Where Li Qingzhao Misses Her Husband

Double Radiance: Poetry and Prose of Li Qingzhao by Li Qingzhao
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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 spirit 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. Either the language became more natural or I just adjusted, because I felt like I was starting to hear, 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.

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