I say this as a simple reader, who lacks any language, contextual and historical knowledge, I absolutely enjoyed reading these new translations by David Hinton, especially after reading the companion book, Awakened Cosmos, the Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry, David Hinton (Shambala, 2019). Following Tu Fu's challenging life through the unique and incredible lens of his poems was so engrossing that I was sad to come to the end of the book. The translations feel very much alive and immediate, a clear and distinct voice coming through. I was fascinated by Tu Fu's directness, his sense of humor in the face of enormous difficulties, his empathy, and the practice of his art. But also, some of his poems show preoccupations so quotidian they could have been written by any overwhelmed parent, and in that sense feel like postcards from over a millenium ago. His children and his wife endured hardship after hardship at his side or separated from him during wartime, and it makes one wonder how they survived after his death. Tu Fu's poems definitely left me curious.

Por lejos el mejor poeta con que puedes salir a tomar.

Tu Fu is my kind of poet, on and on about the moon and autumn and trees. For me he is at his best when describing scenes of everyday life in the highly compressed mode of his later works.

I am pleased I knew nothing of his fame before beginning the text, but it is clear Tu Fu's accomplishment is well deserved. His talent strikes through clearly enough to make an impression in translation 13 centuries later. I have read it is difficult to not be influenced by his writing, as with Shakespeare, he is in almost everything if you dig deeply enough.

This is the best poetry book I have ever read till this day.

Beautiful poems, though I would like to explore different translations.

review: descriptions of events circumscribed by nature.. seems like all the poems use the word teetering. Not an interesting translation, boring subject matter abounds!

Deep Winter

heaven's design blossoms and leafs out,
stone roots bind rivers and stream: clouds mirroring glimmers of dawn shadow, each cold current traces a star. yang chu's

tears come easily here. Ch'ü yüan's wandering soul cannot be summoned. as wind and billowing waves load the teetering dusk, we abandon oars for a night in whose home?

By far the best translation into English of my favorite Chinese poet. The pool of comparison is large and includes my own translations in my PhD dissertation.

I didn't connect with Tu Fu as closely as I did with Li Po or Stonehouse, but these are beautiful poems, giving snapshots of a difficult time in China as the poet wrestles with the dark clouds of war, the vicissitudes of life, and eventual aging.

Excellent introduction to this enigmatic poet.

Tu Fu was one of China's greatest poets, who lived during a time of war and upheaval in his country. His poetry is deeply touched and troubled by the events of the time. David Hinton's translations as well as explanation of the style of classical Chinese poetry and a short biographical sketch of the poet give English readers an opportunity to appreciate and understand this great poet.

What is it: a fraction of the many hundreds of poems written by the 8th-century government official turned refugee who would become one of the most influential writers in history.

Why I think it's amazing: I'm not a scholar of Chinese poetry--another gap in my education that I'm slowly correcting--so I can't feign an expert perspective on the poems in this collection. And I don't read any Chinese languages, so I can't claim to evaluate the accuracy of David Hinton's translations. Instead, I can speak to my experience approaching Chinese poetry through the works of Tu Fu (also written Du Fu), and I think I can speak to the efficacy of Hinton's translations regardless of any technical accuracy.

My experience reading this collection was one of encounter.

Tu Fu's early decades of poetry are vivid commentary on current events, social norms, his local communities, even political advice to other government officials and the emperor himself. And in all of that, even in poems where Tu Fu takes on a poetic narration of an imagined character rather than his own perspective, there is a clear sense that a particular person in a particular time wrote these particular lines. Distances of thousands of miles and hundreds of years might make that person and time more difficult to access, but those lines provide so many entry points of empathy and experience.

Tu Fu's later years, his most productive and most tumultuous, reveal a man at once growing in his craft and struggling more and more with his place in life.

There is a geographical and social aspect of that struggle, as Tu Fu is unhomed by war and forced to wander to the end of his life as a refugee, only briefly settling for various periods of time to try to raise his family and find some peace. So much of Tu Fu's later poetry (at least as selected for this collection) is grounded in observations of the natural world which fill the majority of any given poem, but almost always these observations of nature are looking beyond the river or mountain or sky and looking inward. This pathetic fallacy--rendering interior emotions through landscape and weather and animal life--is far from mere metaphor, however. Tu Fu includes his interior world (often grief, illness, fear, or homesickness) as an observation of nature along with the landscape, in parity with it and part of it. And while he does write from his own perspective with plenty of autobiographical details, he writes his emotions into the landscape in a way that suggests he speaks for the communities around him--communities that have all been unhomed like he has, all struggling through poverty and fear, all striving to find a place.

But there is a potent spiritual aspect to this as well. In these same later years of his career, Tu Fu increasingly strives to achieve in his poetic craft the philosophies of Tao/Chan Buddhism. In my review of Basho and His Interpreters, I noted a tension in Basho's late life, where the act of writing poetry--of observing the natural world, recording those particularities, rendering his own gaze and his own interior world--were in conflict with the Buddhist admonition to see past those particularities and empty the world of definite forms. That tension is here in Tu Fu's poetry as well, though Tu Fu sustains that tension in a different way than Basho, choosing to write poetry that, increasingly as he aged, sees the world as sparse, as barely real but still pregnant with meaning, meaning that lies beneath the surface, beneath the forms, a mystery that, in poetry, arises from ambiguity and uncertainty and allusiveness in each phrase and image.

This is where the efficacy of David Hinton's translations becomes apparent. Hinton has translated Tu Fu with extraordinary attention to two facets of his poetry. One facet: the patterns of phrase that recur throughout Tu Fu's extensive career, which become signals to the reader of kinds of meaning that are foundational to the poet and yet kinds of meaning that subtly shift and take on new tones as Tu Fu ages and understands his spiritual practice within his role as poet more clearly. Hinton's translation preserves these patterns with vocabulary choices that are consistent and carefully selected (explained in end notes) to communicate only and always those foundational meanings. The other facet: the ambiguity, the mystery. Here, Hinton's craft is most on display, as he manages to render Tu Fu's poetry with English vocabulary that emphasizes grammatical exchanges--nouns that could function as verbs, verbs that could function as adjectives, frequently an omission of English articles and prepositions. The effect is that often any line of Tu Fu's poetry--especially from the latter years--could be read in multiple ways, and the reader is put in a position of searching for something hidden underneath that uncertain grammar.

It seems to me the highest skill of Tu Fu (preserved by the highest skill of Hinton's translations), that a young American man in the 21st century could be put in the position of recognizing the words on the page are but sparse forms, the truth a mystery underlying the uncertain grammar. And it seems to me the heart of this inherent tension that I still see in these poems Tu Fu, an elderly man who witnessed children die, who struggled to put food on the table, who was lonely and homeless for many years when he would have been at the height of his career in better circumstances.

An aside: I have to note another commonality between Basho and Tu Fu. Both men, facing the tension described above, write poems that explicitly acknowledge that poetry cannot lead to the spiritual truth they sought. Tu Fu's late career includes several poems with lines like "I only make poems of whatever I'm facing [...] sage-masters realized isolate silence whole: where am I, not yet far into twilight years, heart and mind already too frail for all that" and "in such dharma perfected, poems are folly [...] how could I renounce wife and children." And some lines that seem almost post-apocalyptic, like "books and histories spilling loose, baggage half-soaked and smashed on these shorelines of life" or "Poets both north and south found cold grief out here, loss and confusion. My whole life spent spirit-wounded--and now, I wander every day a more profligate waste of road." More tragic even than the poverty and war that Tu Fu describes around him, I feel the tragedy in these lines--a poet at the height of his craft, seeing that such craft may actually be worse than silence and may only point to a future world that is already upheaved.

You might also like: I've already mentioned Basho and His Interpreters and could not more highly recommend it. Basho, while writing nearly a millennia later in Japan, wears the influence of Tu Fu on his sleeve (actually quotes Tu Fu multiple times), and is wrestling with many of the same fundamental spiritual questions albeit from a life of voluntary travel rather than forced exile.

NEW YEAR’S EVE AT TU WEI’S HOME

The songs over pepper wine have ended.
Friends jubilant among friends, we start
A stabled racket of horses. Lanterns
Blaze, scattering crows. As dawn breaks,

The fortieth year passes in my flight toward
Evening light. Who can change it, who
Stop it for even a single embrace—this dead
Dazzling drunk in the wings of life we live?

MOONLIT NIGHT

Tonight at Fu-chou, this moon she watches
Alone in our room. And my little, far-off
Children, too young to understand what keeps me
Away, or even remember Ch’ang-an. By now,

Her hair will be mist-scented, her jade-white
Arms chilled in its clear light. When
Will it find us together again, drapes drawn
Open, light traced where it dries our tears?


MOONLIT NIGHT THINKING OF MY BROTHERS

Warning drums have ended all travel.
A lone goose cries across autumn
Borderlands. White Dew begins tonight,
This bright moon bright there, over

My old village. My scattered brothers—
And no home to ask Are they alive or dead?
Letters never arrive. War comes
And goes—then comes like this again.


FAREWELL AT FANG KUAN’S GRAVE

Traveling again in some distant place, I
Pause here to offer your lonely grave
Farewell. By now, tears haven’t left dry
Earth anywhere. Clouds drift low in empty

Sky, broken. Hsieh An’s old go partner.
Sword in hand, I come in search of Hsü,
But find only forest blossoms falling and
Oriole songs sending a passerby on his way.