From Wikipedia

This is a Chinese name; the family name is 鱼 (Yu).

Yu Xuanji (simplified Chinese: 鱼玄机; traditional Chinese: 魚玄機; pinyin: Yú Xuánjī; Wade-Giles: Yu Hsuan-chi, approximate dates 844–869, or possibly to 871), courtesy names Youwei (幼微) and Huilan (蕙兰), was a Chinese poet born in Chang'an during the Tang Dynasty. She is distinctive for being the first Chinese poet to break the conventional passive voice^{[citation needed]} of women in poetry and lyrics. She is the first Chinese feminist poet.^{[citation needed]}

Biography

Yu was married as a concubine to Li Yi (李亿) at 16, and after separating three years later she became a courtesan and a Daoist nun. She was a fellow of Wen Tingyun, to whom she addressed a number of poems. She died early, at the age of 26 to 28. Apart from names and dates in her poems, the tabloid-style Little Tablet from the Three Rivers, (三水小牘), gives the only facts about her life, although these are salacious in detail: that she had an affair with Wen Tingyun, lived a scandalously promiscuous life, and was executed for beating her maid to death.

Poetry

In her lifetime, her poems were published as a collection called Fragments of a Northern Dreamland, which has been lost. The forty-nine surviving poems were collected in the Song Dynasty mainly for their freak value in an anthology that also included poems from ghosts and foreigners.

English translations

Published in 1998, her work was translated by the team of David Young and Jiann I. Lin^[1]. In the 2000s, her work was translated by Stephen Owen and Justin Hill.

See also

• Yu Huan

References

• Fu, Shousun, "Yu Xuanji". Encyclopedia of China (Chinese Literature Edition), 1st ed.
• Young, David and Jiann I. Lin. The Clouds Float North: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji (Wesleyan University Press: Hanover and London, 1998)

Notes

External links

• The Clouds Float North David Young's Translation of her poems (link no longer works, but click for more information)
• Passing Under Heaven Novel by Justin Hill, inspired by her life

This article incorporates information from the revision as of 2010-01-29 of the equivalent article on the Chinese Wikipedia.