10: Scraps of Du Fu

It occurred to me that before I launch into some musings on the specific allusions in Du Fu's "The Beautiful Woman", it would be worth it to talk a bit about Du Fu the man. As one of a very few people occasionally referred to as China's 'Greatest Poet' (the 诗圣 or 诗史 to Li Bai's 诗仙), there is an enormous amount that has been written and surmised about Du Fu. I'm certain that Max and I will both return to him often in the future. For a brief outline of his life, there is of course his wikipedia page, but here's a quick thought on his work:

What we know of Du Fu comes mostly from the 1500 or so of his poems to have survived, themselves scattered pools of the sea of verse he probably wrote. In Du Fu's day, educated men wrote poetry the way we text or blog: for whatever purpose lay before them, in whatever format seemed convenient. Naturally, instead of the choice between Twitter and Wordpress, they chose among a series of strict poetic forms. Certainly also, poetry was not a mass media, and was treated by its writers and readers very differently from the way we treat internet ephemera. The analogy is nonetheless useful when one considers the volume of poetry produced by individuals, most of which was never published, and much of which consisted of reactions by the poet to things he saw, or did, or felt. From Du Fu, then, we have a collection of the best, choice scraps from a lifetime of daily collecting, all carefully arranged in precise lines, selected for purity of thought and precision of placement, both by the author (in terms of what he saved, published, or merely did not destroy), and by the many collectors, preservers, and students of his work since his death. The same can be said of the work of any of the poets represented in the 300 Poems of the Tang, but for Du Fu, a man of particular concern with history, the passing of time, and of the changing society around him, a master of every poetic technology of his age, a man called sometimes the "Poet Historian", it is all the more lovely an image.

I recommend, for a truly good collection of Du Fu translations, David Young's Du Fu: A Life in Poetry.