The Song-dynasty writer Li Qingzhao (1084-1151) is considered one of the greatest poets in Chinese history. The fact that she was a woman, working at a time when women were discouraged from writing or publishing, makes this honor all the more astonishing. Moreover, not only did she write and publish prolifically—producing ci (lyrics), shi (poems), and wen (essays) on craft—she lived an extraordinary life.
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As I highlight in my introduction to The Magpie at Night, a collection of my translations of her poetry, Li Qingzhao earned fame for her poetry when she was still a teenager, married for love, assembled a vast collection of art and antiquities, had to flee her home due to war, divorced an abusive second husband, and was even imprisoned for a short time. What I didn’t know, when I first started translating her in college, was that her poetry would take me on a decade-long journey and redefine my own voice as a writer.
There was a seductive magic to the process of translation; it felt like a communion that transcended time and space.
I stumbled across the idea of translation by chance. I was an undergraduate at Wellesley, taking my first workshops with Frank Bidart and Dan Chiasson, and experiencing what it was like to have my poetry be taken seriously by real, published poets. A fellow student was putting together an anthology of translations from around the world and sent out a call for submissions. I was intrigued by the project and decided to submit a translation of a Chinese woman writer.
Li Qingzhao immediately came to mind, as a writer known widely by the public in China but little known or translated in America. As a young woman writer myself, I greatly admired her and thought it unjust that she was not given nearly as much attention by translators as her male compatriots like Li Bai or Du Fu. It seemed to me another erasure of women in history—and one I wanted to redress in some small way.
The first work of hers I ended up translating for the anthology was a ci titled “A Cutting of Plum Blossoms.” The ci, which is infused with a feeling of absence and romantic longing, begins by illuminating a lone speaker:
In autumn, the scent
of the red lotus
fades from bamboo mats.
Loosening my silk skirt,
I step into the riverboat,
alone.
Autumn is a season of transition, a season in which the fragrance of summer’s red lotus dissipates and makes way for the desolate chill of winter. This promise of winter brings a sense of urgency to the speaker’s request: “Who will send me a brocade letter / through the clouds?” The desired answer, of course, is the absent lover. But, within the poem, there is no response. Instead, the speaker must drift down the river, surrendering herself to fate. The poem ends with of an assertion of her longing, which is the only certainty that remains:
One shared longing,
parted between two.
Unrelenting, it falls
from the brows, only to rise
in the heart.
No matter how she tries to reason away her longing, her emotions are not quelled by logic. Thus, her longing always ends up resurfacing “in the heart.”
Li Qingzhao’s images have a Dickinsonian feel to them; they are direct, surprising, and emotionally cutting. This ci is a perfect example of why her writing mesmerized China during her life and in the centuries after. Certainly, her work captivated me even more as a translator who had to puzzle through how to best capture this particular quality of hers.
There was a seductive magic to the process of translation; it felt like a communion that transcended time and space. How was it possible that her words, words written a thousand years ago, could possess me so deeply? And how could I become a writer whose work could reach another in the same way?
When thinking through images, I considered how I could surprise and delight the reader while imbuing those images with emotional inevitability.
For the next decade, I continued to translate her ci one by one, gaining encouragement from editors and professors in my MFA and PhD programs. At Syracuse, I was lucky enough to study with Brooks Haxton who taught me so much about translation as a creative practice. As a translator, I was a careful student of Li Qingzhao’s work, close-reading each word in Chinese while interrogating the English language. Each translation offered up new lessons on how to use features like imagery, setting, and sound to emotionally impact the reader.
In the ensuing years, I took these lessons to heart while writing my poetry collection, Unearthings, and novel, Their Divine Fires. When crafting scenes or opening lines, I thought about how I could create a sense of immediacy and urgency. When thinking through images, I considered how I could surprise and delight the reader while imbuing those images with emotional inevitability. In Unearthings, I even ended up writing a poem titled “Translating Li Qingzhao” about the role of the translator:
You, from outside, look in
past the bamboo screen
blue with night,
the sheer curtains
layer after layer,
to where she is sleeping…
In her later years, Li Qingzhao seemed to have taken an interest in mentoring other young woman writers. There is record of her offering to mentor a ten-year-old girl later known as Madam Sun. This Madam Sun, however, refused by stating that “literary talent is not a woman’s business.” This anecdote was passed down as an example of the young Madam Sun’s virtue in knowing a woman’s proper place in society—and emphasizes the restrictive societal expectations for women that Li Qingzhao was working against in her lifetime.
Although Li Qingzhao’s offer of mentorship was refused in that particular record, I like to imagine that there were other young woman writers who sought her out and studied under her. Certainly, her work offered me mentorship and guidance as a young woman writer working in the 21st century and led me to think more deeply about language through the practice of translation.
Now, I teach at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in the Creative Writing program, where our MFA students are required to complete a translation project as part of their degree. From working with my students, I see the ways that translation complicates how they think about their own work, as well as their relationship and positionality to language. As for me, I know that my writing has been transformed through translating Li Qingzhao—and for that, I will be forever grateful.
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The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao (1084–1151) by Li Qingzhao, translated by Wendy Chen, is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan.
