TU FU, WHO also shows up in internet searches as Du Fu, was the other great Tang Dynasty poet besides Li Po (circa 8th century CE). Weinberger explains in an afterword that this book "is not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images, and allusions in the poetry."
What to make of that description? I don't know. How faithful a portrait of Tu Fu this book is, how close these texts come to recreating Tu Fu's poems in English, whether these texts correspond even roughly to Tu Fu's actual poems--I have no idea.
The book worked for me, though. I think it was Hugh Kenner who wrote of Ezra Pound's Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius that in looking far away from the here and now of Europe during World War I, Pound responded all the more profoundly to the crisis. The Life of Tu Fu is like that. It manages to evoke the mood of the pandemic and the final chaotic year of the first Trump administration--the dislocations, the ruptures, the estrangements, the sense of being in endless free fall--with renderings of the lines and images of a Chinese poet (and beleaguered bureaucrat) who lived thirteen centuries ago.
Soldiers still guard the ruined palace: rats run across the tiles.
A squirrel with folded hands outside his broken nest.
That dandelion in the wind once had roots.
Live like a wren, unnoticed on a high branch, and you'll stay alive.
It's been so many years: I imagine her face, looking at me skeptically.
No comments:
Post a Comment