A new translation of a Chinese poet: Li Ho

Extract

Li Ho (791–817), one of the most original of Chinese poets, and a key influence in the development of late T'ang poetry, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. It is therefore a pleasure to welcome the appearance of a full-scale study by such a well-equipped scholar as Dr. J. D. Frodsham. His qualifications for the task are quite exceptional; already well known for his work on pre-T'ang poets, he uses the Japanese as well as the Chinese authorities, loves poetry for its own sake, and is familiar with Western literature and literary criticism. It is refreshing to read a book on a Chinese poet which instead of repeating the traditional judgements approaches his work from an independent and modern angle and with post-Empsonian critical tools. Substantial selections from Li Ho's poems have appeared in English before (a fact which Frodsham nowhere mentions), in Robert Payne's White pony, the Poems of solitude of Jerome Ch'en and Michael Bullock, and my own Poems of the late T'ang. But the present collection covers, with detailed annotation, all the 243 poems attributed to Li Ho, in versions which convey the floridity and satirical liveliness of the lighter pieces more effectively than the sombre power of the major poems. Since the Chinese text is notoriously difficult reading, even specialists in T'ang poetry will find their way about in the collected poems more comfortably with Frodsham's assistance. It is symptomatic of the special fascination of Li Ho for Western readers that a poet unrepresented in the ‘300 T'ang poems’ should be one of the first to be honoured by complete translation into English.