9780241774076 by Smakprov Media AB

The Magpie at Night

Translated by Wendy Chen

For Camilla, whose laughter brings us joy

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First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025 First published in Great Britain by Penguin Classics 2025 001

A version of the introduction originally appeared, in different form, in Copper Nickel (issue 25).

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. . . at every snowstorm, Yi’an would wear a bamboo hat and cloak of reeds and climb on top of the city walls, looking into the distance in search of poems.

– Zhou Hui (b. 1126 CE ), Miscellaneous Notes from Qingbo

Contents Introduction xi

As in a Dream (Remember that day) 3

Silk-Washing Stream (Hanshi Day Ripples) 4

Drunk in the Shade of Flowers: Chongyang Festival 6

You burn my hand 7

Complaint Against a Prince: Spring Ends (1) 8

As in a Dream: Late Spring 10

Celebratory Quatrain for Duanwu Festival: For The Emperor’s Pavilion 11

Complaint Against a Prince (On the lake, the wind arrives) 12

Camphorous smoke fades away 14

Partridge Sky: Osmanthus Flowers 15

A Cutting of Plum Blossoms 16

Departure from Yan Beach at Night 17

Spring at Jade Tower: Red Plum Blossoms 18

Deliver my desolation 20

Fragrant Courtyard: Fading Plum Blossoms 21

Offering Incense 23

Silk-Washing Stream (In the small courtyard) 25

Crystal pillow 26

Celebratory Quatrain for Duanwu Festival: For the Ladies’ Pavilion 27

Many Beauties: Ode to White Chrysanthemums 28

Du Fu was also a pitiful man 30

Rows of Small Mountains 31

Contents

Barbarian Bodhisattva (The voices) 33

How much hatred breaks man 35

At Phoenix Tower Remembering the Tune of the Flute 36

Her braceleted arm 38

Celebratory Quatrain for Duanwu Festival: For The Empress’s Pavilion 39

Butterflies Long for the Flowers: Parting Feelings 40

Rouging Lips: Chamber Thoughts 42

Rosy clouds often scatter 43

The Maiden Singer’s Charms: Spring Feelings 44

Butterflies Long for the Flowers: Letter

To My Sisters from Changle Way Station 47

Emotions 49

Late Spring 50

Two Poems Matching Zhang Wenqian’s ‘Wuxi Restoration Ode Tablet’ 51

Among the robes and caps fleeing south, there is No Wang Dao 53

The Fisherman’s Pride (In the midst of snow) 54

Butterflies Long for the Flowers: Gathering of Kin On Shangsi Festival 56

The feelings I make into poems 58

Partridge Sky (Cold sun) 59

Confessions: Fragrant Plum Blossoms by The Pillow 61

The Banana Tree Outside The Window 63

Dawn Dream 64

Southern Song 65

Drifting south, still I feel 66

Remembering Qin E: Ode to the Wutong 67

Immortal by the River 68

These silk robes have consumed 70

Silk-Washing Stream (Do not say the cup is too deep) 71

Slow Notes 72

viii

‘Dew on the flowers inverts the image’ – Liu Sanbian 74

The Approach of a Happy Occasion 75

Assigned The Rhyme ‘Zhi’ 76

Two Poems Presented to Lord Han of the Bureau of Military Affairs and Lord Hu of the Ministry of Works 77

By Chance 81

Fragrant Courtyard, a Modulation 82

Idle, I have doubts numerous 84

Barbarian Bodhisattva (Soft wind. Pale sun.) 85

Ode to History 86

Traveling on The Imperial Road 87

Let Alone, the feelings 89

Complaint Against a Prince: Spring Ends (2) 90

On Bayong Tower 92

Picking Mulberries, Expanded: Banana Tree 93

Like a Singer Raising Her Fan 94

Silk-Washing Stream (My hair grieves) 95

Summer Quatrain 96

Spring in Wuling: Late Spring 97

Taught me 98

Endless Joy: Lantern Festival 99

Pure Serene Music 101

The Fisherman’s Pride: Dream Notes 102

Notes 103

Selected Bibliography 131

Acknowledgments 133

Introduction

Wendy Chen

‘The feelings I make into poems / are like the magpie at night, / circling three times, unable to settle,’ writes Li Qingzhao in one of her surviving fragments. Though she is considered the greatest woman poet in Chinese history and has been hailed for her intense Dickinsonian clarity and vision, Li Qingzhao remains relatively unknown in the West.

When I first heard Li Qingzhao’s poetry recited to me by a family member, I was immediately arrested by the power of her imagery. In every line, the Song dynasty poet effortlessly offers up surprises to delight the reader. In one poem, she describes the self as being ‘thinner than a yellow flower’ (‘Drunk in the Shade of Flowers’). In another, she draws our attention to the moonlight falling on pear blossoms: ‘[t]he pear blossoms are dipped / in the moon’s first / slanting light’ (‘Complaint Against a Prince: Spring Ends (1)’). Her writings touch on the full range of human experience – from the joy and hopefulness of youth to the grief and despair of an elderly refugee who has lost her home and loved ones. Nothing is forbidden to her pen, not even the emperor’s politics – a bold move considered risky by most writers of her time, and even riskier for a woman writer who would not have had the same social protections as a male writer.

Li Qingzhao (1084–1155 CE ) defied cultural expectations for women by mastering ci, which are lyrics set to music. She also composed scholarly wen, prose essays or articles, on a variety

Introduction of subjects and wrote political shi, literary poems, critiquing government policies. Scholars and artists in the generations following her death have acknowledged her as a master of her craft – a status few women have ever achieved in Chinese history due to the lack of opportunity and encouragement for women writers. Moreover, the work of women writers was not preserved with the same care and attention given to that of their male contemporaries – and so it has often been lost to history. In a contemporaneous record by fellow poet Zhou Hui, he notes that ‘. . . at every snowstorm, [Li Qingzhao] would wear a bamboo hat and cloak of reeds and climb on top of the city walls, looking into the distance in search of poems.’* While putting together this work, I have often imagined her standing on the edge of the city walls, braced against the fury of the storm, the snow swirling around her. It is this very spirit I have tried to capture in my translations.

When I began translating Li Qingzhao as a teenager, only one translation of her complete works in English remained in print: Li Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems (1979), translated and edited by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung. Gender plays no small part in this neglect; the field of translation in the United States has long been dominated by white men translating other men. I became interested in reclaiming English translation of Chinese texts as a space where Chinese and Chinese American voices can be heard and appreciated. I was compelled to translate her work not only to share the pleasure of its emotional intensity, but also to increase appreciation of Chinese women writers throughout history, and to show how Li Qingzhao’s work speaks to writers of every era.

Li Qingzhao herself wrote in a social context that dismissed voices like hers. As the daughter of a respected and prosperous family of scholar-oﬃcials, she was educated and encouraged in

* Qingbo zhazhi 清波雜志 by Zhou Hui 周煇.

Introduction her literary pursuits by her parents – a rare phenomenon for women at the time. By the time she was a teenager, she was already a celebrated poet whose works were performed and memorized by established male poets.

During her lifetime she published several volumes of work under the pseudonym Yi’an Jushi (‘the easily contented dweller’) and was recognized for her shi and wen, including a renowned essay on the ci form. Today, she is most celebrated for the elegant immediacy and freshness of her ci – lyrics that matched existing songs with predetermined meters and tones. The titles of ci were frequently the titles of the songs they were set to, with the result that many ci shared the same title. The actual musical scores of these songs have been largely lost to history. However, what is not lost in the lyrics of Li Qingzhao is the indomitable voice in her work, which still sings to us across the centuries.

Much of Li Qingzhao’s work has not survived – indeed, very few shi and wen are available to us – and what has survived is plagued with questions of authenticity and attribution. In the dynasties following her death, editors who collected her works often ‘discovered’ new pieces of hers in order to attract critical interest to their anthologies. Many of these hitherto undiscovered pieces were then folded into successive anthologies and accepted as part of her body of work. Thus, modern-day estimations of how many of her poems remain can vary widely depending on their source texts: anywhere from forty to eighty or more. In this collection, I have chosen to translate work whose attribution to Li Qingzhao is commonly accepted.* I have included her ci, shi, and surviving fragments of other poetry. I have not ordered these poems chronologically, as the dates of many of these poems are uncertain. Rather, I have

* For further reference, see the credibility rankings in Ronald Egan’s The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), p. 103.

xiii

Introduction

arranged these poems more intuitively, according to an emotional resonance in each work. Poems that are full of youthful joy and passion appear earlier in this collection, before gradually giving way to work that is more contemplative and solemn.

Developed in the Tang dynasty, ci was regarded as a popular genre, with themes that were often personal and romantic, particularly in comparison with the loftier, political subjects of shi. Though for the most part only men composed ci, they typically depicted the viewpoint of a woman. Conventional subject matter included lamenting an unrequited love, the loss of beauty, or the passing of the seasons. Courtesans in entertainment halls would perform and sing these ci for audiences of educated and wealthy men. Ci was an art form centered on the interiority of women but shaped by the male imagination and performed for the male gaze.

During the Northern and Southern Song dynasties, ci as a genre gained in popularity among literary readers and acquired a more elevated status. It was during this period that Li Qingzhao composed her ci and became known for the quiet fire that illuminated her subtle plays of emotion and restraint against the backdrop of seemingly conventional settings. Here, for once, was a woman exploring the interiority and perspective of the presumed female speakers in the ci form.

Li Qingzhao also used the ci form to explore less conventional ground: questions of exile, authorship, and artistic legacy. These were subversive subjects to explore in ci, and even more subversive for a woman to be writing about. Li Qingzhao’s engagement in the male-dominated genre of ci defied male conceptions of what was possible not just for women, but for women writers.

Li Qingzhao rarely uses the first person explicitly in her ci. This is a common practice in classical Chinese poetry, unlike in English poetry, as subjects are often implied through clues in the line rather than directly stated. In my translations, I have chosen to use pronouns – especially first- and third-person pronouns.

Introduction

I feel this helps create poems that sound more natural to English readers. Also, using the first and third person facilitates a glimpse into the life of a woman in Li Qingzhao’s position. This position, as she makes clear in her work, is one that can often feel shockingly relatable even today. ‘I exhaust / the wine, gladly / turn to bitter tea,’ she writes in ‘Partridge Sky (Cold Sun),’ conveying not only a deep and troubled interiority but also one that grapples with the same emotions and thoughts that writers – particularly women writers – deal with today.

Still, many of her ci do follow certain conventions of the form, especially in terms of their romantic subject matter, which has prompted speculation about her life with her scholar-oﬃcial husband, Zhao Mingcheng. Several anecdotes in her body of work illustrate the prevailing understanding of their relationship as one founded on mutual affection, shared intellectual pursuits, and playful competition. In one, Zhao Mingcheng hides a poem of his wife’s among a collection of his own, which he then shows to an esteemed literary friend for evaluation. After reviewing the poems, the friend declares all of them unremarkable except for one. This, of course, turns out to be Li Qingzhao’s. Zhao Mingcheng, though frustrated as an artist in his own right, graciously and admiringly concedes that her work is superior.

The couple was also known for curating a personal collection of art and antiquities, a kind of art form in and of itself popular among the upper classes of the time. The pastime of collecting antiquities flourished under the reign of then emperor Huizong of Song (1082–1135 CE ), who himself had a renowned collection of over nine thousand pieces of antiquities, paintings, and calligraphy. Zhao Mingcheng was particularly interested in the study of Chinese epigraphy. Together with Li Qingzhao, he collected over two thousand rubbings of inscriptions on bronze and stone and began work on a text titled Bronze and Stone Inscriptions. After Zhao Mingcheng’s death in 1129 CE , Li Qingzhao