In the Footsteps of Du Fu - 3 Quarks Daily

by Leanne Ogasawara

American poet, essayist, and translator Eliot Weinberger opens his new book, The Life of Tu Fu, describing a seminal moment in the Tang dynasty poet’s life, when he had just failed the Imperial Examination —for the second time. Weinberger, it should be said, has not written a biography of the eighth century poet as the title of the book might suggest. Nor has he come out with a new translation of Du Fu’s work. Rather, Weinberger has created a montage of fifty-eight original poems inspired by Du Fu’s life. And in his opening gambit, taking on the voice of the young poet, he compares all the candidates who failed the examination that day to hundreds and hundreds of chickens:

They say this is the only tree in the world that has these pears, for these pears have no desire to propagate elsewhere.

I thought of The Old Man Who Called His Chickens. He had hundreds of chickens, each with its own name. He could call its name and the chicken would come. I thought of him when all the candidates, including me, failed the exam.

One wonders: how is it possible that one of the greatest minds the world has ever known failed the examination not once –but twice? Scholars continue to argue about it. But one thing is clear: this second failure was only the start of Du Fu’s troubles!

Considered by some people, and I am one of those people, to be China’s greatest poet, Du Fu’s work never went out of style in China. Not even during the Cultural Revolution, when so much traditional culture was canceled, did Du Fu’s light fade. The reason usually cited for this is that Du Fu has always been considered the poet of the common people. He gave voice to their suffering. And he also understood that violence, natural disasters, and war fell disproportionately onto their heads; for unlike the elite, the poor had few options open to them when things got rough. British historian and documentary film-maker Michael Wood, in his wonderful 2023 travelogue In the Footsteps of Du Fu, writes about China’s millennium-long love affair with the Tang dynasty poet. Tracing Du Fu’s life across the vastness of China, from the mountains of Sichuan to the great lakes of Hunan, he wonders whether there has ever been any other poet in the pre-modern world, who “so urgently recorded what it feels like to be a refugee, fleeing for your life?”

When asked: “Why Du Fu?” Wood replies that Du Fu is fascinating for many reasons, not least of all having been born at the precise moment of lift-off of the glorious Tang, considered to be one of China’s great ages of cultural and literary flowering. While Du Fu began life comfortably well-off during the heyday of the Tang, by mid-life he was suffering through the worst of the great chaos following the An Lushan uprising, which saw millions dead with countless more people fleeing for their lives.

Here is Weinberger again:

An abandoned courtyard: an old tree:
A temple bell lying on its side:
The world I live in.

They win and we lose; we lose and they win.
Vines wrap around the rotting bones.

She knows he won’t come back from the army, but patches the clothes he left just in case.

As Forrest Gander recently writes in his review of Weinberger’s book in the Los Angeles Review of Books, this poem “could as easily reference Chang’an, where Tu Fu lived in the Tang dynasty, as Ukraine in 2024.”

Timeless Du Fu.

春望杜甫
國破山河在，城春草木深。
感時花濺淚，恨別鳥驚心。
峰火連三月，家書抵萬金。
白頭搔更短，渾欲不勝簪。

I think it is safe to say that all Chinese people know Du Fu’s poem “Spring Scene,” written in 757, just months after the collapse of the Tang dynasty during the An Lushan Rebellion. The emperor had fled the capital and so too did Du Fu attempt to flee—only to be captured by the rebels and brought back to the city, where he was held in captivity. The events would see him lose a beloved child to starvation and cause him to wander from place to place with his family trying to find somewhere safe to plant a garden. It wasn’t all bad, of course, but his was a tough life—and this struggle is something that can be felt in all his poems, which constantly remind us that if life is this hard for him, imagine what it must be like for those of a less comfortable background?

Wood takes some time to try and imagine what it is like to read a Tang poem. And he makes the point that reading in classical Chinese was necessarily a more creative activity than we experience reading modern poems with clearly stated pronouns and grammatical inflections. Ancient Chinese is highly abbreviated. At first glance looking at a Tang poem, one sees what appears as a series of nouns. A modern reader, then, is forced to make some interpretations— adding verb tense and connective terms, for example. Readers must actively “fill in the blanks”—and as Wood insists, this was something ancient Chinese readers had to do as well.

Because modern Japanese makes use of so many Chinese characters, as a Japanese translator “Spring Scene” is mostly intelligible to me. But here is what I see:

country broken/ mountains rivers remain
city springtime/grass trees dense

feel times/flowers shed tears
hate partings/birds startle heart

beacon fires/continue three months
home letters/worth 10,000 taels

white hair/ scratch made shorter
about to/hairclip unable hold

There are so many questions. Without pronouns, how do we read the second set of couplets? Are the flowers crying because of the (troubled) times or is the poet feeling sad and wondering if the flowers are not also shedding tears? In Japanese, you don’t need to take a position regarding the pronouns, but you do at least have to add verb endings and some conjunctions.

Weinberger, in his poems, not only follows the basic contours of Du Fu’s life, but he also captures the wonderfully abbreviated quality of Du Fu’s classical Chinese, which is prized for its magnificent sonorous couplets.

They say failure in early life will bring success in the end,
but birds know when they’re tired of flying,
and clouds have no will of their own.

I scratch my head and knock out a hairpin,
more concerned with medicines than poetry.

Around here no one does a thing.
Even minor clerks are surly toward me.

I think if Du Fu read Weinberger’s poem, he would see his own “Spring Scene” reflected within it beautifully. There is the couplet-esque “birds tired of flying” and “clouds with no-will-of-their-own.” We also meet the scratching man with his hairpin again; a poet who is now so worn down by the world that he cares more about medicine than poetry.

Weinberger’s poetry also captures Du Fu’s unsettling —almost hallucinatory— juxtaposition of images. Here is Weinberger evoking Du Fu’s Autumn Meditations:

Mt. Wu lit up by the moon.
Who put the stars up there?

I thought of the story of the blind man in the Nirvana Sutra. A doctor shaved his eyeballs with a golden scalpel and cured him, but he did not know how to see.

Of course, Weinberger is very good at this. In his 2016 book, written with Octavio Paz, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he analyzes the opening lines of a poem by Wang Wei, beginning with the literal translation:

Empty/mountain(s) [or]hills/negative/ to see/person [or] people

From this launching off point, the translator has countless choices to make. And clearly Weinberger finds that fun. Like Wood, Weinberger is not a Sinologist, and it is not clear how much Chinese he can read. But for whatever reason, some of the greatest “translations” of Tang poets are written by non-Chinese readers—famously starting with Ezra Pound, the list includes translations by Kenneth Rexroth and my own favorite David Young, whose Du Fu: A Life of Poetry I cannot recommend enough.

For even more exploration of what it is like to translate Du Fu, there is A Little Primer of Tu Fu, by David Hawkes, which does what Weinberger does in his study of the Wang Wei Poem and analyzes translation choices for 30 such poems by Du Fu.

As all Du Fu translators say again and again: over a thousand years separates us from the Tang dynasty. And yet the poet’s voice remains clear and timely. It is perhaps not surprising that both Weinberger and Wood came to study Du Fu during the sad days surrounding the pandemic and lockdown; for this was also a time when the world felt full of suffering and death—again it was pain falling disproportionately hard on the less privileged. Then, as now, poets can only watch and bear witness as the world falls apart outside their windows. And like many poets —and people— before and after, in the midst of all the terrible violence and chaos, disease and death, Du Fu would locate and celebrate the peace of the natural world.

As Du Fu famously declared in his poem “Spring Scene”: the country might be destroyed, but the mountains and rivers remain 國破山河在

An early poem by Du Fu introduces something of the solace of the simple life—a theme which runs across so much Chinese poetry. In “An Evening Banquet at Mr. Zuo’s Country House,” the poet recalls the darkness unfolding outside the villa, and the sounds of spring water flowing as the fragrance of flowers fills the air. Sounds and smells… Then more sounds arrive from the plucking of a qin, as he feels the dampness of the dew. Above is a constellation of stars. Going inside, much wine is imbibed as precious books and swords are appreciated. Mr. Zuo is a military man and a scholar, so poems are composed and recited. Finally, folksongs are chanted in the dialect of the southern Yangzi River delta (Jiangnan).

It is a magical evening —but what does the poet recall most of all from the evening? The story of Fan Li, a general who lived during the late Spring and Autumn period, in the 5th century BCE. After helping the king win a decisive victory over his enemies, Fan Li refused all rewards and instead boarded a small boat and sailed away, living a life of peaceful seclusion with his wife Xi Shi, one of the great beauties of the time.

Oh, the quiet life…..

夜宴左氏荘（杜甫）

夜宴左氏荘
風林繊月落、衣露浄琴張。
暗水流花径、春星帯草堂。
検書焼燭短、看剣引盃長。
詩罷聞呉詠、扁舟意不忘。

A slender moon sinks into trees —swaying in the wind,
Clothing dampened by dew, I hear the pure tones of a zither.
In the darkness spring water winds a path perfumed by flowers,
As a constellation of spring stars embraces the thatched roof.
Looking things up in books —the candles slowly burn down,
I appreciate a fine sword as another cup of sake comes around.
Reading our poems aloud, we listen to Wu songs being chanted,
Even now I can’t forget someone mentioning Fan Li’s small boat.

Again and again in his poetry, Du Fu reminds us that in times of chaos, the wise person takes to the hills. And it is there, when one quiets the mind and stills the heart, that solace can be found.

Or in the words of Weinberger’s poem:

The moon, the river, the boat, an egret, a fish, a splash, a lamp rocking in the wind.

While Du Fu always said he considered himself to be a Confucian at heart, Wood (following David Hinton) contends that his poetry evoked a deep understanding of Daoist-informed Chan Buddhism.

Certainly, Du Fu was many things.

Weinberger captured something of Du Fu’s rich philosophical outlook in his poem

The war goes on: I live among deer.
I sit out in the moonlight and moonlight shines on my knees.
I sit out even when it rains.

I thought of the sage Wang Hui-Chih who was appointed to the Ministry of Mounts. Asked what his duties were, he said he did not know, but people were always bringing him horses. Asked how many horses, he said a sage doesn’t think about horses.

At the end of his book, Michael Wood reminds us how centuries after the death of Du Fu, China’s great female poet Li Qingzhao would be forced to join the great ride of “panic-stricken refugees flooding south after the fall of Kaifeng in 1127 with her precious scrolls of Du Fu’s poetry.” Lady Li would write of keeping those treasured scrolls clutched to her chest as she fled south. She would later in life —perhaps inspired by Du Fu—take on the sobriquet of a person who is easily satisfied—or someone 易安 “easily contented.”

Du Fu’s lasting fame would have astonished no one more than the great Du Fu himself. It is a miracle that his work even survived, insists Wood. Having watched the great promise of his life fall into a million broken pieces, he must have felt himself to be a failure. And yet a thousand years later an American poet feels so inspired by the man and his life that he writes his own poems in homage, while a British historian writes of being so drawn to him as to visit all the Du Fu literary pilgrimage sites of China. Du Fu’s poems accept the evanescence of a person’s time on earth, exploring the pathos of a life without enduring impact. And yet, one can never know the ultimate impact of one’s life across the stretch of time. Du Fu has surely taught us that.