Where I Didn't Get It

Li Shangyin by Li Shangyin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was okay.

I generally really enjoy Chinese poetry, especially Tang-era poetry. I was psyched to get this book. But it's very hard to connect with.

A lot of Tang poetry is straightforward, at least on the surface, with concrete imagery and plain language, dealing with being separated from home, or enjoying wine and books, or working in one's garden, or visiting a neighbor, or saying goodbye at the river's edge. Generally comprehensible. And sometimes, often even, the poetry is filled with allusions that are completely unknown in the West, but are explained in extensive notes. (Red Pine does a really good job of this.) Both are absent here. Nothing is simple or readily comprehensible to a Western reader, and the many, many allusions are either left unexplained (most of the book) or are partly dealt with in endnotes (a few). So I struggled to understand or enjoy these poems.

I might succeed with a different collection and different translation and notes.

Like, look at these four lines (from a couplet in the original) and see if you get the author's intention:

Seablue, moonbeam,
Pearls hold tears.
Indigo fields, sun-warmth,
Jade begets smoke.

The book includes other translations of a few poems including this one, and one of those has two pages of notes for this 8-line poem. After working through that, I mostly understand it and can appreciate it some. Without it, I've got nothing but vibes, and I'm way off the mark on most of it.

My polite take on this book of poetry is that it is very challenging. I'm gonna look for a translation with more helps.

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