Was Du Fu (712-750) “China’s greatest poet”? Generations of readers, many of them poets themselves, have certainly thought so. Kenneth Rexroth was even convinced that Du Fu (formerly transliterated as Du Fu — Weinberger retains the old spelling) was “the greatest, non-epic, non-dramatic poet in any language.” Such grand claims would have surprised Du Fu himself, who, in his least confident moments, thought of himself as piece of duckweed floating this way or that way (“Writing My Feelings in Kui on an Autumn Day”). When you read Du Fu’s poetry — by which I mean really read it, beyond the handful of favorites collected in the anthologies — you realize how little concerned he was with “greatness.” Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu, a short book consisting of 58 brief poetic meditations inspired by Du Fu’s work, reminds us, beautifully, that the Chinese poet’s world was made up of little things — a basket of cherries given to him by a neighbor, the layer of mushrooms sprouting on a broken temple wall, the feathers of a kingfisher drifting around an old riverboat, the lone goose, “unnoticed by the crows,” sailing through the clouds, the stray cricket under our bed that sounds so much louder than it did outside. A wanderer during much of his adult life, Du Fu would always pause to take note, in true Zen fashion, of the details of world around him: the patches of snow on the rooftops, a rooster crowing well after sunrise, the plants with thorns that — nature’s revenge! — spring up “only … where people walk.”
Like any seasoned traveler, Du Fu was preoccupied with the rain that muddied the roads he took, the mountain paths he climbed. Some days it rained so hard he thought the fish in the river might drown and the mountain would simply wash away. “The world is damp and dry, damp or dry,” Du Fu intones in one of Weinberger’s recreations, and then recalls how two swallows came into his room to hide from all that unpredictability. “It took them a long time to get here, / escaping the damp and dry of the world like me.” At times, Du Fu felt like a bird himself, comparing himself to the wren, that most resilient of songsters that can make its home almost anywhere: “Live like a wren,” he told himself, “unnoticed on a high branch, and you’ll stay alive.”
Poetry, to Du Fu, was a matter of life or death, the lens through which the fragments of the world would for a moment arrange themselves, as through a kaleidoscope, in meaningful patterns. It was the only guarantee he had of survival: “I chant poems to relieve my sighs,” he wrote in “Far Traveling,” a poem not included in Weinberger’s pastiche.[1] He produced more than 1,400 of such self-consoling poems (altogether 60 scrolls), though many of them also had lighter themes — a night spent drinking with friends, the pleasant sight of beautiful women, preparing some chickens for the market. However, the defining events of Du Fu’s life were the bloody battles that erupted after rebels in 755 toppled the Tang dynasty. The ensuing civil wars killed thirteen million (out of fifty million). In “The T’ang,” a beautiful essay published in 2008, Weinberger conjured the mix of refined decadence and intellectual sophistication that was characteristic of the Tang empire and especially of its capital Chang’an (present-day Xi’an), the largest city in the world at the time, which featured artificial lakes and mountains, parks with imported songbirds, and pleasure quarters with banquet halls and brothels. Forced to flee such gloriousness, Du Fu, the descendant of a wealthy family, spent a decade crisscrossing the country, on foot or on horseback or by boat, heading north, then west, then southwest, then south, sometimes with his family, sometimes without them. The signs of war were everywhere: corpses piled up by the side of the road, houses on fire or abandoned (“Is there anyone still left …?”), the smell of blood wafting in the wind. One of his sons died from hunger. Du Fu’s greatest fear was that he, too, might end up by the side of the road, “and only be remembered for that.”
But the experience of exile, interrupted by intermittent attempts to settle down, fueled Du Fu’s most keenly observed poems. Some of them speak to us today with a rawness that makes us forget how long ago they were written. If Du Fu initially was running away from the rebels, he came to realize that he was also running away from himself. Barely out of his thirties, he began to feel old. As his illnesses (diabetes, rheumatism, asthma) multiplied, the signs of his aging did too: his teeth and hair were falling out (he frequently complains that no hair pin would stick anymore), he got thinner and his hearing dimmer, and he needed a cane to walk. “What does a wren think when the sun goes down?” Du Fu asked in an early poem. His late poems provide an answer of sorts:
I wondered if sparrows no longer twitter,
then realized I’m going deaf.
My mirror is skilled at hurrying old age.
I’ve given up garlic and scallions.
Drinking now makes me ill, so I’ll just watch you,
A little jealous when you fall over.
Weinberger’s poetic montage fuses passages from four different Du Fu poems: “Getting Deaf” (“my ears began to grow deaf last month. / When gibbons cry, my tears for autumn are missing, / sparrows chatter, but my evening sorrow is gone”); “Gloomy” (“I have a mirror, adept at hastening old age”); “Following Deputy Zhang to a Gathering at New Pavilion to Send Off Various Gentlemen” (“I will never change in giving up garlic”); and, finally, one of the many poems Du Fu wrote inspired by a social occasion, a poem with the chatty title “The End of Autumn, My Cousin Su Ying Feasts My Nephews, Case Reviewer Cui, and Sherriff Wei at His Mansion by the River by Night,” which served as the inspiration for Weinberger’s last two lines: “This old man, because drinking makes me ill, / just sits here long, watching you quaff your ale.”
The resulting cut-and-paste job is not, to be sure, a Du Fu poem. But it’s one he very well could have written. The form of Weinberger’s poetic miniatures gestures at Du Fu’s own preference for couplets with five to seven syllables or Chinese characters per line. And there’s that same intense self-absorption, the focus on concrete detail (the sparrows, the garlic, the annoying mirror that makes us look older), the same willingness to fess up to unflattering things about yourself (he is jealous of younger, fitter folk who can still get plastered) — all of it vintage Du Fu. Some of Weinberger’s lines closely echo Du Fu’s or at least mimic how they would sound if properly translated. Others are significantly changed or abbreviated. For example, Weinberger drops the crying gibbons in the passage he borrows from “Getting Deaf” (a reference to the proverb that when gibbons in the Chang Jiang Gorges cry, a traveler will feel homesick and cry, too). Not that Weinberger would ever disclose his sources: The Life of Tu Fu comes without any notes or explanatory appendix. But it is not necessary that the reader perform the same kind of literary sleuthing that I have done. Weinberger’s tour de force through Du Fu’s poetry needs no scholarly apparatus to convey its intentions.
In 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987; 2016), a caustic little volume comparing different English versions of a well-known four-line poem by Wang Wei, another Tang poet, Weinberger comments on the formidable difficulties confronting the translator of ancient Chinese poetry. “No longer even pronounced as its writer would have spoken it,” the poem exists in a realm inaccessible to the English speaker, a thing that is “forever itself, inseparable from its language.” In the Chinese original, nuances of tone, as well as the number of characters per line, both impossible to reproduce in English, determine a line’s meaning. All attempts to reproduce it accurately fall short.
Take the ending of “Thoughts While Travelling at Night” (or “Writing of My Feelings Traveling by Night”) which William Hung gives as “Just a beach gull between heaven and earth” and Stephen Owen, following Du Fu’s syntax more closely, represents as “between Heaven and Earth, single seagull.” Now compare these two translations with the character-by-character rendition offered by David Hawkes, in his classic Little Primer of Tu Fu: “Sky-earth one seagull.” Weinberger recasts the line as “A single seagull, tossed around the in the wind,” but inserts it between two lines that come from other, unrelated Du Fu poems. The first of these, “Peach blossoms in the river current; ducks below the dock,” lifts an image from “River Rain, I Have Thoughts of Zheng of the Household Affairs Service” (“peach blossoms spreading their small pinks”) and fuses it with “ducks below my river deck” from the ornately titled “In West Tower for the Third Time Expecting Magistrate Yan of Dachang To Come Spend the Night and He Doesn’t Come.” And Weinberger’s third line, “It is beneath you never to forget petty slights,” is derived from “The High Red Clouds: A Ballad,” a poem in which Du Fu pleads for harmony in human relationships: “A true man leaves his name for ten thousand years — / to always remember petty slights is not for a noble and worthy man.”
It’s interesting to see how much of Weinberger’s material was harvested from Du Fu’s less well-known works, the countless poems with often long-winded titles triggered by social occasions or news from friends. That’s not a coincidence. Weinberger is asking us to think comprehensively about Du Fu’s work, to not get stuck on a single famous poem or memorable line and take those as reflective of the poet’s entire work — a favorite move in academic readings of poetry, inherited from the New Critics, who taught us to find entire worlds embedded in one luminous detail. Writing poetry, suggests Weinberger, means more than writing poems. And he takes things one step further. Although a seasoned translator himself (especially of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz), in The Life of Tu Fu Weinberger doesn’t really pretend to translate Du Fu’s poems. Instead, his remix of Du Fu’s work transports us beyond the boundaries of individual poems and, as far as that might be possible, into the mind that produced these poems, the whirligig of ideas, echoes, experiences, and stories that, when the mind is ready, pours itself into the shape of a poem and, when that one is finished, does so again and again and yet again — in Du Fu’s case, as we know, over 1,400 times.
But Weinberger has another trick up his sleeve. We know that the capacious storehouse of Du Fu’s mind was stocked also with echoes of other poems, tributes to other people’s stories and experiences:
I thought of Chiang Yen who dreamed that Kung P’o, long dead, appeared and asked for his writing brush back, and after he awoke Chiang Yen never wrote poems again.
I thought of Tsu Yung who, at his examination, wrote a poem of only four lines. Questioned by the examiner, he replied: “That was all I had to say.”
The first thought occurs in a late Du Fu poem called “Stirred by Autumn,” in which the poet reflects on changes in his poetic practice triggered by old age, noting that formerly he had taken his “colored brush” out “upon the atmosphere,” whereas now he was just singing and gazing, his “head hanging in bitterness.” Stephen Owen, in his edition, adds a note summarizing the Chiang Yen story, which Weinberger pulls out of the realm of footnotes and puts into the text of his own poem. Embedded into The Life of Tu Fu, the story becomes part of Weinberger’s meandering transcript of Du Fu’s creative mind, part of the welter of allusions, images, and quotations that he suggests resides there. Weinberger’s purpose in placing this passage close to the end of The Life of Tu Fu, is clear — Du Fu, just like Chiang Yen, has reached the end of his writing life and is laying down his brush.
By contrast, Weinberger’s second “I thought” doesn’t, as far as I can tell, serve as a reference point in any of Du Fu’s works. But it recalls a well-known contemporary story that, having once failed two government service exams himself, Du Fu would have found relatable, a story that, given the right moment, might even have found its way into a Du Fu poem. Just like its companion piece on the same page, the Tsu Yung anecdote also suggests finality, the wisdom — not easy to come by in old age — to stop when one no longer has anything to say. At the same time, since it points us to a possible future poem, the passage also says, on another level, that the process of making poetry never really ends. A poet’s work, The Life of Tu Fu tells us, is about so much more than the individual poems that the poet actually managed to finish. It also consists of all the poems a poet could have written.
One can see now why Weinberger, in the short postscript to his volume, was so adamant that his book be taken not as a translation but, instead, as Du Fu’s “fictional autobiography.” A made-up autobiography, in other words, though infused, as Weinberger admits, with his own experiences, specifically the time spent in virtual isolation during the pandemic. So, not quite made up, then? Weinberger invokes Wen Tianxiang, the 13th-century poet and resistance fighter, who survived his time in prison by chanting Du Fu’s poetry to himself — and then suggests that we replace “prison” with “pandemic” and “chanted” with “read” (and, I would add, “Wen T’ien-hsiang” with “Weinberger”). And there we have it: the perfect book for lockdown, a poetic manual for overcoming despair.
And yet, The Life of Tu Fu is, in the end, neither about the life Du Fu lived nor about the life Weinberger, confined by the virus to his New York apartment, didn’t get to live. It’s about making poetry, to be sure, but in a larger sense it’s about living life, too, life in all its messiness and sadness and wonder. It’s about how staying alive, amidst all the chaos outside and all the chaos inside, means getting old — a truism that becomes a revelation only when it is too late, when we’ve actually really reached the point of no return called old age: the time when we know the sparrows are still singing, as they’ve always done, though they no longer sing to us.
[Published by New Directions on April 2, 2024, 64 pages, $13.95 US paperback]
[1] Quotations not from Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu are either from William Hung, Tu Fu: China’s Greatest Poet (Harvard University Press, 1952) or The Poetry of Du Fu, trans. Stephen Owen, 6 vols. (de Gruyter, 2016), the first edition of all the poems in English. Biographical details follow Michael Wood, China’s Greatest Poet: In the Footsteps of Du Fu (Simon and Schuster, 2023).