Li Shangyin is noted as being one of the most ambiguous and densely allusive poets in the Chinese tradition. In the words of one prominent American scholar of Chinese poetry, “much of his poetry is difficult, and some of it is impenetrably obscure.” As a result, he is one of the most written about poets in Chinese, but has only been graced with one monograph each in English and French.

In 1969, James Liu called Li Shangyin a Ninth-Century Baroque Chinese Poet, but his difficulty means that he also fits translation into an aesthetic T. S. Eliot described as “more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning”—especially because so much difficulty in contemporary poetry in English, from Ezra Pound to J. H. Prynne, can be tied to referencing China. And Chinese poets and readers since the eighties have cited Li Shangyin to defend contemporary writing against charges of being “obscure.”

But difficulty in poetry is not only linked to “the early years of the last century, when,” as Charles Bernstein put it, “a great deal of social dislocation precipitated the outbreak of 1912, one of the best-known epidemics of difficult poetry.” Stephen Owen notes that a “general distrust of poets and poetry seems to have increased in the second quarter of the ninth century,” leading to a period-style of difficulty and a sense that to “admire poetry, moreover, might be looked upon as a dangerous diversion from serious pursuits.” Li Shangyin’s poetry may not only stand in opposition to society today, in other words; it may have implied this opposition from something close to the beginning.

My translations aim to link the opposition to the social order that motivated these poems in the ninth century with an opposition to the social orders relevant to dense and allusive poetry today.