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A review by spacestationtrustfund
The Clouds Float North: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji by Yu
4.0
The "complete poems" of Yu Xuanji (魚玄機) consist of 49 poems written at unknown times during her 24-year life (ca. 844-ca. 871). Apart from the surviving poems and some unconfirmed rumours over a decade after her death that she had beaten a servant to death and was subsequently executed (which David Young wryly calls "the contemporary equivalent of a tabloid"), almost nothing is known of her life. Even her name is unusual: Yu (魚, fish) is an uncommon surname; Xuanji (玄機, mystery) refers to a concept in Daoism and Buddhism that could be described as "profound theory," "mysterious principle," or "secret mechanism" (玄 black, reddish black, profound, mysterious + 機 machine, cause, secret, idea, thing). Young says in his introduction that "[we] owe the survival of these poems to the ancient Chinese anthologists' urge to be complete," and I couldn't agree more:
This short book was published in 1998 and, as Young mentions, was almost certainly the first English-language "anthology" (if such a brief collection can be identified as such) of Yu Xuanji's poetry. Young notes that Kenneth Rexroth included four of her poems in Women Poets of China in 1972. (Young also says that other anthologies "represent [Yu] even more briefly, if at all," which I found amusing: four poems constitutes nearly 10% of Yu's entire œuvre.)
Some good stuff:
To their comprehensive period anthologies of what they thought counted most—the poems of men who were also government officials of varying degrees of importance—they couldn't resist adding curiosities: poems by ghosts, poems by monks, priests, and foreigners, even poems by women "and others whose efforts," as The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature notes, "might provide amusement."And what amusement indeed.
This short book was published in 1998 and, as Young mentions, was almost certainly the first English-language "anthology" (if such a brief collection can be identified as such) of Yu Xuanji's poetry. Young notes that Kenneth Rexroth included four of her poems in Women Poets of China in 1972. (Young also says that other anthologies "represent [Yu] even more briefly, if at all," which I found amusing: four poems constitutes nearly 10% of Yu's entire œuvre.)
Some good stuff:
Besides parallelism, which presents an ever-interesting challenge to the translator, Chinese poems from the Tang offer a particular obstacle to successful rendering: their use of allusions—to other poems, to famous incidents and names from history and folklore, and to geography that is charged with associations built up by poetry, religious worship, and popular lore. The principle of parallelism is at work here too. Why not mention some famous character or incident while exploring parallels and letting the play of association establish a field of meaning for the reader to occupy? The problem, of course, for Western readers, is an absence of the cultural context that makes the allusions meaningful. [...] The answer, in some cases, is to detour around them. In others, a form of substitution may be effective. In addition, we have provided notes to the poems. They identify some of the more obscure allusions and thus clarify the places where we decided to keep proper names or culture-specific references. If to be a good reader of Chinese poetry requires creativity on a reader's part, it also requires a willingness to learn gradually about the civilization that produced such remarkable work.