Li Shangyin (813–858) had an unremarkable career as a low-level official in various capacities, which included county sheriff, classics professor, and collator in the Imperial Library. He turned to Buddhism later in his life and died a widower at the age of forty-five.


Chloe Garcia Roberts is the author of The Reveal, a book of poetry, and the translator of Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes as well as of Cao Wenxuan’s children’s book Feather. She studied Chinese at Wesleyan University, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and the University of Oregon. She currently lives in Boston, where she is the managing editor at the Harvard Review.

Lucas Klein is an assistant professor at the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. Among his translations are Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (winner of the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize) and October Dedications, translations of the poetry of Mang Ke.

A.C. Graham (1919–1991) spent his aca