Du Fu
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Du Fu or Tu Fu (杜甫; pinyin: Dù Fǔ; Wade-Giles: Tu⁴ Fu³), also known as Dù Shàolíng (杜少陵) or Dù Gōngbù (杜工部) (712–770) was a prominent Chinese poet during the Tang Dynasty. His courtesy name was Zǐ Měi (子美).
Along with Li Po (Li Bai), he is frequently called the greatest of the Chinese poets. His own greatest ambition was to help his country by becoming a successful civil servant, but he proved unable to make the necessary accommodations. His life, like the whole country, was devastated by the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, and the last 15 years of his life were a time of almost constant unrest.
Initially unpopular, his works came to be hugely influential in both Chinese and Japanese culture. He has been called "poet historian" and "poet sage" by Chinese critics, while the range of his work has allowed him to be introduced to Western readers as "the Chinese Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Béranger, Hugo or Baudelaire". (Hung p. 1).
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Life
Traditionally, Chinese literary criticism has placed great emphasis on knowledge of the life of the author when interpreting a work, a practice which Watson attributes to "the close links that traditional Chinese thought posits between art and morality" (p. xvii). This becomes all the more important in the case of a writer such as Du Fu, in whose poems morality and history are so prominent. Another reason, identified by the Chinese historian William Hung, is that Chinese poems are typically extremely concise, omitting circumstantial factors which may be relevant, but which could be reconstructed by an informed contemporary. For modern, western readers, therefore, "The less accurately we know the time, the place and the circumstances in the background, the more liable we are to imagine it incorrectly, and the result will be that we either misunderstand the poem or fail to understand it altogether" (p. 5). Du Fu's life is therefore treated here in some detail.
Early years
Most of what is known of Du Fu’s life comes from his own poems. Like many other Chinese poets, he came from a noble family (they claimed descent from the emperor Yao) which had fallen into relative poverty (although Hung estimates that his family income was still eleven times that of an averagely comfortable family). He was born in 712: the birthplace is unknown, except that it was near Luoyang, Henan province (Gong county is a favourite candidate). In later life he considered himself to belong to the capital city of Chang'an.
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As the son of a minor scholar-official, his youth was spent on the standard education of a future civil servant: study and memorisation of the Confucian classics of philosophy, history and poetry. He later claimed to have produced creditable poems by his early teens, but these have been lost.
In the early 730s he travelled in the Jiangsu/Zhejiang area; his earliest surviving poem, describing a poetry contest, is thought to date from the end of this period, around 735. In that year he travelled to Chang'an to take the civil service exam but was unsuccessful, to his surprise and that of centuries of later critics. Hung concludes that he probably failed because his prose style at the time was too dense and obscure. After this failure he went back to travelling, this time around Shandong and Hebei.
His father died around 740. Du Fu would have been allowed to enter the civil service because of his father's rank, but he is thought to have given up the privilege in favour of one of his half brothers.
In the autumn of 744 he met Li Po for the first time, and the two poets formed a somewhat one-sided friendship: Du Fu was by some years the younger, while Li Po was already a poetic star. We have twelve poems to or about Li Po from the younger poet, but only one in the other direction. They met again only once, in 745.
In 746 he moved to the capital in an attempt to resurrect his official career. He participated in a second exam the following year, but all the candidates were failed by the prime minister (apparently in order to prevent the emergence of possible rivals). He married around 752, and by 757 the couple had had five children — three sons and two daughters — but one of the sons died in infancy in 755. From 754 he began to have lung problems (probably asthma), the first of a series of ailments which dogged him for the rest of his life.
In 755 he finally received an appointment as Registrar of the Right Commandant's office of the Crown Prince's Palace. Although this was a minor post, in normal times it would have been at least the start of an official career. Even before he had begun work, however, the position was swept away by events.
War
The An Lushan Rebellion began in December 755, and was not completely crushed for almost eight years. It caused enormous disruption to Chinese society: the census of 754 recorded 52.9 million people, but that of 764 just 16.9 million, the remainder having been killed or displaced. During this time, Du Fu led a largely itinerant life, being kept unsettled by wars, associated famines and imperial displeasure. This period of unhappiness, however, was the making of Du Fu as a poet: Eva Shan Chou has written that, "What he saw around him– the lives of his family, neighbors, and strangers– what he heard, and what he hoped for or feared from the progress of various campaigns– these became the enduring themes of his poetry" (Chou, p. 62).
In 756 Emperor Xuanzong was forced to flee the capital and abdicate. Du Fu, who had been away from the city, took his family to a place of safety and attempted to join up with the court of the new emperor (Suzong), but he was captured by the rebels and taken to Chang’an. In the autumn, his youngest son Du Zongwu (Baby Bear) was born. Around this time Du Fu is thought to have contracted malaria.
He escaped from Chang'an the following year, and was appointed Reminder when he rejoined the court in May 757. This post gave access to the emperor, but was largely ceremonial. Du Fu's conscientiousness compelled him to try to make use of it: he soon caused trouble for himself by protesting against the removal of his friend and patron Fang Guan on a petty charge; he was then himself arrested, but was pardoned in June. He was granted leave to visit his family in September, but he soon rejoined the court and on December 8, 757, he returned to Chang’an with the emperor following its recapture by government forces. However, his advice continued to be unappreciated, and in the summer of 758 he was demoted to a post as Commissioner of Education in Huazhou. The position was not to his taste: in one poem, he wrote:
"I am about to scream madly in the office/Especially when they bring more papers to pile higher on my desk."
He moved on again in the summer of 759; this has traditionally been ascribed to famine, but Hung believes that frustration is a more likely reason. He next spent around six weeks in Qinzhou (now Tianshui, Gansu province), where he wrote over sixty poems.
Chengdu
In 760 he arrived in Chengdu (Sichuan province), where he based himself for most of the next five years. By the autumn of that year he was in financial trouble, and sent poems begging help to various acquaintances. He was relieved by Yen Wu, a friend and former colleague who was appointed governor general at Chengdu. Despite his financial problems, this was one of the happiest and most peaceful periods of his life. In 762 he left the city to escape a rebellion, but he returned in the summer of 764 and was appointed military advisor to Yen, who was involved in campaigns against the Tibetans.
Last years
Luoyang, the region of his birthplace, was recovered by government forces in the winter of 762, and in the spring of 765 Du Fu and his family sailed down the Yangtze, apparently with the intention of making their way back there. They travelled slowly, held up by his ill-health (by this time he was suffering from poor eyesight, deafness and general old age in addition to his previous ailments). They stayed in Kuizhou (now Baidi, Chongqing) at the entrance to the Three Gorges for almost two years from late spring 766. This period was Du Fu's last great poetic flowering, and here he wrote 400 poems in his dense, late style. In autumn 766 Bo Maolin became governor of the region: he supported Du Fu financially and employed him as his unofficial secretary.
In March 768 he began his journey again and got as far as Hunan province, where he died in Tanzhou (now Changsha) in November or December 770, in his 59th year. He was survived by his wife and two sons.
Hung summarises his life by concluding that, "He appeared to be a filial son, an affectionate father, a generous brother, a faithful husband, a loyal friend, a dutiful official, and a patriotic subject."
Works
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Criticism of Du Fu's works has focused on his strong sense of history, his moral engagement, and his technical excellence.
History
Since the Song dynasty Du Fu has been called by critics the "poet historian". The most directly historical of his poems are those commenting on military tactics or the successes and failures of the government, or the poems of advice which he wrote to the emperor. Indirectly, he wrote about the effect of the times in which he lived on himself, and on the ordinary people of China. As Watson notes, this is information "of a kind seldom found in the officially compiled histories of the era" (p. xvii).
Moral engagement
A second favourite epithet of Chinese critics is that of shisheng (詩聖 — poet saint, or poet sage), a counterpart to the philosophical sage, Confucius. One of the earliest surviving works, The Song of the Wagons (from around 750), gives voice to the sufferings of a conscript soldier in the imperial army, even before the beginning of the rebellion; 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 are continuously articulated in the poems on the lives of both soldiers and civilians which Du Fu produced throughout his life.
Although Du Fu's frequent references to his own difficulties can give the impression of an all-consuming solipsism, Hawkes argues that his "famous compassion in fact includes himself, viewed quite objectively and almost as an afterthought". He therefore "lends grandeur" to the wider picture by comparing it to "his own slightly comical triviality" (p. 204).
Technical excellence
Du Fu's work is notable above all for its range. He mastered all the forms of Chinese poetry: Chou says that in every form he "either made outstanding advances or contributed outstanding examples" (p. 56). 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 ("chameleon-like" according to Watson): his earliest works are in a relatively derivative, courtly style, but he came into his own in the years of the rebellion. Owen comments on the "grim simplicity" of the Qinzhou poems, which mirrors the desert landscape (p. 425); the works from his Chengdu period are "light, often finely observed" (p. 427); while the poems from the late Kuizhou period have a "density and power of vision" (p. 433).
Although he wrote in all poetic forms, Du Fu is best known for his lǜshi, a type of poem with strict constraints on the form and content of the work. About two thirds of his 1500 extant works are in this form, and he is generally considered to be its leading exponent. His best lǜshi use the parallelisms required by the form to add expressive content rather than as mere technical restrictions. Hawkes comments that, "it is amazing that Tu Fu is able to use so immensely stylized a form in so natural a manner" (p. 46).
Influence
In his lifetime, and immediately following his death, Du Fu was not greatly appreciated. In part this can be attributed to his stylistic and formal innovations, some of which are still "considered extremely daring and bizarre by Chinese critics" (Hawkes, p. 4). However, as Hung notes, he "is the only Chinese poet whose influence grew with time" (p. 1), and in the ninth century he began to increase in popularity. With time, his innovations began to seem less radical, and hindsight could appreciate the historical aspects of his poems better than his contemporaries. His influence was helped by his ability to reconcile apparent opposites: political conservatives were attracted by his loyalty to the established order, while political radicals embraced his concern for the poor. Literary conservatives could look to his technical mastery, while literary radicals were inspired by his innovations.
Du Fu's popularity grew to such an extent that it is as hard to measure his influence as that of Shakespeare in England: it was hard for any Chinese poet not to be influenced by him. While there was never another Du Fu, individual poets followed in the traditions of specific aspects of his work: Bai Juyi's concern for the poor, Lu You's patriotism, and Mei Yaochen's reflections on the quotidian are a few examples. More broadly, Du Fu's work in transforming the lǜshi from mere word play into "a vehicle for serious poetic utterance" (Watson 1984, p. 270) set the stage for every subsequent writer in the genre.
Beyond China, Du Fu was a major influence on Japanese poetry, and in particular that of Matsuo Basho. In the 20th century, he was the favourite poet of Kenneth Rexroth, who has described him as "the greatest non-epic, non dramatic poet who has survived in any language", and commented that, "he has made me a better man, as a moral agent and as a perceiving organism" (Rexroth pp 135, 137).
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 bringing out the formal constraints of the original without sounding laboured to the western ear (particularly when translating lǜshi), and of dealing with the allusions contained particularly in the later works (Hawkes writes that "his poems do not as a rule come through very well in translation" — p. ix). 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 enjambement 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.
See also
References
- Chou, Eva Shan; (1995). Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521440394.
- Cooper, Arthur (translator); (1986). Li Po and Tu Fu: Poems. Viking Press. ISBN 0140442723.
- Hawkes, David; (1967). A Little Primer of Tu Fu. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9627255025.
- Hung, William; (1952). Tu Fu: China's Greatest Poet. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0758143222.
- Owen, Stephen (editor); (1997). An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393971066.
- Rexroth, Kenneth (translator); (1971). One Hundred Poems From the Chinese. New Directions Press. ISBN 0811201815.
- Watson, Burton (editor); (1984). The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231056834.
- Watson, Burton (translator); (2002). The Selected Poems of Du Fu. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231128290.
External links
- Tu Fu's poems (http://afpc.asso.fr/wengu/wg/wengu.php?l=Tangshi&no=-1&auteur=Du_Fu) included in 300 Selected Tang poems, translated by Witter Bynner
- Du Fu's poems (http://www.chinese-poems.com/du.html) organized roughly by date written; shows both simplified and traditional characters
- Open Directory Project category (http://dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/Authors/D/Du_Fu/)de:Du Fu
es:Du Fu eo:Du Fu fr:Du Fu ja:杜甫 jv:Du Fu nl:Du Fu pl:Du Fu ru:Ду Фу fi:Du Fu zh:杜甫