Selected Poems of Du Fu

Author:
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023150229X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
Du Fu (712–777) has been called China's greatest poet, and some call him the greatest nonepic, nondramatic poet whose writings survive in any language. Du Fu excelled in a great variety of poetic forms, showing a richness of language ranging from elegant to colloquial, from allusive to direct. His impressive breadth of subject matter includes intimate personal detail as well as a great deal of historical information—which earned him the epithet "poet-historian." Some 1,400 of Du Fu's poems survive today, his fame resting on about one hundred that have been widely admired over the centuries. Preeminent translator Burton Watson has selected 127 poems, including those for which Du Fu is best remembered and lesser-known works.

Poems

Author: Li Po
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141915250
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Li Po (AD 701-62) and Tu Fu (AD 712-70) were devoted friends who are traditionally considered to be among China's greatest poets. Li Po, a legendary carouser, was an itinerant poet whose writing, often dream poems or spirit-journeys, soars to sublime heights in its descriptions of natural scenes and powerful emotions. His sheer escapism and joy is balanced by Tu Fu, who expresses the Confucian virtues of humanity and humility in more autobiographical works that are imbued with great compassion and earthy reality, and shot through with humour. Together these two poets of the T'ang dynasty complement each other so well that they often came to be spoken of as one - 'Li-Tu' - who covers the whole spectrum of human life, experience and feeling.

The Selected Poems of Li Po

Author: Bai Li
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811213233
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
There is a set-phrase in Chinese referring to the phenomenon of Li Po: "Winds of the immortals, bones of the Tao." He moved through this world with an unearthly freedom from attachment, and at the same time belonged profoundly to the earth and its process of change. However ethereal in spirit, his poems remain grounded in the everyday experience we all share. He wrote 1200 years ago, half a world away, but in his poems we see our world transformed. Legendary friends in eighth-century T'ang China, Li Po and Tu Fu are traditionally celebrated as the two greatest poets in the Chinese canon. David Hinton's translation of Li Po's poems is no less an achievement than his critically acclaimed The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, also published by New Directions. By reflecting the ambiguity and density of the original, Hinton continues to create compelling English poems that alter our conception of Chinese poetry.

The Selected Poems of Tu Fu

Author: Fu Du
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811211000
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
For over a millennium, Chinese literati have almost unanimously considered Tu Fu (712-770 A.D.) to be their greatest poet.

A Little Primer of Tu Fu

Author: David Hawkes
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9629968991
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
The deepest and most varied of the Tang Dynasty poets, Tu Fu (Du Fu) is, in the words of David Hinton, the “first complete poetic sensibility in Chinese literature.” Tu Fu merged the public and the private, often in the same poem, as his subjects ranged from the horrors of war to the delights of friendship, from closely observed landscapes to remembered dreams, from the evocation of historical moments to a wry lament over his own thinning hair. Although Tu Fu has been translated often, and often brilliantly, David Hawkes’s classic study, first published in 1967, is the only book that demonstrates in depth how his poems were written. Hawkes presents thirty-five poems in the original Chinese, with a pinyin transliteration, a character-by-character translation, and a commentary on the subject, the form, the historical background, and the individual lines. There is no other book quite like it for any language: a nuts-and-bolts account of how Chinese poems in general, and specifically the poems of one of the world’s greatest poets, are constructed. It’s an irresistible challenge for readers to invent their own translations.

The Selected Poems of Tu Fu: Expanded and Newly Translated by David Hinton

Author: Tu Fu
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228398
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
A new and substantially expanded version of Hinton’s landmark translation of Tu Fu, published on the thirtieth anniversary of that original edition A newly translated and substantially expanded version of Hinton’s landmark Tu Fu, published on the thirtieth anniversary of the original edition Tu Fu (712–770 C.E.) has for a millennium been widely considered the greatest poet in the Chinese tradition, and Hinton’s original translation played a key role in developing that reputation in America. Most of Tu Fu’s best poems were written in the last decade of his life, as an impoverished refugee fleeing the devastation of civil war. In the midst of these challenges, his always personal poems manage to combine a remarkable range of possibilities: elegant simplicity and great complexity, everyday life and grand historical drama, private philosophical depth and social engagement in a world consumed by war. Through it all, his is a wisdom that can only be called elemental, and his poems sound remarkably contemporary: Leaving the City It’s bone-bitter cold, and late, and falling frost traces my gaze all bottomless skies. Smoke trails out over distant salt mines. Snow-covered peaks slant shadows east. Armies haunt my homeland still, and war drums throb in this far-off place. A guest overnight here in this river city, I return again to shrieking crows, my old friends.

The Selected Poems of Wang Wei

Author: Wei Wang
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811216180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
David Hinton, whose much-acclaimed translations of Li Po and Tu Fu have become classics, now completes the triumvirate of China's greatest poets with The Selected Poems of Wang Wei.

Reconsidering Tu Fu

Author: Eva Shan Chou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521028280
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
This work studies one of China's greatest poets, Tu Fu, as both cultural icon and literary genius.

The Selected Poems of Po Chü-I

Author: Juyi Bai
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811214124
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Po Chu-i (772-846 C.E.) is the quintessential Chinese poet. For although clear thought and depth of wisdom inform the work of all major Chinese poets (as opposed to the complexity and virtuosity often valued in the West), Po makes clarity itself his particular vision.

Poems of the Late T'ang

Author:
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590172575
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Classical Chinese poetry reached its pinnacle during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and the poets of the late T'ang-a period of growing political turmoil and violence-are especially notable for combining strking formal inovation with raw emotional intensity. A. C. Graham’s slim but indispensable anthology of late T’ang poetry begins with Tu Fu, commonly recognized as the greatest Chinese poet of all, whose final poems and sequences lament the pains of exile in images of crystalline strangeness. It continues with the work of six other masters, including the “cold poet” Meng Chiao, who wrote of retreat from civilization to the remoteness of the high mountains; the troubled and haunting Li Ho, who, as Graham writes, cultivated a “wholly personal imagery of ghosts, blood, dying animals, weeping statues, whirlwinds, the will-o'-the-wisp”; and the shimmeringly strange poems of illicit love and Taoist initiation of the enigmatic Li Shang-yin. Offering the largest selection of these poets’ work available in English in a translation that is a classic in its own right, Poems of the Late T’ang also includes Graham’s searching essay “The Translation of Chinese Poetry” as well as helpful notes on each of the poets and on many of the individual poems.