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Du Fu and
Chinese poetry |
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Du
Fu (AD 712-70), the greatest poet of a country devoted
to poetry, believed himself a failure. He gained little
distinction in the official examinations, but remained a
minor civil servant uprooted by the An Lu-shan rebellion
that destroyed the first T'ang dynasty. He was usually poor,
and occasionally close to starvation. The major turning
points in his life were his meeting and friendship with
Li
Po (701-62), and the civil war, which opened his eyes
to the sufferings of the common people. Li Po was the greater
technician – an astonishing technician – but it's
Du Fu's humanity that speaks across the centuries.
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Chinese poetry |
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Classical
Chinese poetry is well known through translations by
Ezra Pound,
Arthur Waley and others.
Pound's
theories were wrong, unfortunately, and however beautiful
the translations, they convey almost nothing of the original.
Chinese is a compact but allusive language, and its poetry
employs devices every bit as complex as European: metre,
rhyme, allusion, imagery, etc. Classical
Chinese poetry is emphatically not written as "free
verse", and in fact has demanding rules and traditions
of its own. Some flavour of the original can be obtained
by reading up on Chinese
conceptions of poetry, and then listening
to the poetry being read while looking at parallel
texts. It'll be an introduction to the difficulties
of translation, and perhaps a door to a very different
civilization.
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Aesthetics of Chinese poetry |
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Chinese poetry often attempts to express what cannot
really be said. Extended verse narratives or dramas
are rare, and the Chinese conceive poetry as a distillation
of allusions to contemporary life and past literature. Or
some do. In fact, Chinese aesthetics is as various as ours,
though employing very
different perspectives. Only the western concept of tragedy
remains undeveloped, as the Chinese do not admire the individual
who pits himself against the world. For a larger view of Chinese
thought try: Traditional
History, R M-W Choy's Read and Write Chinese (1900),
E. Eoyang's Translating Chinese Literature (1995),
T. Huter's Culture and State in Chinese History (1998),
I.P. McGreal's Great Thinkers of the Eastern World
(1995) and Fung Yu-Lan's A Short History of Chinese Philosophy
(1948/76). |
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Books on Chinese poetry |
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Bibliographies are given in the Chinese Poetry section
of the The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics. Readable introductions to Chinese poetry include
Neinhuaser, Hartman and Galer's The Indiana Companion to
Traditional Chinese Literature (1998), A. Cooper's Li
Po and Tu Fu (1973), J.J.Y. Liu's The Art of Chinese
Poetry (1962). B.S. Miller's Masterworks of Asian Literature
(1994), B. Watson's The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry
(1984), S. Owen's The Great Age of Chinese Poetry (1977)
W-L. Yip's Chinese Poetry (1997) and A.C. Graham's
Poems of the Late T'ang (1965). |
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