Zuo Fen

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Zuo Fen ( Chinese  左 芬 , Pinyin Zuǒ Fēn ; * about 255 ; † 300 ) was a Chinese poet and scholar of the Western Jin Dynasty .

Life

Zuo Fen was born into the family of a Confucian scholar in Linzi Prefecture . Her mother died young. Her father Zuo Yong became an imperial official with responsibility for the imperial archives. Zuo Fen received a good literary education and often played word games with her brother Zuo Si , who also became a famous writer.

In 272 she went to the palace and became a concubine of Emperor Wu of Jin . Chinese emperors at the time did not just take concubines to father sons. They took women who were literarily or otherwise artistically gifted. Zuo Fen is said to have been ugly. But the emperor enjoyed her literary reflections. Zuo wrote the Rhapsody of Thoughts on Separation at the Imperial Court, expressing her frustration at being separated from her family and the rest of the world. That she expressed her dissatisfaction with life in the palace, which almost no one else did, did not let her fall in favor. She attained the highest rank of Noble Concubine. The emperor regularly requested writings from her, but she was often ill and played no political role at court. When Empress Yang Yan died, she wrote a funeral song in her honor. Fusheng Wu writes about this poem: “The special thing about this work is that it completely ignores the emperor. Zuo Fen is fully focused on her feelings and her reactions to it, which the poem turns into an intense personal reflection on her fate as a confined lady-in-waiting. "

Zuo Fen died in the year 300.

literature

  • Kang-i Sun Chang, Haun Saussy, Charles Yim-tze Kwong: Women writers of traditional China. An anthology of poetry and criticism . Stanford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8047-3230-2 .
  • Fusheng Wu: Written at imperial command. Panegyric poetry in early medieval China . State University of New York Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-7914-7370-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chang, Saussy, Kwong: Women writers of traditional China. An anthology of poetry and criticism. P. 30.
  2. ^ Keith McMahon: The Institution of Polygamy in the Chinese Imperial Palace . In: The Journal of Asian Studies . No. 72 , 2013, p. 917–936 , doi : 10.1017 / S0021911813001137 ( kuscholarworks.ku.edu [PDF; 293 kB ; accessed on November 1, 2016]).
  3. ^ Wu: Written at imperial command. Panegyric poetry in early medieval China. P. 54.
  4. ↑ Chang, Saussy, Kwong: Women writers of traditional China. An anthology of poetry and criticism. P. 31.
  5. ^ Wu: Written at imperial command. Panegyric poetry in early medieval China. P. 53.
personal data
SURNAME Zuo, Fen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 左 芬 (Chinese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chinese poet and scholar of the Western Jin Dynasty
DATE OF BIRTH 255
DATE OF DEATH 300