Eighth Century Chinese Writer Tu Fu Is The Greatest Poet You’ve Never Heard Of

Of all the greatest poets that have ever written, which is the least known to American readers? I would join many others who point to Tu Fu (a.k.a. Du Fu). He wrote 16 centuries ago during the Tang Dynasty, a golden era of Chinese painting, calligraphy, and poetry. Those artists were able to transform the spiritual ideals of Taoism and Buddhism into incredibly intense engagements with nature and ordinary people. Many excelled, but none did it better than Tu Fu.

The American poet/essayist Eliot Weinberger has just published The Life of Tu Fu, a book too eccentric to make the Chinese poet famous in the West, but that is nonetheless resonant with what makes him worth knowing. Weinberger has penned not a standard biography nor a critical study but rather an extended poem that borrows fragments from Tu Fu’s writing and extends them into an impressionistic consideration of his work and life.

In the second section of his book, for example, Weinberger writes:

In the Eastern Capital it is tiring being clever.

 

Chanting poems in the Hall of Gathering Kingfisher

Feathers, drinking in the Pavilion for Gazing at Clouds.

 

They only talk about plum blossoms and never notice

the new shoots of a willow.

The Tang Court’s Eastern Capital was Chang’an, now known as Xi’an. From 705 to 755, it enjoyed half a century of relative peace and prosperity, which allowed its poets and painters to depict a world in harmony with itself.

The great poets Wang Wei and Li Po (aka Li Bai, Li Bo or Rihaku) fashioned splendid poems in that era, but their less talented peers settled for cleverness and formula, turning plum blossoms into tropes without fragrance and ignoring the willow shoots for lacking an assigned symbolic meaning. The ever-roaming Tu Fu spent scant time in court and wrote with greater freedom than any of his colleagues.

Everything changed in 755, when the An Lushan Rebellion unleashed several decades of war and displacement that lasted far past Tu Fu’s death in 770. He was well prepared to find the right words for this altered world, for his own life had long been difficult and unsettled, and he was accustomed to trying to reconcile the detachment and calm of Taoism/Buddhism with the unruly emotions provoked by life’s trials.

His ability to juxtapose tranquility and turbulence resulted not so much in reconciliation as in a rich, rich irony. And that’s why he appeals so powerfully to modern and Western readers.

For example, Tu Fu writes of his exile from Chang’an in the battle-battered region between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in poem translated by Kenneth Rexroth as “A Restless Night in Camp”:

In the penetrating damp

I sleep under the bamboo,

Under the penetrating

Moonlight in the wilderness.

The thick dew turns to fine mist.

One by one the stars go out.

Only the fireflies are left.

Birds cry over the water.

War breeds its consequences.

It is useless to worry,

Wakeful while the long night goes.

Tu Fu employs the Taoist method of clearing the mind of preconceived notions and ego to describe what’s right in front of him in the most direct and vivid terms.

Moonlight pierces the mountain forest. Dew rises as mist. Stars go out. But he can’t ignore the other part of what’s in front of him: the wounds and dangers of war. Men moan and enemies may lurk in the pre-electric night.

“It is useless to worry,” he writes, like the good Taoist he is. But that line turns ironic when he concedes that nonetheless his nerves jangle and he can’t sleep.

Rexroth, who was a kind of encouraging uncle to the Beats, was a fine poet himself and an advocate for and translator of many Chinese poets. In the postscript to his influential 1971 anthology, One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, he wrote, “Tu Fu is, in my opinion, and in the opinion of a majority of those qualified to speak, the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language. Sappho, for instance, can hardly be said to have survived. He shares with her, Catullus and Baudelaire, his only possible competitors, a sensibility acute past belief.”

To that short list of poetic minimalists, I would add Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca and Louise Gluck, but Rexroth’s point is well taken.

Again and again, Tu Fu turns his observational focus on a scene and finds words so we can see it too—even if we are miles and centuries away.

Because he is showing us the lotus blossom, the curving river, or the brushwood gate without telling us how we should feel or think about them.  We readers confront their essential thingness as if they were in front of us. When he adds a single line of emotion or context, we can make the unspoken connections—which mean that much more because we have made them.

In a poem that translator David Hinton calls “Facing Night,” Tu Fu writes:

in farmlands outside a lone city, our

River village sits among headlong waters.

Deep mountains hurry brief winter light

Here. Tall trees calming bottomless wind,

Cranes glide in to {cq} misty shadows. Sharing

Our thatch roof, hens settle in. Tonight,

Lamplight scattered across koto and books.

All night long, I can see through my death.  

I cannot speak or read Chinese, so like most Westerners, I’m at the mercy of translators.

In an earlier book, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Weinberger uses a single poem of four lines with five ideograms each to examine the challenges of moving a poem from one language to another. In the first three two-page chapters he gives us Wang’s original Chinese poem in its calligraphic, sonic, and transliteral forms. Then he examines 16 different translations of that poem and comments on the successes and failures of the translators—often in the same rendition.

Of an early version, Weinberger writes, “In line four, ambiguity has been translated into confusion: Fletcher’s line has no meaning.” Of another, he says, “Where Wang is specific, Brynner’s Wang seems to be watching the world through a haze of opium reflected in a hundred thimbles of wine.” On the other hand, Weinberger is willing to forgive the liberties Rexroth takes, because it is so close “to the spirit, if not the letter of the original: [it’s the] the poem Wang might have written had he been born a 20^th century American.”

Tang Dynasty poetry had a huge impact on American poetry in the early 20^th century. When Ezra Pound published his translations of Chinese poetry in the slim, 1915 volume, Cathay, the emphasis on unmediated, sharply perceived images had the same impact on poets as Japanese woodblock prints had on painters. The resulting Imagism movement included such poets as Pound, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell and H.D. The Imagists were succeeded by the Objectivists as Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen, who further refined the Chinese influence.

In Nineteen Ways, Weinberger calls Gary Snyder’s version of Wang’s poem “surely one of the best translations, partially because of Synder’s lifelong forest experience. Like Rexroth, he can see the scene. Every word of Wang has been translated, and nothing added, yet the translation exists as an American poem.”

David Hinton, perhaps the most widely read English translator of Chinese poetry in this century, is a kindred spirit to Snyder. Both men are knowledgeable about and sympathetic to the spiritual beliefs of the Tang Dynasty, and both men stick closely to both the Chinese words and to the in-the-moment clarity of Taoism.

When Hinton published his book, The Selected Poems of Tu Fu: Expanded and Newly Translated, in 2019, he also published a companion volume, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. The latter uses Hinton’s discussion of 19 Tu Fu poems as a way to explain the spiritual and philosophical mindset that informed both the content and methodology of Tang Dynasty poems to Western readers.

Hinton argues that Taoism views “all reality as a single tissue,” an undifferentiated nothingness that is constantly generating somethingness, things that “emerge from the existence-tissue as distinct forms, evolve through their lives, and then vanish back into that tissue, only to be transformed and reemerge in new forms.” He further claims that the famous Chinese paintings of mountain peaks emerging from obscuring clouds and the Chinese poems about blossoms emerging from buds or boats from mists are artistic analogues of this religious system.

There’s no question that Tu Fu was a product of his culture, for his poems are littered with references to Taoist precepts and Taoist phrases. But just because a poet uses the religious metaphors of one’s milieu doesn’t mean one is an unconflicted believer—just look at the Catholic Lorca or the Congregationalist Dickinson. The same tension between faith and skepticism we find in their poems are also found in Tu Fu’s. As a result, Hinton’s book is good at describing the tradition Tu Fu was coming out of but not very helpful in understanding the worldview he was moving into.

It’s just that tension between the detached stoicism of the “awakened cosmos” and the irrepressible urges and passions of the human animal in its short lifespan that makes Tu Fu such a fascinating poet. He can bond with the beauty of the present time and place (“Birds are whiter on jade-blue water,” Hinton translates, “against green mountains, blossoms verge toward flame”) and in the next moment be overwhelmed by homesickness (“Spring keeps passing. How long before I return home?”). One doesn’t have to choose between the here-and-now and the there-and-then; their coexistence is inescapable.

Weinberger makes this tension explicit in The Life of Tu Fu:

All things do what they do:

Birds swoop to catch an insect.

Moonlight breaks through the forest leaves.

Soldiers guard the border.

I am trapped in this body.

Tu Fu was homesick a lot. After he failed the imperial exam for government service in 735, he began wandering around inland, central China, visiting other underemployed poet-scholar-monks, usually in isolated monasteries.

After the 755 rebellion, his travels were less voluntary, necessitated by shifting fates of his political allies. He was forced out into the countryside, where the brutality of war and the poverty that fueled it were impossible to ignore. Most of his greatest poems come from these last 15 years of his life.

He wants to be a good Taoist and accept the return to existence-tissue gracefully, but his human body doesn’t want to die. It wants one more cup of wine, one more visit to the wife. These poems, evoking the majesty of China’s wilderness and the sorrow of the unfinished life, are as powerful as any ever written.

Weinberger alludes to this endgame, when he writes:

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.

That’s good, but far better is Tu Fu himself, in Hinton’s translation of “Facing Snow”:

Northern snows overrun T’an-chou. Mongol

Storm clouds leave ten thousand homes cold.

Windblown with scattering leaves, the rain-

Smeared, flakeless snow falls. Though my

 Gold-embroidered purse is empty, my credit

Easily buys drink in silver jars. And with

No one to share the floating-ant wine,

At nightfall, I await the coming of crows.