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Women and Women's Writings from Antiquity Through the Middle Ages - Yu Xuanji (Lyric Date C. 9Th Century)
YU XUANJI (LYRIC DATE C. 9TH CENTURY)
SOURCE: Yu Xuanji. "Joining Somebody's Mourning" and "Three Beautiful Sisters, Orphaned Young." In The Clouds Float North: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji, translated by David Young and Jiann I. Lin, pp. 52, 54-56. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998.
The following are translations of two lyrics by the ninth-century Chinese poet Yu Xuanji (844-871), a nun who was executed in the latter years of the Tang Dynasty.
Many of [Yu Xuanji's] poems, to be sure, dwell on absence, longing, and loss, as do lyric poems in any culture and period. But their original handling of theme, their inspired sense of detail, their exuberant rightness of tone and form, all counterbalance the painful subject matter with exquisite formal and aesthetic pleasure. Whether this sleight-of-hand fully compensates the poet is not the question: the reader's gift is the distillation of...
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- Pan Chao (Poem Date C. 1St Century)
- Yu Xuanji (Lyric Date C. 9Th Century)
- Three Beautiful Sisters, Orphaned Young
- Izumi Shikibu (Diary Date C. Early 11Th Century)
- Marie De France (Poem Date C. 12Th Century)
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