49 Poems of Yu Xuanji

By far the best part of my day-job is the opportunity to immerse myself into most things Chinese.  My pinyin is nowhere close to where it should be by this time - given it's been a few months I am hacking away at it - but my Beijing trips increase my cravings for China with every visit.  Hmm...did I say the best food I ever had was Chinese food in China?  I now think - though only half-way into the 4-volume set - that The Dream of the Red Chamber (also called The Story of the Stone) is probably the best literary work that emerged from 1760s east or west or whatever. 

I am now reading Yu Xuanji's poems.   She died around 871, when she was only 28.  About her:

"Outside her remarkable poems, we know very little about Yu Xuanji. Her surname, Yu, which means "fish," is unusual. Her given name, Xuanji (Hsuan-chi in Wade-Giles romanization), means something like "dark secret" or "mysterious luck." She was born around 844 and died around 871, at the age of twenty-eight."

Here is an extract from one of her poems (#35, Late Spring Improvisation):

"...
around here it's mostly army drums
disrupting morning sleep
nothing but magpies in the courtyard
chattering through spring sorrow
how could I hope to have any part
in the world of grand events
my own life at such a distance
and no place to tie up my boat?"

All that and more - including a brilliant introduction to the etext collection - is at the University of Virginia etext library.  Here is an extract from the introduction. 

"Western role names like "nun" and "concubine" (lesser wife) and courtesan" (since a number of the poems suggest that she led this life as well) are clumsy ways at best of denoting social roles and relationships that were very different from the ones we know. They fail to characterize a life that we are more likely to glimpse, if we manage it at all, by turning to the remarkable poems she left, forty-nine in number. These poems reflect her relations with men--relations that are certainly more complex and interesting than any reduction of them to sex and commercial transaction would suggest--and they also show her exploring the Daoist ideals of meditation, solitude, and contemplation of nature. Behind them stands a person who escapes stereotypes, a gifted writer who explores the limited options available to her, material and spiritual, with vigor and imagination. "

~