The Critical Flame: Chloe Garcia Roberts and Guangchen Chen Close Read Li Shangyin

At The Critical Flame, Chloe Garcia Roberts and Guangchen Chen engage in a conversation about reading and translating the writing of Li Shangyin.

CGR: We have described Li Shangyin’s poetry as painful before, and it is interesting to think of this pain in conjunction with a non-objective poetic frame. I find pain to be both palpable and ever present in his work like a note held constantly throughout the lines. This presence is a thread that inspires me in my translations as it serves almost as a counterpoint to the abstraction and obfuscation of his work. And I suppose because pain and agony must ultimately stem from an I, a body, that it seems to naturally fall into a subjective reading for me. Even in the inciting of empathy the reader first accesses their own sense memories in order to feel the author’s. The pain here then is where I feel the “I” or subjectivity the most and it is the voice by which I navigate through the mist. What are your thoughts?

GC: I would say it is a kind of pain that cannot be located. Yes there needs to be a body. But you also mention disembodiment, which I agree with. The body, the self, is indeed fractured. So the power of his poem seems to come from the fact that this pain, so sensual and concrete as it is, is always afloat, always intangible, unlocatable. The utmost case of unfulfilled desire, maybe…

CGR: So each instance of loss remains tethered to its own little cellular moment which we see only sidelong, obliquely, always too early or too late, always missing the desired.

GC: In these middle couplets Li is describing four instances in life, each isolated from their contexts, lumped together in a kaleidoscopic manner. As you have said, they are all about something that is about to happen, yet to happen. We could compare this to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s point made in “Laocoon; or the Limits of Poetry and Painting.” There Lessing argues that:

If it be true that the artist can adopt from the face of ever-varying nature only so much of her mutable effects as will belong to one single moment… then it is clear that the great difficulty will be to select such a moment and such a point of view as shall be sufficiently pregnant with meaning. Nothing however can possess this important qualification but that which leaves free scope to the imagination… There is not, however, throughout the whole process of a mental affection, any one moment less favourable for this purpose than that of its highest state of excitement.

Lessing is basically making two points. First, a visual artist needs to identify the climax of an event; second, she should avoid directly depicting it, because by so doing she leaves no room for the imagination. Therefore the moment right before this climax is recognized as one “pregnant with meaning.” What is striking about Li’s choice of such a moment is that, it is pregnant with many meanings which have no direction. They even seem trivial for poetic depiction: a fragrance enters the room, a cord holding a bucket is circling, someone glimpses her lover, and another is in the process of leaving some token of love for her lover. There is no climax; nothing happens. We are shown moments of expectation for something intense, and then moments of loss when the time has elapsed and the longing is left unfulfilled. This might explain why his poems are so painful.

Read their conversation in its entirety at The Critical Flame.