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richard_f's review
5.0
Excellent poems, notes, and translation.
It is augmented by the insightful footnotes.
It is augmented by the insightful footnotes.
chasing_dallas's review against another edition
3.0
One challenge I have realized it that poetry is hard to check out from the library because it is difficult to not savor and think and slowly wind your way through a book of poetry. That being said this book was interesting for the footnotes and the added commentary about the poems as the poetry itself. I enjoyed the poetry somewhat but it didn't resonate too deeply for me a few good lines. I might pick it up at some used book store sometime to slowly wander through this poets life.
jeeleongkoh's review against another edition
5.0
Like all the other Chinese scholars of his time, Du Fu aspired to serve the court in the country's vast bureaucracy. He was passed over again and again, and lived with his family in poverty for much of his life, intermittently relieved by the generosity of friends and patrons. The country's loss is poetry's gain. Du Fu might have written as much and as well if he were a high-ranking official (although that is very doubtful), but he would not have been as innovative in his subject matter.
Struggling with the various miseries of poverty, he gained a profound sympathy for the weak and helpless, and wrote wrenching poems about commoner families suffering from devastating warfare. Separated from his family in order to find work, he celebrated in verse the simple joys of playing with his son and watching chickens scratch in the backyard, when he was finally reunited with them. Equally new was his expression of romantic sentiments for his wife. Before Du Fu, feelings of affection were reserved, at least in poetry, for courtesans and male friends. But Du Fu wrote, in "Moonlight Night,":
Tonight
in this same moonlight
my wife is alone at her window
in Fuzhou
I can hardly bear
to think of my children
too young to understand
why I can't come to them
her hair
must be damp from the mist
her arms
cold jade in the moonlight
when will we stand together
by those slack curtains
while the moonlight dries
the tear-streaks on our faces?
The progression of ideas and images is utterly simple and convincing. "Slack curtains" is a masterly touch. It speaks of their financially straitened circumstance as well as their strong longing for reunion, but it does so in an image that gives the opposite impression of tension and strength.
David Young's unrhymed couplets, here and elsewhere in the book, capture very effectively the extensive use of parallelism and caesura in Chinese verse. The minimal punctuation--beginning with a capital letter and ending with a period or question mark--also evokes the openness and suggestiveness of Chinese poetry. Yet the translation reads like a successful English poem.
The translations are arranged in the book according to the chronology of the poet's life. The eleven section titles sum up its course: Early Years in the East, 737-744, Back at the Capital 745-750, War and Rebellion 750-755, Trapped in the Capital 756-758, Reunion and Recovery 758-759, On the Move 759, Thatched Cottage 759-762, More Disruptions 762-765, East to Kuizhou 765-766, The Gentleman Farmer 767-768, Last Days. Young introduces each section with a paragraph of biographical context that, read together with the poetry, gives the sense of a tumultous life.
Struggling with the various miseries of poverty, he gained a profound sympathy for the weak and helpless, and wrote wrenching poems about commoner families suffering from devastating warfare. Separated from his family in order to find work, he celebrated in verse the simple joys of playing with his son and watching chickens scratch in the backyard, when he was finally reunited with them. Equally new was his expression of romantic sentiments for his wife. Before Du Fu, feelings of affection were reserved, at least in poetry, for courtesans and male friends. But Du Fu wrote, in "Moonlight Night,":
Tonight
in this same moonlight
my wife is alone at her window
in Fuzhou
I can hardly bear
to think of my children
too young to understand
why I can't come to them
her hair
must be damp from the mist
her arms
cold jade in the moonlight
when will we stand together
by those slack curtains
while the moonlight dries
the tear-streaks on our faces?
The progression of ideas and images is utterly simple and convincing. "Slack curtains" is a masterly touch. It speaks of their financially straitened circumstance as well as their strong longing for reunion, but it does so in an image that gives the opposite impression of tension and strength.
David Young's unrhymed couplets, here and elsewhere in the book, capture very effectively the extensive use of parallelism and caesura in Chinese verse. The minimal punctuation--beginning with a capital letter and ending with a period or question mark--also evokes the openness and suggestiveness of Chinese poetry. Yet the translation reads like a successful English poem.
The translations are arranged in the book according to the chronology of the poet's life. The eleven section titles sum up its course: Early Years in the East, 737-744, Back at the Capital 745-750, War and Rebellion 750-755, Trapped in the Capital 756-758, Reunion and Recovery 758-759, On the Move 759, Thatched Cottage 759-762, More Disruptions 762-765, East to Kuizhou 765-766, The Gentleman Farmer 767-768, Last Days. Young introduces each section with a paragraph of biographical context that, read together with the poetry, gives the sense of a tumultous life.
st_leo's review against another edition
5.0
As a forewarning, I am not a scholar of Chinese literature. I have never studied it and I consider myself very ill-read (in all senses of the word) in all forms of Chinese literature. These are just my thoughts as a casual enthusiast of fiction and poetry in general, so they may be highly misinformed and lacking in insight.
With that said, this is my favorite translation of Du Fu's poems by far.
In the past, with previous translations, I found that the tone of his words did not match the subject matters in his poems, somehow.
But with Young, Du Fu has found a new voice--a more restrained, abstemious one--that resonates with his poetry more harmoniously than before.
If Du Fu's one distinction that separates him from the rest of his contemporaries is his connection with the non-aristocratic class, as Young notes, then much of what the previous translations seem to miss is that the language--or more specifically, diction--should reflect the portrayals of said common folk. The point is not to disparage their lack of formal education, but display the deceptively simple yet concise uses of everyday words. I feel that Young achieves this quite well.
It is also quite helpful to watch the poems "grow," as they've been arranged chronologically. A lot of his earlier poems are rather affected and conventional for his time, but as time progresses and his disposition changes, he flows into a much more composed and sincere voice.
I may never get to experience the full breadth of his poems in their original forms, but this highly intimate translation does a fine job of exploring a view at Du Fu like never before.
With that said, this is my favorite translation of Du Fu's poems by far.
In the past, with previous translations, I found that the tone of his words did not match the subject matters in his poems, somehow.
But with Young, Du Fu has found a new voice--a more restrained, abstemious one--that resonates with his poetry more harmoniously than before.
If Du Fu's one distinction that separates him from the rest of his contemporaries is his connection with the non-aristocratic class, as Young notes, then much of what the previous translations seem to miss is that the language--or more specifically, diction--should reflect the portrayals of said common folk. The point is not to disparage their lack of formal education, but display the deceptively simple yet concise uses of everyday words. I feel that Young achieves this quite well.
It is also quite helpful to watch the poems "grow," as they've been arranged chronologically. A lot of his earlier poems are rather affected and conventional for his time, but as time progresses and his disposition changes, he flows into a much more composed and sincere voice.
I may never get to experience the full breadth of his poems in their original forms, but this highly intimate translation does a fine job of exploring a view at Du Fu like never before.
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