Li Shangyin

Li Shangyin

Li Shangyin ( Chinese  李商隱 , Pinyin Lǐ Shāngyǐn , also Yuxisheng or Fannansheng , * around 813, † 858 ) was a Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty .

Life

Li Shangyin was the last great poet of the Tang period (618–907). Coming from what is now the province of Henan on the Yellow River in central China, he passed the imperial official examination in 837, but only held low offices during his unsteady life. Several times he went into the service of military governors, which also took him to remote outskirts of the empire, such as Guilin . The daughter of one of these governors became his wife in 838, but she died early.

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Li Shangyin's lyric poetry, permeated with melancholy and fin-de-siècle mood, reflects the decline of the once flourishing Tang Empire, which became obvious in the 9th century. The strict, rhyming forms of the rule poem (four- or eight-liner closed five or seven characters per verse) with dense, sometimes mannerist-looking pictorial compositions to the limits of comprehensibility, which earned him the reputation of a hermetic poet. Often, however, his dark verses conceal artful satires, which in encrypted form are directed against ruling emperors and states or, in epigrammatic quatrains, cast known historical events in a surprising light. Some of his erotic poems also show satirical traits. Among them are some that he apparently left “untitled” (無 題) on purpose and whose enigmatic imagery has continued to provide new interpretations to this day. Occasionally this group also includes those poems which have the title of the first two characters of the text, such as the famous eight- liner The richly decorated zither (錦瑟). In Li Shangyin's work, which comprises almost six hundred poems, there are also masterful poems of the seasons and things, verses about his impressions of travel as well as numerous occasional and friendship poems, and it is not least this versatility that makes him particularly special.

literature

• Li Shangyin: Night after night her heart. Translated from the Chinese by Raffael Keller. hochroth Berlin 2017. ISBN 978-3-903182-01-1 .
• Martin Gimm : "Li Shangyin (812-858): Mixed epigrams. A selection from the Zazuan." In: Wolf Baus, Volker Klöpsch , Otto Putz, Peter Pörtner (eds.): Booklets for East Asian Literature , No. 24 / May 1998, pp. 13–21.

Web links

• Li Shangyin's life
• Four "Untitled" poems by Li Shangyin