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"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.
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