Craig Space: Poetry: About Li Ho (A.D. 791-817)
Li Ho
(A.D. 791-817)
China has always been a major source of beautiful and compelling poetry. Chinese is a language well-suited to careful words, and the aristocratic and bureaucratic elite were always expected to be good with a metaphor. Unfortunately, of course, I don't read Chinese, so I had to get Li Ho's poetry in translation. It's probably nothing but a pale shade of the original, with few of the conventions, subtle literary forms and speech patterns that I might appreciate if I read Chinese. This is a problem with any literature in translation.
Li Ho lived during the Late T'ang period of Chinese history. The T'ang was one of the familial dynasties that ruled much of China.
Li Ho died young. A. C. Graham's introduction to Li Ho in "Poems of the Late T'ang" says this about him:
"Although famous in the ninth century and never quite forgotten, he offended the conventionality of later taste by his individuality and its health and balance by his morbidity and violence...
Li Ho's central theme is the transience of life, a subject which he treats as though no one before him had ever felt the drip of the water-clock on his nerves, in a wholly personal imagery of ghosts, blood, dying animals, weeping statues, whirlwinds, the will-o'-the-wisp...
An aphorism often repeated in various forms declares that Tu Fu's genius was that of a Confucian sage and Li Po's of a Taoist immortal, that Po Chu-i's was human and Li Ho's ghostly or daemonic.
...The Kuei of Li Ho's poems are generally not devils but ghosts, sad rather than malevolent beings."
Poetry
Craig Space
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