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 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".
Life
Traditionally, Chinese literary criticism has placed great emphasis on knowledge of the life of the author when interpreting a work, a practice which Burton 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 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 an aristocratic 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). His 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 Chang’an.
Du Fu's mother died shortly after he was born, and he was partially raised by his aunt. He had an elder brother, who died young.
He also had three half brothers and one half sister, to whom he frequently refers in his poems, although he never mentions his stepmother. As the son of an official, his youth was spent on the standard education of a future scholar-official: 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 Bai for the first time, and the two poets formed a somewhat one-sided friendship; we have twelve poems to or about Li Bai 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, 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. It was a minor post, but this was a period of rest compared to what was to follow.
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.
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. 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 moved to Qinzhou (now Tianshui, Gansu province), where he spent around six weeks and 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 spent the winter of 765 in Yun'an, and stayed in Kuizhou (now Baidi, Chongqing, at the entrance to the Three Gorges), from late spring 766 to mid-spring 768. 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
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 Burton 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 (poet saint, or poet sage), a counterpart to the philosophical sage of Confucius. One of the earliest surviving works, The Song of the Wagons (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 lifetime.
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 Burton): 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 Owen comments on the "density and power of vision" of the poems from the late Kuizhou period (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 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 restriction, 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.
Further reading
- Chou, Eva Shan; (1995). Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context. Cambridge University Press.
- Cooper, Arthur; (1986). Li Po and Tu Fu: Poems. Viking Press. ISBN 0140442723.
- Hung, William; (1952). Tu Fu: China's Greatest Poet. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0758143222.
- Owen, Stephen; (1997). An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393971066.
- Rexroth, Kenneth (translator); (1997). One Hundred Poems From the Chinese. New Directions Press. ISBN 0811201815.
- Watson, Burton (translator); (2002). The Selected Poems of Du Fu. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231128290.
External link
- Tu Fu's poems included in 300 Selected Tang poems, translated by Witter Bynner