzying, rambling stanzas, fixating on one very narrow idea, often an animal. He writes and writes trying to really capture the essence and the bulk of the creature in a complex, vivid, life-like way. Yu Xuanji's poetry is not like this. It is laconic and economical. We see glimpses of images, maybe with one or two words to connect that image to a feeling. "The sun admires us", "The vast sky gets locked away", "The monk can sit up late, admiring midnight". She doesn't linger on any one idea to long. Rather she strews the ideas around us like flowers or gems, each one small, exquisite and gently coloured. And somehow all the images connect up. It is a scene or a moment or a feeling with a heady, woozy vibe, a dense, stuffy atmosphere or a clear, sapphire day.

It might be my favourite volume of poetry. So beautiful. So easy to read and understand. So heartfelt. I think I can strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to read some easy and beautiful poetry.

[Liam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a perfectly good annotated collection of the slim body of work that has survived from the great 9th century Chinese poetess Yü Hsüan-chi (Yu Xuanji). I would have liked to see something a bit more substantial in terms of scholarship (a difficult task to be sure, given the paucity of sources, but even more detailed background would be both interesting and helpful to those of us who are not China specialists). After all, it is not too different a situation than that of Sappho, and there have been literally dozens (if not hundreds) of books written about the latter.

I am quite sure that the translations presented here are accurate; for those who may be able to read Chinese, the Chinese text is printed on every page also, as this is a bilingual edition. It is not a question of accuracy that bothers me about these renditions of the poems. In any case, translation is as much an art as a science, and I would say that this is particularly true with regard to the translation of poetry. I have to wonder about the tastes of the translators in this case, because there is unfortunately a bit of coldness about these poems, almost a sort of "modern" minimalism, that evokes curiosity as to the styles and forms of poetry preferred by the translators themselves and how their tastes might have informed their translation. This work is certainly more than adequate (hence my three-star rating), but I had hoped, and will continue to hope, for something better.

As for me, I was first introduced to the work of Yü Hsüan-chi nearly four decades ago, when I first saw one of her poems quoted (and translated) by the great scholar and writer Dr. Robert van Gulik. I was so taken with that poem that it became one of my favourites immediately, and still is all these years later; the same poem's translation in this present book is somewhat bland. Not being fluent in Chinese, I have no way of knowing which is the more accurate of the two translations, but regardless of that the earlier translation was certainly better as poetry. If you would like to read it, it appears in one of Dr. van Gulik's historical detective novels, one which was inspired in part by the life and career of Yü Hsüan-chi, and which is entitled 'Poets and Murder'...

[Rodica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for a StoryGraph challenge, as an entry for China. Went in knowing next to nothing, left in awe. Too bad we know so little about this woman who wrote such beautiful poetry. I reread some of the poems already and can’t bring myself to shelve the book, because I keep going back to it. One of the highlights of 2025 for me.

[Paul Haan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was rather taken by this body of work. It is not as removed or philosophical as the poetry of many of her (male) contemporaries and predecessors. Much of it is occasional poetry, but written with clarity and an economy that is dense with emotion. Her poetry communicates human emotions in a way that is grounded in universal understanding and ideas without being sentimental. While centuries old, her expressions are fresh and gave me plenty of reasons to reconsider the role of emotion as we seek to understand the world around us.

The translators appear to have done solid work, yet I wish they would have avoided using the common phrasing in the translation that they then later excuse in the end notes.

[pearl · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Allegory

Peach blossoms everywhere, pink
color of spring

silver willows by every house
moon­bright

someone upstairs, trying on new clothes
waiting for nightfall

somebody else, alone in her bedroom
drowning in tenderness

the carp play around with the lotuses
under the moon

the sparrows call out to the rainbow
at the horizon

joys and sorrows, these are the dreams
we have in this world

why do they always come to us
in pairs?

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several nights in this gorgeous pavilion
and I began to have expectations

until my darling surprised me
he had to be off on a journey

so I sleep alone and don't discuss
the whereabouts of clouds

around the lamp, now almost spent,
one lost moth is circling.

*

[Tani · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a huge poetry fan, but I really did like this. The language was beautiful, and the feelings behind it were even better.

[Matt Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

These short would-be obscure poems by a would-be unknown poet are as beautiful, sad, and unusually compelling as anything Emily Dickenson wrote. In some ways, it even exceeds Dickenson’s poetry due to a narrative coherence that, though probably incidental, still resonates through Yu Xuanji’s poetry collection. It’s about loss, beauty, missed encounters, and, in short, everything else. I’m glad it survived time and obscurity, and I hope it enjoys the recognition it deserves in the future.

[Scipio Africanus · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars for the original poet. 4 for the translation which can be a little too literal and academic at times. Considering there are only 3 translations in existence and only 2 of them complete translations i can't help but recommend it.

My favorite Tang Dynasty woman poet. My favorite woman poet period.

[Víctor Bermúdez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blossoms of spring, the autumn moon
you have to turn them into poems
the bright days, the clear nights
you feel surrounded by floating gods
I rolled up the curtain idly
and never rolled it back
I moved my couch to face the mountains
and slept here from then on.

[laudine · Rating 4 out of 5]

the silver lamp by the window
dims in the wind at dawn

I write you letters across great distances
and never know if they reach you

holding a bamboo pole at sunset
next to a wide blue river

[Seashelly]

I don't know how to rate it, but it was a wonderful experience getting through these for the most part!

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uma coletânea de poemas tocantes e melancólicos, em sua maioria sobre amor e separação. Não poderia escolher um só como favorito, vários me emocionaram por diferentes motivos.

Que pena que não temos mais nada da Yu Xuanji para ler :(

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poet killer her maid, was executed. Poems---fantastic.