Yu Xuanji – författare
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Inbunden, Engelska, 2025
361 kr
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Yu Xuanji (c. 843-868) is one of the most interesting poets in premodern Chinese literature, and her approximately fifty extant poems include some of the most arresting writing from the Tang dynasty--a period known as the golden age of Chinese poetry. Born a commoner, by fifteen Yu had become the concubine of a man from an illustrious family, until he abandoned her and she became a Daoist priestess, where she took on an active role as a poet as well as a religious practitioner. She was only a priestess for two years before she was executed at the age of twenty-six on dubious accusations of murder.Yu's story is fascinating, but her poetry is even more so. Despite her relatively slim output and the patriarchal culture in which she lived, she became known for writing that combines late Tang lushness with a rare frankness about what it meant to be a woman in the ninth century. Yu was an incisive and expressive poet, and her work treats a wide range of topics, such as love, spirituality, abandonment, female friendship, sex, and sexuality. Preceded by a critical introduction explaining the possibility of a tradition of women's poetry in medieval China, as well as Yu's relationship with the dominant tradition of male poets, this collection of innovative translations combines scholarly accuracy with a poet's demand for creative solutions in handling the crossover between languages and literary styles.
Häftad, Engelska, 1998
252 kr
Tillfälligt slut
"Outside of her remarkable poems, we know next to nothing about Yu Xuanji," David Young writes. "She was born in 844 and died in 868, at the age of twenty-four, condemned to death for the murder of her maid...We owe the survival of her forty-nine poems to the ancient Chinese anthologists' urge to be complete."The poems gathered in this bilingual (Chinese/English) edition will be read again and again for their beauty. The works preserve Yu Xuanji's passion, her sharp eye for detail, her often witty variations on familiar Chinese themes, all of which give the poems an immediacy one rarely finds in ancient, translated texts. Poems addressed to Yu Xuanji's husband and to other men (some famous poets) and women give us some sense of her relationships; the book also includes other traditional Chinese forms such as meditations on landscapes and occasional poems commemorating feast days. As noted in the introduction, the poetry also provokes us to think about the act of writing, about the culture and politics of the T'ang Dynasty, and about gender.