Reviews

Selected Poems of Du Fu by

sriq's review against another edition

"Yang Guifei, who lived in a palace whose walls were scented with pepper"

"... explains the reference to the bluebird, the traditional bearer of love notes."

"But why heed such talk, let our thoughts grow gloomy?/
While we live and have each other, we'll lift the cup!"

"A silver pick to strum the many-stringed zither,/
a golden fish exchanged for another round of wine./
We'll move as fancy takes us--don't bother to sweep--/
sit wherever we please on the mossy ground."

spacestationtrustfund's review

3.0

This collection of 135 poems by Du Fu (杜甫) was translated by Burton Watson. As Watson notes in his introduction to the text, his selection is limited:

[...] to translations of his works in shi [诗] form, both the “old style” shi forms and the “new style,” or tonally regulated forms. The latter include the four-line jueju [绝句], the eight-line lüshi [律詩], or regulated verse, and the pailü [排律], which is unrestricted in length. (The form and line length of the original are noted in the headings to my translations.) Du Fu also wrote works in the fu [賦], or rhyme-prose form, though his efforts in this form are seldom read today.

(Characters in brackets are my addition.) Watson also comments that, in his translations, he has "endeavored in most cases to stick as closely as possible to the wording and lineation of the original," which I appreciated.

There are many different ways to approach the problems involved in translating Du Fu, which is why we need as many different translations as possible. Any attempt to achieve a translation of his poetry that is wholly satisfactory is an exercise in the impossible, yet even a translation that is only partially successful seems eminently worth striving for. Such is the power and appeal of Du Fu’s work and the importance of its place in world literature that translators, myself among them, will always keep trying.

This is applicable, in my opinion, to any translation of any text. But anyway, despite the usual disappointing hallmarks of a Chinese-to-English translation (loss of ambiguity, increased syllabic and metric length, no pictorial nuance, etc.), there were quite a few major benefits to this particular collection. Although Watson does not include the original text of the poems alongside his translations, he does use footnotes and endnotes frequently, and leaves untranslated certain culturally specific words (琴 for example is left as "qin" with a footnote explaining that it is "a horizontal stringed instrument like a zither or Japanese koto").

I picked one of the poems at random to dissect; this is "On a Spring Day Thinking of Li Bai" (春日憶李白, spring-day-recall-Li-Bai):

Li Bai—poems unrivaled,
thought soaring airborne, never banal:
the freshness, newness of Yu the Commander,
the rare excellence of Adjutant Bao.
Here by the northern Wei, springtime trees;
east of the Yangzi, clouds at the close of day—
when will we share a cask of wine,
once more debate the subtleties of the written word?

Watson's initial notes are that the poem was in five-character regulated verse, "written around 746, when Du Fu was in Chang'an near the Wei River and Li Bai was in the region of Wu southeast of the Yangzi." The footnotes explain that "Yu Xin (513–581), who held the title of Commander Unequaled in Honor, and Bao Zhao (414–466), who held a military post late in life, were two of the most distinguished poets of the period preceding the Tang." This is the original poem, in traditional characters:

　　白也詩無敵，飄然思不群。
　　清新庾開府，俊逸鮑參軍。
　　渭北春天樹，江東日暮雲。
　　何時一樽酒，重與細論文。

And, as I always do, broken down character-by-character:

Bai / also / poetry / not- / -enemy, 1 / float- / -in air 2 / think / not / flock
clear- / -fresh 3 / Yu / open- / -government, 4 / beautiful- / -elegant 5 / Bao 6 / join- / -army 7
Wei (river) / north / spring / heaven / tree, / east- / -bank 8 / day / dusk- / -cloud 9
what- / -time 10 / one / bottle / wine, / heavy / and / detailed / discuss- / -language 11

Overall, pretty solid. The last line in Watson's translation (the equivalent being the final five characters in Du Fu's poem) takes the most liberties, in my opinion. Again, nearly all of the ambiguity inherent in the original poem is lost when the text is moved into English. As unfortunate as this situation may be, it remains (to the best of my knowledge) inevitable.

1 無敵 invincible
2 飄然 floating in the air
3 清新 fresh, innovative, elegant
4 開府 to be allowed to create one's own secretariat
5 俊逸 beauty and elegance
6 鮑 abalone
7 參軍 enlist
8 江東 the east bank of the Yangtze river
9 暮雲 clouds at sunset, twilight, dusk
10 何時 when
11 論文 thesis, dissertation, treatise: 論 n. theory, view; v. discuss + 文 n. culture, language; adj. refined, literary

eely225's review against another edition

4.0

Like most poetry, it deserves to be read slowly, a few at a time. Not every piece hits home, of course, as I can only relate to an 8th century Chinese aristocrat surviving a civil war to so certain a degree. That being said, I could relate much better than I'd thought. The volume clearly evokes the simple language of melancholy that bridges the gap in experience. Since poetry is so hard to describe out of context, especially for a novice like me, I'll end by simply giving the author his due and including a quote from the second half of poem 62:

"Here in the mountains a scholar, friend from old times;
all our talk is of the past, painful to recall.
Ah-ah, song of the seventh-- hush, leave off singing!
Look up at the heavens as the bright sun hurries by."