Li Shangyin (NYRB Poets)

by A. C. Graham, Chloe Garcia Roberts, and Lucas Klein

Chloe Garcia-Roberts (Translator), A. C. Graham (Translator), and Lucas Klein (Translator)

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A one-of-a-kind collection of work by little-known Late Tang poetic master Li Shangyin.


Li Shangyin is one of the foremost poets of the late Tang, but until now he has rarely been translated into English, perhaps because the esotericism and sensuality of his work set him apart from the austere masters of the Chinese literary canon. Li favored allusiveness over directness, and his poems unfurl through mysterious images before coalescing into an emotional whole. Combining hedonistic aestheticism with stark fatalism, Li’s poetry is an intoxicating mixture of pleasure and grief, desire and loss, everywhere imbued with a singular nostalgia for the present moment.

This pioneering, bilingual edition presents Chloe Garcia Roberts’s translations of a wide selection of Li’s verse in the company of other versions by the prominent sinologist A. C. Graham and the scholar-poet Lucas Klein.
  • ISBN10 168137224X
  • ISBN13 9781681372242
  • Publish Date 31 July 2018
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint The New York Review of Books, Inc