My interest leans to Li Po more than Tu Fu but contemplating on the period they become renowned poets in China, I could say that Tu Fu's poems are experimental and his style transcends the usual Chinese poetry form (maybe this is the reason why his readers back then tend to misunderstand his craft; hence, dismissing him as queer or challenging the tradition in an unpleasant way) and in it I found a foreign sharpness and beauty.

Introduction and annotations were a big help in understanding the text but sometimes the translator explains too much which, for me, ruins the experience of reading the poems.

This is an introduction to these two poets with some selected poems. The poems that are here gave me nothing, so do not think that these poets are something for me. Liked Li Po's poems better though.

The translator Arthur Cooper provides an overview and analysis of individual poems from the Chinese Tang Dynasty poets Li Po and Tu Fu as well as a selection of their poems in English. It's a good introduction for the casual reader who is approaching the subject for the first time.

Before my bed
there is bright moonlight
So that it seems
like frost on the ground:

Lifting my head
I watch the bright moon,
Lowering my head
I dream that I'm home.

Not quite this version, but another book of poems by the same.

Zen. Classic!

Tang dynasty
plum wine

5* Introduction that doubles as an overview of Chinese poetry's history and outlines poetic traditions and devices, plus commentary on difficulty in translation.

2* poems - mostly too much lost in translation.

More like a 3.5. You can tell the age of this book (published 1973) due to the tangential references to Chairman Mao and Communism. Also this line from Cooper "(The reader will probably succeed in getting a friendly Chinese waiter to say it [recite Li Po's poem, "Quiet Night Thoughts:], in his own dialect)," is really uncalled for. Cooper's insights and translation makes the text seem more like a chore than really add anything to Li Po or Tu Fu's works.

With that being said, I really enjoyed Tu Fu's works (I like Li Po as well).
Tu Fu's Nine Short Songs are really insightful and well translated (as far as rhythm and images are concerned).

You got to take the good with the bad I suppose.

Reading the poetry of Li Po and Tu Fu in English translation (with some poems in Chinese), I am charmed by old poems still intact in memory, but somehow the aura of their time and place had faded into unfamiliarity in this reader.

Some of the poems, forced upon school-age children through rote memorization, remain emotionally and psychologically alien. Li-Tu represented the two sides of Taoism (Yin and Yang), hence these Taoistic overloaded sentiment expressed through ancient figures of speech is too far to retrieve for this reader. The English translated version even helped in some instances, particularly through antique phrases and words.

For readers interested in Chinese poetry, this is an excellently compiled and introduced collection. Maybe I shall revisit it in the future.

'Li Po is the Taoist [the Yin] in this pair of poets, and his constantly recurring symbol is the reflected light of the Moon at night; whilst Tu Fu is the Confucian who from early childhood made the Phoenix his symbol, the Fire Bird symbolizing the Yang' (Penguin Classics, 1973, pp.18-19).

Li Po (or Li Bo, or Li Bai) therefore, represents the reflective Tao, while Tu Fu (or Du Fu) attempts to illuminate the Tao. Both versions of the underlying essential Tao are thus represented, as humankind consists of both the Yin (female) and the Yang (male), and the philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism are both useful to society. Confucianism is the moral philosophy, applicable to social behaviour, administration, government, and so politics; Taoism is the natural philosophy, and speaks of the numina of things in Nature, and thus is about the spirituality of Nature and the universe.

Cooper writes, in his excellent long introduction to both the poets and the history of Chinese poetry, the first 60 pages of which are background, the rest a discussion of the prosody (study of versification, esp. metre and rhyme) and technical issues of translation from Chinese etymological syllables, the characters, to English meaning:

'It was... part of [Li Po's] Taoism that his poems seem to receive rather than to give: to receive the light of the Tao without illumination of their own and to receive, hospitably, the reader's own imagination instead of informing it.' (p.30)

This impression of communing with the poet is precisely the reverie one feels also in reading Wang Wei's poetry - a profound sense of being there, in time as well as place. Wang Wei (AD 699-761) was contemporary with both Li Po (AD 701-62) and Tu Fu (AD 712-70) as the central T'ang poets. Cooper proceeds to analyse a line of Li Po's to illustrate his meaning:

'The real content of Li Po's best poetry seems to be not in the words but as if it were somehow inbetween them (Lao Tzu's "teaching without words"); as in the five simple syllables [translated]...: "drunkenly I rise to stalk the brook moon". Li Po had dozed over his wine outdoors in spring until night has fallen: that much we've been told. That the stream he followed on waking and getting up from the ground... ran between magical wooded slopes, we are not told; and these wooded slopes are made the more magical, their presence is the more felt, because we are not told. We are therefore there, just as we are where we are now; with nobody telling us where we are or describing what is around us.'

And then Cooper articulates this sense of communing quite superbly:

'We know, in fact, by two things that there are wooded slopes: that the moon belongs only to the brook and not also its banks, as it would if they were open fields; and that it has to be 'stalked', which is a reasonable translation of the Chinese verb used. But we have no need to think in this logical way and no time to do so, before being taken from wherever we may be and placed in that faraway landscape and at that moment more than twelve hundred years ago; bringing nothing but ourselves with us on the flight and so achieving perfect identity with the man Li Po, then and there.'

This... is the effect that the best literature, poetry, and here, Chinese poetry and their poets can give. And in giving, we give ourselves, across space and time, in a moment simultaneous in both worlds.

Even the simplest of poems - such as 'Bathed and Washed' by Li Po - have a history to them, referencing old stories and songs (Ch'u Tz'u: Songs of the South, ~100 AD), such as the meeting with the fisherman. This story represents a conflict between the Confucian way and the Taoist way. It has far more in it than we would ever know by its reading alone. Cooper's extensive footnotes are essential to the different layers of understanding: the background context; the differing poetic forms (such as the old ballad style or quasi-folk song, the yüeh-fu); the referencing of old stories, songs, poems and poets; the contention between the philosophies, Confucianism and Taoism; the context of the individual poem in the poet's work; and the meaning of the poem through all these references. This is a collection which needs to be studied - at least a little - to understand and appreciate.

Tu Fu particularly combined both Taoist and Confucian modes more obviously as complimentary of the art form (the 'visual rhyme', rather like those colourful 'epithets' of Blake's early verse which clarioned Romantic poetry) and the allegory (with often dense historical and political referencing). Such of his poems also exhibited complex and clever combinations of form (such as the combination of Chinese ballad and sonnet forms) - and reading them makes you as aware of his cleverness as your own ignorance of the medium. Of course, one is excused, since much of the original rhyme is lost in translation (and the original script is Chinese characters written right-to-left), where, in native English, for example, rhyming allows the eye through linear scansion to 'read' the form at the same time as the content. Much of this is lost to us here, but for Arthur Cooper's fascinating annotations, and his introductory remarks and examples on 'verbal parallelism' invite us to read these poems with a new eye and understanding.

Depending on mood and constancy of close reading (which varies from day to day, poem to poem), my favourite of Li Po's is 'Letter to his Two Small Children...', rivalled by the lyrical painting of 'The Waterfall on Lu Mountain'; and of Tu Fu's, 'From: The Journey North: The Homecoming' (which here is ~70 lines from the middle of 140, a long epic poem), which speaks of the strife and hardship of Tu Fu's middle life during the civil war (An Lu-shan's Rebellion), and his 'Ballad on Seeing a Pupil of the Lady Kung-Sun Dance the Sword Mime', which is a feast of visual imagery, biography and culture that expresses both the sad tristesse of beauty and time passing, and the glory that living, lasting culture brings.

I read the poems of Li Po and Tu Fu in a world literature class, and they were delightful.

I’m always sussed out by English translations of Chinese because they seem to leave a lot behind. That said, I can’t read any Chinese language, so this edition is a pretty good way to read the greatest hits of these to essential poets.