Li Shangyin (813-858), also known by his literary name, Yi Shan, lived toward the end of the Tang dynasty. Over the course of his short life, he penned a series of strikingly beautiful compositions regarded as enigmatic even by the standards of his day. Tang poets such as Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu—to name the three most familiar to Western readers—prized suggestion and evocation; Li Shangyin, writing nearly a century after them, pushed this tendency to an extreme, and added a sensuality and allusiveness all his own. If poetry from this tradition is always hard to render in English, Li Shangyin poses unique challenges.

Garcia Roberts identifies two: “The first challenge is the language itself. The divide between poetic Classical Chinese and modern English is vast, particularly in sentence structure, the sparsity of pronouns, the layered symbolism and allusion,” she explains. “The second is Li Shangyin’s particular poetics. He is not by any means a poet who moves completely in tandem with the currents of his tongue. Instead he is constantly playing with, pushing against, subverting the language he writes in.” Translating him entails capturing not only the meaning, but also the occasional strangeness of his words.