Tu Fu

Dù Fǔ (杜甫, Wade-Giles: Tu Fu), also known as Dù Shàolíng (杜少陵) or Dù Gōngbù (杜工部) (712 - 770) was a Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty; his courtesy name is 子美 (pinyin: Zǐ Meǐ).

He was born in Gong County, Henan, China. He has been called 詩聖, meaning saint of poetry, and along with Li Bai, he is generally acknowledged as the greatest of the Chinese poets. He also influenced the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. He is particularly known for his humane response to the wars and political crises through which he lived, and for the range of his poetry; William Hung (p. 1) notes that he has been called "the Chinese Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Béranger, Hugo or Baudelaire".

Table of contents

1 Life
2 Works

2.1 History
2.2 Moral engagement
2.3 Technical excellence

3 Translation
4 Further reading

4.4 Reference
4.5 See also
4.6 External link

Life

Most of what is known of Du Fu’s life comes from his own poems. He travelled for a time in eastern China, before briefly seeking a civil service position in the capital in 735, and moving there permanently in 746. He married and had at least two sons and two daughters. From 755 onwards, he led a largely itinerant life, being kept unsettled by wars, associated famines and imperial displeasure. He left Chang'an in 759, moving to Qinzhou (in Gansu province), then in 760 to Chengdu (Sichuan province). He lived intermittently in Chengdu until 765. Thereafter, he travelled east down the Yangtse river, settling for some time in Kuizhou (Sichuan province), and dying in Tanzhou (Changsha) in 770.

Works

His works are characterised by: a strong sense of history; moral engagement; and technical excellence.

History

Du Fu’s life and works were both shaped by his historical context. The An Lushan Rebellion broke out in 755 and unrest continued intermittently until long after Du Fu’s death.

Du Fu himself firmly supported the government. Although his own attempts to participate in the central government were unsuccessful, he saw the imperial government as the only hope for the Confucian values of stability and order for which he longed.

His life was directly influenced by rebellions during which he was frequently forced to flee advancing rebel forces. He was once captured by rebels when they held the capital, Chang'an. Among his poems are accounts of these journeys, and references to the physical deprivations which he experienced as a result of the continuous fighting, although it is unclear to what extent the poverty to which he refers was real or mere literary convention.

Du Fu’s own worries were also caused in part by his initial failures to join the central government service, and by his lack of success when he did manage to obtain a post. His conscientious but undiplomatic Confucian zeal repeatedly resulted in demotions and periods of exile, which prompted yet more journeys and deprivations.

In addition to Du Fu’s personal brushes with history, Du Fu wrote many poems of advice to the emperor, and commentaries on the military successes and failures of the government forces.

Moral engagement

Du Fu’s frequent references to his own difficulties can give the impression of an all-consuming solipsism. This is balanced, however, by his sensitivity to the sufferings of others. One of his earliest surviving works, The Song of the Wagons (around 750), gives voice to the sufferings of a conscript soldier in the imperial army; this poem brings out the tension between the need of acceptance and fulfilment of one’s duties, and a clear-sighted consciousness of the suffering which this can involve. These themes continuously articulated in the poems on the lives of both soldiers and civilians which Du Fu produced throughout his lifetime.

Technical excellence

Du Fu’s work is notable above all for its range. He mastered all the forms of Chinese poetry. Furthermore, his poems use a wide range of registers, from the direct and colloquial to the allusive and self-consciously literary. The tenor of his work changed as he developed his style and adapted to his surroundings: his earliest works are in a relatively dense, courtly style; those written in Qinzhou (Gansu province) are stark and rugged; the works from his Chengdu period are fresh; while his late works, from the Guizhou period (present day Sichuan province) are again extremely dense.

Although he wrote in all poetic forms, Du Fu is best known for his lǜshi;. He is generally considered to be the leading exponent of this form. His best lǜshi use the parallelisms required by the form to add expressive content, while avoiding excessive formalism.

Translation

There have been a number of notable translations of Du Fu’s work into English. The translators have each had to contend with the same problems of retaining the formal constraints of the original without sounding laboured to the western ear, and with the allusions contained particularly in the later works. One extreme on each issue is represented by Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems From the Chinese. His are free translations, which seek to conceal the parallelisms through emjambment and expansion and contraction of the content; his responses to the allusions are firstly to omit most of these poems from his selection, and secondly to “translate out” the references in those works which he does select.

An example of the opposite approach is Burton Watson’s The Selected Poems of Du Fu. Watson follows the parallelisms quite strictly, persuading the western reader to adapt to the poems rather than vice versa. Similarly, he deals with the allusion of the later works by combining literal translation with extensive annotation.