I lean more towards the ethereal spirit journeys of Li Bai but don't let that take anything away from Tu Fu. I don't fully buy into the narrativistic simplification that the two poets are polar opposites of each other, they both have excellent poetic imaginations. My favourite line came from Tu Fu's Night Thoughts Afloat:

Drifting, drifting, what am I more than
A single gull between sky and earth?

An excellent selected collection of these two poets' work.

Like most good editions of oriental works this has a substantial introduction and comment throughout. It is in-fact a Li Po & Tu Fu reader for those using English. The introduction is amongst the best I've read for any work of any genre. Arthur Cooper really did well covering not only many topics of poetry but language, history and philosophy as well, explaining the workings behind his translations of these poems and providing complete context within which they should be read.

This is by far the most unputdowneable book I've read in a long while and I think this work has given me much for thought when composing my my own poetry.

It would be pointless describing or reviewing any poem of Li Po or Tu Fu ! They're simply perfect in their simplicity ... You must read them to know what i mean .

Li Po and Tu Fu are two chinese Tang dynasty poets who rivaled each other for the title of China’s greatest poet.

Tu Fu was a master of all the poetic forms of his time, but is especially admired for his lüshi, or “regulated verse.” Poems of this form have eight lines of five or seven syllables and conform to strict tonal patterns. Born in 712 in Gongxian, he received a traditional Confucian education that should have enabled him to become a public official. Because he was unable to pass the required imperial examination, however, he became for a time a wanderer. He won some fame as a poet and met other writers of his time, including the brilliant Li Po. His poems celebrated nature, bemoaned the passage of time, criticized injustice, and condemned the senselessness of war.

Li Po was a romantic who wrote about the joys of nature, love, friendship, solitude, and wine. While gaining a reputation as a brilliant poet, he tried in vain to become an official at court. His lyrical poems are prized for their exquisite imagery, spontaneity, and rich language and allusions. Born in 701 in Jiangyou, in what is now Sichuan Province. He began to live as a wanderer when he was 24. After a few years he married and settled down temporarily with his wife’s family in Anlu, which is now in Hubei Province.

The introduction is actually quite informational, and the poetry is still moving despite the translation.

In Li Po’s verses, where every word counts like a measured shot, we find the essence of a man who ultimately found solace amidst the mountains and the wilderness:

You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest,
and I smile, and am silent,
and even my soul remains quiet:
it lives in the other world
which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom,
The water flows.

And then, we meet his comrade, Tu Fu, who drifts through the the vast expanse of the earth:

Drifting, drifting,
what am I more than
a single gull
between sky and earth?

the translator of a certain strain of east asian poetry into english appears to face the same problems the translator of goethe does: the complexity of the poems lies in the implied depths beneath a surface deceptively simply using the inherent assets of each respective source language. the englisher is put between a scylla and charybdis: do you expand the lines to explain all the allusions and make them seem overly wordy, or emphasise the original concision and excise so much the reader may be left asking themselves "is that it?" = an impossible quandary to come up with a definitive answer for

Yeah I was not feeling these translations

Top 10 poets to read!

real urban pop

All I can say is that I like Li Po. The night poet who wanders around composing poem. It’s something I share with him. Sometimes I wonder around at night writing poems too.

contains a very interesting introducion with an unusual essay on the primal sound meanings in language.