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SELECT POEMS. - Li Qingzhao
Malaga, Center of Editions of the Delegation of Malaga, 2003.
Translation of Pilar González España.
In the history of China the name of a woman shines with proper light, Li Qingzhao considered the best poetess of the classic Chinese literature. Although in Spanish language we had already had the opportunity to read some of his poems selected in some general anthology of Chinese poetry, this translation realized by Pilar González España, the first one who presents a personal anthology of the authoress, it opens a way for the discovery of other essential Chinese poets in the knowledge of the universal literature.
The life of Li Qingzhao passed in an epoch infested with convulsions and with big historical changes, in the transition stage between the dynasty Song of the North (1067-1126) and the dynasty Song of the South (1127-1279). During the dynasty Song of the North the dismembered Chinese empire was reunified after the fall of the dynasty Tang in the year 907 and it was one of the most fruitful periods of the history of China. But the continuous wars untied by three northern peoples, the Kitan, the Tangut and the Jurchén (Jin), were debilitating slowly the government of the dynasty Song of the North, which had to go towards the south because of the gradual military invasion of these three ethnic groups; finally there was founded the dynasty Song of the South, which capital was erected in the current Hangzhou.
He had Li Qingzhao to live during this period of historical transition. He was born in the province of Shandong, in the bosom of a scholars' family, what allowed him to receive a careful education. He married Zhao Mingchen, bibliophile of vast culture, which composed along with his wife a Catalog of Inscriptions in Metal and Stone. The love that professed his husband had no limits. Zhao Mingchen, for his profession, was changing destination continuously and Li Qingzhao was remaining alone at home while he was longing for the arrival of his husband, as it is possible to observe in his poems dedicated to the separation of his dear being. For the threat of the barbarian peoples of the north they fled towards the south. When his husband died, the poetess began a long long journey without course for grounds of the south, where he died sixty eight years after age. Between the scarce work that survives of Li Qingzhao, it is necessary to emphasize the genre poems "ci" that he bequeathed to the posterity, poetical composition in which she shone par excellence. During the dynasty Song, the genre "ci", that means literally "song - word", reached his maximum plenitude.
In select Poems, the translator has selected twenty-seven poems of Li Qingzhao, which at the same time it has divided in three parts, according to the subject-matter, which they correspond perfectly at the ages of his life: poems of youth and spring (ten poems), poems of the separation (eight poems) and poems of the old age and of the death (nine poems). In the poems of youth and spring, the poetess sings to the life and to the youth, to the beauty and to the love, to the nature and to the splendor of the bodies, to the placidity and to the inebriation that provides the wine. In the poems dedicated to the separation, one listens to a melancholic voice for the absence of the dear being, who is far from the hearth, a sad and solitary tone being perceived in the words, but with certain hope light for the future reunion. In the poems of the old age and of the death, corresponding to the last stage of the life of Li Qingzhao, when she has already remained a widow and walks without course back and forth along the grounds of the south, the voice of the poetess is overwhelmed of solitude, sadness and affliction, because it realizes that the days of the youth they have already gone away and that the happy sleep has got lost forever; that is to say, the conscience of the old age and the fleetingness of the life opposite to the nature, which always remains. All the poems are written by big lyricism and exquisiteness, by an excellent mastery of the prosody of the genre "ci", in that the rhythm of the poem and the expression of the feelings unite for the creation of an authentic and deep poetical universe.
The publication of these poems chosen between Li Qingzhao means to extract to the light another essential work of the Chinese classic poetry, especially of the dynasty Song, as in his time it was the appearance of the poems of your Dongpo, the big poet of the Song, of whom we already have a translation to Spanish realized by Anne-Helène Suárez (Remembering the past in the Red Cliff and other poems, Madrid, Hiperión, 1992).
JAVIER MARTÍN RIVERS
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