zhao luanluan
You would think there were no ancient Chinese women poets of consequence by reading the popular translation in English poetry anthologies I can lay my hands on. I suspect this has to do with the translators more than anything else. For example, out of Innes Herdan’s 300 Tang Poems (Far East Book Company, 2000) two-hundred and ninety nine of the poems are by men. Kenneth Rexroth writes dismissively in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (New Directions, 2003) of the poet Zhao Luanluan (Chao Luan-Luan), a Tang era poet: “Her poems were a common type, a sort of advertising copy …” (233)
However, since there were ancient Chinese women poets of consequence, I spent a little time today browsing the Internet looking for them. Here is a poem by Zhao Luanluan that had also been translated into Japanese. I present both:
Chinese original:
Japanese translation by from the website GoLive 5:
