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[FIRST IMPRESSIONS] “Rebuilding the Fishtrap: Translation, Biography and Female Poetics in Yu Xianji” by Marsha McDonald
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on Hiding in Caverns.
Yu Xuanji (author), Lucas Klein (translator). Hiding in Caverns Formed from Old Roots: The Collected Poems of Yu Xuanji, Oxford University Press, 2024. 160 pp.
Is she also, through the many female roles she held during her short life, a shape-shifting messenger?
“Rebuilding the fishtrap”, the title of this review, is a phrase taken from Lucas Klein’s introduction to his translations of the poetry of Yu Xianji, a Tang dynasty poet:
In poetry, one cannot forget the fishtrap of language, just because we think we have caught the fish of meaning. In translation, we must rebuild the trap so that it can catch fish of the same kind. (p. xxvi)
Yu Xianji’s small body of extant work, comprising 50 short poems as well as poetic fragments, is presented here in Chinese and English. There have been many English translations of Yu Xianji’s work. What does Klein’s translation offer?
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Klein clearly explains Tang dynasty poetic structures and tonal patterns in his introduction. While sensitive to the classical Chinese forms of the poems, Klein also advocates for “strong interpretations”, his term for an analogous, but not imitative, use of modern English syntax. He also offers insightful examples of “strong interpretations” in translating Yu’s Chinese into English:
In Chinese, that is, the couplet
聚散已悲雲不定
恩情須學水長流
Once upon a time, I might have translated this as:
Together or apart both are sad clouds are never fixed
Kindness and sentiment must always follow the water in its endless flow
Now, I make it,
with or without you, I grieve for the instability of clouds
despite how in love we must learn from the endless tide,
as it is above in “For Li Yi”.
For Klein, this approach to translation seeks to capture a certain linguistic directness while preserving each poem’s culturally distinctive character. He believes this is especially important when conveying the subjective nature of Yu Xianji’s poetry.
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The introduction also contains a biography of the poet, drawn from two medieval Chinese texts included in the book’s appendices, as well as from the meticulous research of scholar Jinhua Jia.1
Around 843, Yu Huilan (her likely given name) was born a commoner in the Tang capital, Chang’an. At 15, she became a secondary wife, or concubine, to a promising young bureaucrat, Li Yi. It was, at first, a good match. Li and Yu spent some happy years together, though they mostly lived apart. Very young and, by some accounts, beautiful, Yu is thought to have been regarded as an intolerable presence by Li’s first wife. Li Yi eventually abandoned her. In 866, at the age of 24, she became a Daoist priestess. Tang dynasty Daoist priestesses enjoyed an independence of mind, spirit and body (romantic and sexual liaisons were tolerated) that was rare for women of their time. It was while living in the convent that Yu took the name Xianji.
Two years later, Yu Xianji was executed, having been found guilty of the brutal murder of Lü Qiao, her maid, in a fit of jealous rage.
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When listening to the female voice in Yu’s poetry, I find myself constantly in the presence of Lüqiao.
It is her voice, the voice of a servant, that whispers to me from between the lines of Yu’s romantic longing and literary expression. She wraps images of willows in her tears. I imagine Lüqiao’s dreams, along with Yu Xianji’s letters, clinging to the wings of birds and the backs of fishes. From Yu Xianji’s poem “Autumn”:
A longing woman, brocade in her loom,
someone trekking through the sky beyond the pass:
wild geese fly, fish are in the water,
and letters, too, get sent along.
This, too, is part of the fishtrap of language. Lüqiao’s female voice, unschooled and weary from work, remains trapped in conjecture. Below is Yu Xianji’s poem “A Parable”, in Klein’s translation:
Red peaches everywhere, the image of spring
with jade-green willows at every home, and a bright moon.
One awaiting nightfall in fresh makeup upstairs,
another sitting in anticipation alone in the boudoir
but fish play under lotus leaves
and beside a rainbow sky there’s sparrow song.
In this world happiness and pain are but a dream,
yet how is it that in gaining one, both arrive?
Klein reads the fish in Yu Xianji’s poems as a play on her unusual surname, Yu, which means “fish”. Fish are also traditionally seen as messengers, much like birds. I wonder, though. The poet sees herself as a woman of flesh and blood. But is she also, through the many female roles she held during her short life, a shape-shifting messenger?
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Zhai Yongming
The book ends with a remarkable poem, “The Rhapsody of Yu Xuanji”, by the feminist poet Zhai Yongming (b. 1955). This long poem is included in its entirety in Appendix 4. Zhai’s poem, poet to poet, poet on poet, is both introspective and outward-facing, directionally ambivalent. There are so few women poets we know of in medieval China, so few messengers from the Tang era to our own. Yu Xianji’s brutal act and her punishment lie before us. Sadly, truthfully, she is not alone:
1. The abstruse mystery no one knows between a fish and another fish
This is a story about killing and being killed 868 CE
Yu Xuanji wears a cangue
is sent to the execution ground lies in a pool of blood
her severed head on a hook of fresh flowers
So many ancient women wore cangues
strung up they would fill the sky
like white kites but never ascending to heaven
I admire Klein’s unorthodox use of Zhai’s poem as both a meditative epitaph and a modernist epilogue. It is here that we leave Yu Xianji, lost in a criminal’s unmarked grave, and catch our last glimpse of Lüqiao’s ghost:
III. A flower tune for a fallen sparrow
Composed for guzheng, played by Lüqiao’s ghost
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Hiding in Caverns Formed by Old Roots is a welcome addition to the discourse surrounding Yu Xianji, poetry and female agency in Tang China.
Postscript: After editing this review, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, editor-in-chief of Cha, wrote to me: “It’s very interesting that you focused on the murdered housemaid Lüqiao, known only from a single anecdote in Huangfu Mei’s Sanshui xiaodu 三水小牘, c. 910. The publication of Hiding in Caverns Formed from Old Roots already shines a spotlight on an often-neglected female poet of the Tang period (Yu Xuanji is absent from the classic anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems, and her fifty surviving poems were preserved partly as curiosities), and you went deeper, inviting readers to reflect on an even more marginalised historical figure [no writing of Lüqiao’s survives, and her name is recorded only as the victim of the crime for which Yu was executed]. Fascinating!” (personal correspondence, Friday 9 October 2026).
Ho’s words encouraged me to think further. Lüqiao shook me to my core. The thought of her young life cut so cruelly short haunts me. She had a name, and dreams. For me she represents the vast numbers of women and girls worldwide who have suffered, and still suffer, from a lack of education, opportunity and respect. Yu Xuanji was a remarkable poet, but her accomplishments were not hers alone. Mentors, lovers and friends challenged her mind, sharpened her poetic tools and shaped her notions of love. Through it all, women like Lüqiao were there, working, watching. To me, Lüqiao’s image is that of a bright but sorrowful ghost.
I am sure I have been influenced by Mathelinda Nabugodi’s The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive (Knopf, 2025). Working through letters, lectures, journals and objects, Nabugodi, a young Ugandan-Swedish scholar, examines how the lives and writing of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley were entangled with the racial slavery of their era, and uncovers some deeply disturbing ideas about race and servitude. She also searches the archive for traces of the Black men and women whose paths crossed those of the Romantics: figures who, like Lüqiao, remain at the edges of the record.
Note
- Jia, Jinhua. 2018. Gender, Power, and Talent: The Journey of Daoist Priestesses in Tang China. Columbia University Press. ↩︎
How to cite: McDonald, Marsha. “Rebuilding the Fishtrap: Translation, Biography and Female Poetics in Yu Xianji.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 9 Oct. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/10/09/fishtrap.
Marsha McDonald lives in Vilar de Andorinho, Portugal. An artist and writer, she works and exhibits between North America, Europe, and Asia. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner, Puffin, Mary Nohl (travel), Lynden Sculpture Garden, Gallery 224 Artservancy (artist working within conserved land in Wisconsin USA), and a New York Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Otoliths (Australia), The Drum and The Cantabrigian (Cambridge MA), Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Cha (Hong Kong), and La Piccioleta Barca (Milan). She has collaborated with artists and writers in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, North America, and Japan. In 2024, she will be an arts resident at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland and Studio Kura in Kyushu, Japan. Visit her website for more information. [All contributions by Marsha McDonald.]