“When the pulse begins to throb—the brain to think again— / The soul to feel the flesh”

For Poetry Monday, it's farewell to Millay—with more self-indulgence. I once wrote a story based on this sequence, and it finally occurred to me that I can now make my own translation. This is just as cryptic in Chinese—and probably was to everyone but an intended audience of one—but also strikingly evocative. Which is pretty much Li Shangyin in a nutshell. What can be teased out of the elliptical references and symbols (which I won’t detail beyond surface essentials) is that it’s about a love affair between a Daoist nun and an unnamed man, probably the author. Every female symbol is related to her, every male one to him, and if you think you can see something as somehow related to sex, you are probably right.


Emerald Walls: Three Poems, Li Shangyin

( Most messages in Langyuan are entrusted to cranes / There’s no tree by the woman’s couch without a phoenix )

Index of Chinese translations

---L.

Subject quote from The Prisoner, Emily Bronte.