Double Radiance: Poetry and Prose of Li Qingzhao

by Li Qingzhao, Karen An-hwei Lee (Translator)

Lyrical and passionate, Li Qingzhao‘s work stands apart from Song Dynasty women who chose to write stylized verse framed by imperial culture. At once intimate and universal, Li voices a timeless Love, memory, and loss are integral to human experience. Indeed, her life of writing and art-collecting was doomed by the political instabilities of her time. After the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty, she and Zhao fled into exile as their possessions were reduced to ash. Karen A n - W e Li’s translations let Li’s voice sing in these poems

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Paperback

Published April 2, 2018

About the author

A famous writer and poet from the Song dynasty, Li Qingzhao was born into a family of officials and scholars. Before she got married, her poetry was already well known within elite circles. In 1101 she married Zhao Mingcheng, with whom she shared interests in art collection and epigraphy. They lived in present-day Shandong. After he started his official career, her husband was often absent. This inspired some of the love poems that she wrote. Both she and her husband collected many books. Her husband and she shared a love of poetry and often wrote poems for each other. They also wrote about bronze artifacts of the Shang and Zhou dynasties.

The northern Song capital of Kaifeng fell in 1126 to the Jurchens during the Jin–Song wars. Fighting took place in Shandong and their house was burned. The couple brought many of their possessions when they fled to Nanjing, where they lived for a year. Zhao died in 1129 en route to an official post. The death of her husband was a cruel stroke from which she never recovered. It was then up to Li to keep safe what was left of their collection. Li described her married life and the turmoil of her flight in an Afterword to her husband's posthumously published work, Jin shi lu. Her earlier poetry portrays her carefree days as a woman of high society, and is marked by its elegance.

Li subsequently settled in Hangzhou, where the Song government was now established. She continued writing poetry and published the Jin shi lu. According to some contemporary accounts, she was briefly married to a man named Zhang Ruzhou (張汝舟) who treated her badly, and she divorced him within months. She survived the criticism of her marriage.

Only around a hundred of her poems are known to survive, mostly in the ci form and tracing her varying fortunes in life. Also a few poems in the shi form have survived, the Afterword and a study of the ci form of poetry. She is credited with the first detailed critique of the metrics of Chinese poetry. She was regarded as a master of wanyue pai "the delicate restraint".

Reviews

[Lisa Stice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most beautiful collections of love poems I've ever read. Nature and emotion walk in tune with each other, and love alters yet remains strong with the passing of time and with absence.

[Madison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, beautiful collection of poems. I would love to read it again alongside Wei Djao’s translation one day, to compare.

[Richard Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an elegant collection of a fraction of Li Qingzhao's poetry--most of which is lost. There are not too many famous female poets from the Tang or Song, and it's pretty hard to find English language collections of Chinese poetry by women, so I was happy to locate this one.

Though I liked it and give it 4 stars, it didn't work for me at first. I warmed up to it as I read, however, as I began to glimpse the real person and real emotion behind the precision language. Poetry like this is pretty but doesn't reach me:

Perhaps creation was stirred by inspiration
to instruct the clear bright moon
in gently rendering the earth's translucence.
So let us sip green-ants wine in cups of gold,
and let us not delay intoxication
with a flower whose beauty is far beyond compare.

But when she talks about loss, I can start to feel it:

Yellow dusk covers the yard.
Disconsolate, I sleep off the wine,
my spirt choked with sorrow.
Enduring the deep night alone,
moonbeam on our empty bed,
I listen to the rhythmic washing
of clothes on a laundry stone,
the little sounds of crickets,
and endless dripping water.

In some of the poetry, the language choices of the translator threw me off. An elevated diction is probably indicated, but too much effulgence or quotidian or antipathy made me stumble. "Fresh dew cleanses aquatic flowers" sounds so clinical. And yet, the language felt warmer and more intimate the longer I read. It seems like the language became more natural, but maybe I just adjusted, and I felt like I was really hearing, finally, the poet's voice.

A lot of the emotion expressed by the poet in these verses is certainly genuine. She and her husband were famously in love, and you can hear that connection in many of the poems here. As is described in her own epilogue (from a collection of her husband's poetry) she and her husband were well matched, both loving history and poetry and collecting books and artifacts. They spent most of his salary on their collections, living simply on what remained. They were happy until the war came, when they had to flee an invasion from the north, leaving much behind. Then her husband was sent to a new appointment and died on the way. (She arrived just before he died.) Over time, everything else from their collection was lost in the war, stolen or burned, and she lived sadly without him and without everything they had gathered as a couple. The grief in the later poems, where she is aging without her love and showing signs of depression, is heart-wrenching.

...Alone at the table before cups of wine,
I brood over endless sorrows
flowing from sea to sky, the horizon.
How can I live without you?
The summer rose has withered,
so I rely on pear blossoms for solace.
We loved one another through the years:
Fresh perfume drenched my sleeves:
we drank the tea of fiery passion,
witnessed pageants of horses, festivals
where lightweight riverboats raced.
Fearless in the face of violent storms,
we raised our wine to crushed petals.
Now I wonder
why those days have fled.
I await your return.

At only about 60 pages, this is a slim collection. It's nice, though, and well worth looking at, and I'll probably be returning to it later. I would like to find a few more supports for the allusions, so I'm gonna be looking for more by this poet, other collections, if it's out there.

Recommended.

[liv · Rating 4 out of 5]

some favorites excerpts...

a fisherman's pride

perhaps creation was stirred by inspiration
to instruct the clear bright moon
in gently rendering the earth's translucence

quite beautiful, white chrysanthemum song

whether in moonlight, fresh wind, or dark rain and fog,
the skies cause flowers to wilt
and their perfumed silhouettes vanish.
even love cannot know
how long they're loaned to us.
perhaps if we had the best intentions,
we wouldn't need to remember the flowers
by the riverside and east chrysanthemum hedge.

slow musical notes

searching and searching,
chilled, empty, and saddened -
quick warmth shifts once more to winter
when peace eludes my resting place.
two or three small cups of diluted wine
cannot dispel the chill evening wind.
migrant geese, messenger birds in flight
grieve my broken heart,
feathered friends passing from another time.
now the earth is heaped with yellow petals
disarrayed, ruined. who'll pick them up?
sitting at the window,
how do i alone prevail against darkness?
when a fine rain falls on the parasol tree,
dripping quietly through a yellow dusk,
when i consider all things in this very moment,
one word, sorrow, utterly fails.

sunrise dream

yearning for my former home,
i rise in the morning, pick up clothes,
and cover my ears against the din.
though i may never return,
i find solace, with a sigh, in a dream.

[Amanda Almeida · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book touched me deeply. As my second “real” poetry endeavor I’m surprised by the depth of emotion that steadily increases as I read through. The epilogue had me in tears but as an American with a minuscule amount of Chinese history knowledge, I wonder how much more depth there is…

[Brent L · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite poetry dealing with themes of separation, loss, grief and exile.
These poems bridge ages and cultures, and can be read by modern people easily.

[Bread · Rating 5 out of 5]

a slim collection of poems by li qingzhao, she writes w/ a lyrical & quiet sorrow touching on love & drink, loss & separation, exile & memory, expressed all the more passionately as her life collecting books & reciting poems w/ her dearly loved husband perishes