A Deed of Eternity

When Tu Fu—by common consent the supreme master of classical Chinese poetry, cynosure of all latecomers to that tradition—was but a babe in the crib, a sorceress saved his life. Following his mother’s early death, the great poet was raised by his aunt, and the story goes that in his infancy both he and his little cousin fell ill. Feng shui held the answer: the witchy woman his surely overwrought aunt sent for told her that only the child placed in the southeastern corner of the bedroom would survive. Whereupon the aunt, with a selflessness hard to conceive, lifted her own son out of the crib in that corner and put Tu in his place. Her son died as foretold. Tu lived, and became literature.

Tu lived from 712 to 770, the height of the Tang dynasty. Born into the intellectual elite—his mother a great-great-granddaughter of the dynasty’s founding emperor, his father a government official—he inhabited a rigidly stratified world whose pecking order was reinforced by obsessive genealogical records. One such list, approved by Emperor T’ai-tsung in 638, tracked nearly 300 surnames and ranked more than 1,600 family lineages by their level of prestige. The four noblest families would marry only among themselves. Mysterious forces ruled people’s fates. In Charles Benn’s Daily Life in Traditional China (2002), we read of the following incident: “During construction of a chief minister’s mansion, workmen dug a pit in the northeast corner of the property that disturbed the fengshui and destroyed the future of the mandarin’s sons.” China under the Tang was marked by a love of organization and involuted hierarchy, plus an earthy pragmatism, not to say materialism (the Chinese word for “city” means, literally, walls and markets). Yet it was a superstitious culture, alert for signs and portents, and with an eye and ear for beauty, whether of the scroll—a chief minister of the late eighth century kept a personal library of 30,000 such texts, each written by hand—or of the seraglio, where dwelt beguiling women whose faces bore colorful beauty marks in the shape of birds and flowers, and false eyebrows painted over assiduously plucked skin.

When he was 23 or 24, Tu took the civil-service examination that would have qualified him for a position in the emperor’s administration. Tang society was as far from communism as it was from liberal democracy—a libertarian’s nightmare insofar as it trusted in central planning, everything overseen by an army of administrators ostensibly chosen for their diligence and virtue as well as their smarts, yet a progressive’s dystopia in that the notion of equality (whatever the Tang interest in fairness and justice) was nowhere to be found. Brilliant and learned, Tu should have been a shoo-in for high office. Had he passed the exam—as all his peers nominated by the prefecture did; as he was virtually guaranteed to do, given his brains, upbringing, and connections—there is no telling how conventional he may have become: one more mandarin in a veritable sea of petty sages, compelled by law to remain in office until age 69 (though some bureaucrats served until even riper ages). To serve thus was the common aspiration of his class. Instead, for reasons that are obscure, Tu flunked the test.

Thrown off the expected path, Tu embarked on a peripatetic life that lasted until his fortieth year. His travels furnished him with striking (and now almost proverbial) settings and subjects: rivers and changeability, mountains and monastic solitude. Some 1,400 poems survive of what might have been an even larger corpus. Throughout a life marked by loss, displacement, and deprivation, he felt pulled between two contradictory desires. Service to the emperor was a temporal matter, bringing temporal rewards. Literature, he wrote, “is a deed of eternity.”

***

There is a radical openness to Tu Fu’s poems. Partly this is a matter of language and form: the minimal grammar of classical Chinese poetry (conjunctions are usually absent, as are pronouns) is such that each character arises like an atoll from an ocean of emptiness, bespeaking not only the apparent content of the poem in its unfolding sequence but also the mental state of the poet and, more profoundly, the cosmological conceptions underpinning his verse. Verbal economy in Tang poetry was prized. “It is not just open to silence,” argues the poet and translator David Hinton, who has written extensively on classical Chinese poetry. “It articulates silence.” Tu Fu and other poets were informed by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist philosophy, in which the act of perception was, if not holy, at least spiritual. Hence the legendary intensity of being that Tu’s poems radiate. To Hinton, they feature “things incandescent with their own presence”; here is his translation of Tu’s “Standing Alone”:

Empty skies. And beyond, one hawk.
Between river banks, two white gulls
 
laze wind-drifted. Fit for an easy kill,
to and fro, they follow contentment.
 
Grasses all frost-singed. Spiderwebs
still hung. Heaven’s loom of origins
 
tangling our human ways too, I stand
facing sorrow’s ten thousand sources.

Taoists spoke of creation, the material universe, Being in its countless manifestations, as “the ten thousand things”—here transmuted into multitudinous wellsprings of sorrow, as if mere contact with reality were wounding. (Reader, it is.) In Tu’s verse the outer world is given at least equal standing with the poet’s inner life. The ideal Ch’an meditative state of “empty-mind” or “mirror-mind,” an intense form of awareness, is conceived as the cosmos being conscious of itself, giving back in its pellucid depths the limpid surface (or in its limpid surface the pellucid depths) of the visible. The fleeting arrangement of objects and people captured in a poem reflects the fabric of existence itself in its endless becoming.

Remarkably, Tu’s poetry rarely expounds on such principles. It is neither proselytizing nor, usually, polemical. Rather, he takes Taoist/Ch’an wisdom as given, as the armature on which he molds his art. While this has made his full greatness inaccessible to English readers, in Chinese it has the paradoxical effect of making Tu seem not less but more enlightened, as if—in true Ch’an fashion—he had already mastered the precepts and moved beyond them, into a lived experience of penetrating insight. Memorized by Chinese schoolchildren (for whom the 18th-century anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems is a basic text), Tu is yet revered by sophisticates. He not only wielded effortlessly every poetic form available to him, from imagistic lyrics a mere four lines long to extended narratives and multi-part sequences, but he also transformed the notion of what a poet could be, of the subjects proper to his purview. One aspect of his achievement is to have been a kind of historian in verse, the only one of his contemporaries to record the upheaval all around him. Even late in life, “a lone old grief-sung man,” turning out poems as plangent and renunciatory as John Keats’s epitaph, he remained the moral conscience, perhaps even—to use Saint-John Perse’s memorable phrase—the bad conscience of his age.

***

Faced with the cultural riches of the Tang, it is nearly impossible not to speak of the dynasty as Chinese historians and professional Sinologists traditionally do: as a golden age. It was one of the most cosmopolitan periods of Chinese history, before or since. During this time Ch’an Buddhism reached the zenith of its cultural influence and the 10-foot-high walls of Ch’ang-an, the imperial capital, enclosed as many as one million souls—enough at the time to rank it among the world’s largest cities. The complex efflorescence of the Tang—comprising dramatic advances in art, literature, jurisprudence, and civil society, as well as technological breakthroughs—left a permanent impress on the dynasties that followed. The Tang code of law, dating to 637, held sway for 670 years, until the Ming dynasty at last modified it; fully two-fifths of it remained in force until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. It was during the Tang dynasty that printing was developed, gunpowder was invented, and tea went from being a medicinal beverage to the national drink. It was during the Tang that China’s two greatest poets, Tu Fu and Li Po, lived and wrote. It was during the Tang that China, in many respects, became China.

How to conjure that gone brightness? Variously extravagant and mundane, the teeming ingredients of the incantation one would need are as manifold and contrary as life itself: tea-drinking mandarins and royal eunuchs, grand mansions and pastry shops, figured silks and sumptuary laws, mulberry groves and bird massacres, lunar festivals and frightening eclipses (during which the residents of Ch’ang-an tried to keep the moon from being devoured); pleasure gardens of evergreens and red-flowering crabapples, trained elephants and the hundred diversions of all-day banquets, lavish feasts of bear paws and pheasant soup, rice wine and infant mice (stuffed with honey and consumed alive). . . . It would be a spell compounded of fragrant aloeswood and mounted archers, jade statues and polo grounds, colleges of law and mathematics and calligraphy, meditation halls and bathhouses, cockfighting arenas and ancestral shrines, assassins and physiognomists, frontier garrisons and foreign dance troupes, magic mirrors and priceless paintings on gold rollers. . . . It would be the invocation of an empire capacious enough for both high secretariats and branded slave girls, for grand libraries and grander harems, bibliomanes and illusionists, exorcists and geomancers, Grandees of Radiant Emolument and Superior Pillars of State; an empire rich in sacred mountains, holy relics, and smugglers (using coffins to transport contraband), where, side by side, Buddhist monasteries and Taoist abbeys and Zoroastrian churches held sway, where cosmopolitan learning and religious fanaticism flourished; a society mortared by sex manuals, concubines, and marriage for life, shot through with the Ten Abominations (the worst crimes in the Tang legal code), and dazzled by trees of gold; an army the grand stratagems of which were miniatured in board games played out in shafts of sunlight tinted by silk windows. . . . One would need, finally, to call up a floating world peopled by Confucian scholars and regicides, fraudulent priests, venal princesses, and registered courtesans wearing lip gloss made from cinnabar and ground-up mollusk shells; a legendary age of parade floats, summary executions, self-flagellation, autocremation, hungry ghosts, and gods.

And poetry. Reigning over this imbroglio as supreme art and pastime, poetry writing from 680 onwards formed the heart of the jinshi, the highest degree of the civil-service examination, which was the royal road to plum positions in the Tang bureaucracy. During this time, the jinshi reportedly had a pass rate of just one or two percent; among the more famous recipients is the Tang poet and politician Tu Mu. Perhaps never before or since has poetry held such an exalted place beside the seat of power.

Nevertheless, it was no more practical to make a living by writing poetry in ancient China than it is today. For centuries most poetry was a diversion of the cultured elite, turned out in royal courts and salons. It was, as Mark Edward Lewis writes in China’s Cosmopolitan Empire (2009), “a mode of elite conviviality, where both Confucian moralizing and the independence of the recluse were considered unforgivably boorish.” He describes the severe strictures under which, in the Sui and early Tang dynasties, such hidebound compositions were produced:

Rigidly circumscribed with respect to topic, diction, structure, and occasion, it was a mode of social discourse where members of the elite competed to see who could most rapidly compose poems with set themes and rhymes. Winners received prizes, while the slowest paid a forfeit.... Vocabulary was limited and marked by recurring elegant terms, and the use of everyday words was considered vulgar. Ornament was preferred to simplicity and indirect suggestion to explicit statement.

Gradually, however, through a confluence of factors—including the Empress Wu’s patronage of several poets from humble backgrounds, and the adaptation of court poetry by writers in distant provinces—Chinese verse opened up, becoming more emotional and personal, less bound by rigid notions of decorum; an art form at once more supple and more deeply serious. But it was still not the great art of the High Tang nor the art of Tu Fu, Li Po, and Wang Wei. To forge in verse a new consciousness, to expand further the possibilities of Chinese poetry—and none did more to expand them than Tu—these writers had first to assimilate the great examples of the past. Chief among them was the work of eremitic poet T’ao Ch’ien, also known as Tao Yuanming (365–427), who had gladly forsaken a political career for the bucolic pleasures of farming, wine-drinking, and family life. Choosing the cognomen Ch’ien (“Recluse”), he made plain his disavowal of worldly ambition. Plain, too, were his poems, small masterpieces marked by immediacy and simple diction, marvels of “the natural voice,” lyrical yet unadorned. Impoverished and modest in his own day, T’ao, in being rediscovered, assumed a central, indeed an exalted, place in Chinese literature. “It was [T’ao], more perhaps than anyone else,” critic David Bentley Hart suggests, “who bequeathed to classical Chinese literature its most central aesthetic values: its immediacy, its limpidity, and its veneration of nature.”

Tu Fu, whose vivid nature imagery burns like white phosphorus across wide chasms of language and time, must have learned a great deal from T’ao, as both a poet and a man; the contemplative retirement T’ao chose willingly, Tu would later choose under duress, while lacking the comfort and safety of a stable home to contentedly hymn. (One poem relates how an autumn wind tore bundles of thatch off his roof, exposing his family to drenching rain; another, how the 200-year-old tree whose presence had made the spot an auspicious homesite was ripped out root and branch by a raging storm.) But Tu’s subject matter ranged far beyond his predecessor’s rustic tranquility, just as his syntax dared poetic inversions T’ao would never have attempted, admitting degrees of ambiguity hitherto unknown:

Chest heaving breathes out cloud, and eyes
open dusk bird-flight home.

Nor, from middle age on, did Tu restrict himself to the sort of overtly “poetic” subjects that might yield facile epiphanies. He admired the older Li Po, to whom he addressed several verses, but as he aged, he seems to have been assailed by doubts about the value of his poetic labors, the labors to which he had devoted himself in place of the expected high office. “How could poems bring honor?” he asks. Can he really not have known? Chinese poetry had evolved into a beautiful and complex art, capable of expressing intense emotions and profound philosophical insights—due in no small part to Tu’s own masterful efforts. “Since there have been poets,” reads Yüan Chen’s funerary inscription for his predecessor, “there has never been Tu Fu’s equal.” Yet even as dozens of deathless poems bled from his brush, the High Tang was ripening toward ruin.

***

In 712, the year of Tu Fu’s birth, the emperor Illustrious August (Xuanzong or Hsüan-tsung) began his nearly 44-year reign, which proved to be a time of unprecedented peace, prosperity, artistic achievement, and government rectitude. When civil war broke out in 755, shattering this gilded peace, Tu was 43, and seemed at last to be making up for lost time. Having struggled for years to obtain a worthy appointment, he had reason to feel relieved: word of his brilliance had reached the emperor, and he was given a special examination in 752, which he passed. Despite the reputation this won him, however, more fruitless months followed, months of famine and want, during which a government job, and, with it, financial stability, was slow in coming.

By now Tu was married, to a woman some 20 years his junior, with whom he had five children. Leaving them to shelter in a village north of the capital, he returned alone to Ch’ang-an, where he managed finally to secure a distinguished post: advisor to the crown prince. Success at last! But taking the road north again to collect his family, he discovered that one of his sons had starved to death. Mourning, Tu was merciless with himself; in a poem about the tragedy, he rends his Taoist detachment like a garment:

My dear wife in a strange place, sheltering
our family from wind and snow: why did I
 
leave them so long alone? Thinking we’ll
at least all be together again going without,
 
I come home to sounds of weeping, wailing
cries for a child stone-dead now of hunger.
 
Neighbors sob in the street. And who am I
to master my grief like some sage, ashamed
 
even to be a father—I whose son has died
for simple lack of food?

His awareness of his position is bitter—the privilege of a fortunate birth has not saved him from disaster. Yet his thoughts turn sympathetically to those more ill-favored still: the poor, who have lost so much, and the dead, who in distant borderlands have lost everything:

Son of an untaxed family, not dragged off
to make someone’s war, I have lived a life
 
charmed, and still too sad. O but the poor
grieve like vast wind across ravaged trees:
 
those who’ve lost all for war, those on far
frontiers dead, they wander dark thoughts,
 
and elusive engines of grief still loom like
all South Mountain, heave and swing loose.

The famously wide scope of Tu Fu’s art, his emotional range encompassing every dimension of experience, matched with his deep feeling for Taoist/Ch’an principles, sets his work apart from the contemplative lyrics and nature poems of his great precursors. From this point on his poems grow more complex, his empathy and vulnerability more pronounced, his mastery of his literary resources more complete. Yet in a black late poem, Tu calls himself “savant useless”—as well a father might whose son had died of hunger at home while he was a long way off, seeking distinction in the emperor’s service, constrained by circumstance, unburdening his calligraphic brush of immortal verses.

Worse was to come: the bloodletting on China’s borders, in battles with foreign rivals, gave way to civil war. The illiterate half-Turkish governor An Lu-shan, who commanded defense forces in the northeast, rose in revolt, swiftly capturing the cities of Lo-yang and Ch’ang-an. He proclaimed himself emperor and forced the rightful ruler, Illustrious August (once a diligent sovereign, now a sybarite hopelessly besotted with his favorite consort), to flee in the night. Sweeping into Ch’ang-an, rebel forces looted the imperial palaces and treasuries and partook in the sort of inspired tortures and capital punishments into which an unfathomable quantum of humanity’s creative potential down the long ages has been lustily poured. In full view of the public, royal ladies had their hearts ripped out; other enemies of the rebellion suffered the tops of their heads to be torn off with iron claws. Loyalist families were liquidated “down to the smallest infant,” as one commentary has it. Imperial officials were rounded up by the hundreds as prisoners of war.

Tu likely witnessed these savage crimes. In 756, while disguised as a peasant, he tried to make his way to the court of the new emperor (the former crown prince) beyond the Great Wall at Lingwu, more than 400 miles northwest of Ch’ang-an. He was captured by rebels. Marched off to the occupied capital instead, Tu found himself trapped there for nearly a year, forced to hide his identity, his hope of a great career again wrecked, with no word of the family he had once again been forced to leave behind, this time at Fuzhou, over 200 miles to the north. He contracted malaria, a disease that recurred throughout his life. It is not known precisely how he survived. But it is in these dire straits that Tu’s voice towers up from his hiding place, answering barbarity with the formal perfection of “Spring Landscape,” a poem in what is called Regulated Verse—eight lines in four couplets, the first of which is one of the most famous openings in all Chinese poetry:

The country in ruins, rivers and mountains
continue. The city grows lush with spring.
 
Blossoms scatter tears for us, and all these
separations in a bird’s cry startle the heart.
 
Beacon-fires three months ablaze: by now
a mere letter’s worth ten thousand in gold,
 
and worry’s thinned my hair to such white
confusion I can’t even keep this hairpin in.

The monumental indifference of mutable nature, fully realized in the first couplet, shades with complex irony the lovely anthropomorphism of the third and fourth lines, wherein the flora and fauna who care nothing for us seem to weep for the poet’s troubles, evoking with dewdrops and bird cries the vexed world of human loss and longing, even as the poet evokes in the depthless mirror of his art the ten thousand things of wild nature sufficient to itself. Beacon-fires: a state of emergency for three months straight. “A letter from home would be worth a fortune” is late Oxford professor of Chinese David Hawkes’s prose translation of the sixth line: Tu had no idea what had become of his wife and children, abandoned in a region likely to be overrun. We have both feet firmly in human society now, and the poem which began in such a magisterial vein ends on a note of self-mockery: Tu Fu as a ridiculous old man, losing his looks, worrying himself bald. Playing like a virtuoso upon the strict requirements of his form, including verbal parallelism and antithetical lines, Tu produced a masterpiece.

***

Years of unending conflict burned the High Tang to ash. No sooner was the rebellion put down, in 763, than the Tibetans invaded from the west, briefly occupying Ch’ang-an and installing a prince of their own choosing on the throne. They annexed the northwest territories of China proper—seizing the richest pasturage in the empire—and kept control of them until the 840s. An age of militarism dawned: hundreds of thousands of men were conscripted to join the fighting, while provincial governors in the decades after the rebellion operated as de facto warlords, maintaining their own armies and paying taxes to the crown sporadically at best. According to Benn, “The government lost control of 25 to 30 percent of the population,” along with the revenues it would otherwise have received from them. Before the rebellion, the census had counted 53 million people; afterward the tally was a mere 17 million. By the end of Tu Fu’s life, 36 million Chinese had been either killed or displaced.

Prior to this holocaust, the locus of Tu’s poetics had been what it was for his older contemporaries Wang Wei and Meng Haoran: natural and manmade environments (mountain distances, secluded monasteries) that lent themselves to aesthetic appreciation and philosophical contemplation—a salutary integration of self and world. Now something broke free inside him. To the spectacle of a high civilization committing suicide, he responded with an astonishing outpouring of verse. About 1,200 poems date from the last 11 years of his life, more than 80 percent of his entire oeuvre—a decade mirabilis, and change. Yet he was more than a stenographer of ruin. What he achieved was a sort of miraculous vernacular, in subject if not in style—a rigorous realism closely allied to enlightenment. Immensely suggestive, Tu’s poems do justice to life even at its most mundane, while subtly decentering the human:

In the end, this sick body will stop moving.
Leaves just tumble down into a river pool.

Humbled by suffering (malaria, asthma, and rheumatism plagued him), and at once more intellectual and more broad-minded than Li Po, Tu became what Kenneth Rexroth judged him to be: “the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language.” Nothing was academic for him. War, hunger, captivity, exile; the death of a child, the ruin of a dynasty—he lived it all, body and soul, mirror-mind and suffering meat.

***

Tu Fu’s service to the emperor was short-lived. Though hardworking and conscientious (perhaps too much so), he lasted hardly more than six months in the recovered capital of Ch’ang-an before being sent away for his ties to Fang Guan, a minister responsible for the first, failed attempt to retake the city, in which—according to one of Tu’s own poems—forty thousand imperial soldiers perished. The demoted Tu, now in his mid-forties, was posted in exile to Huazhou in the east, where his family was soon menaced by rebel forces. Fearing for their safety, and evidently fed up with bureaucratic busywork, Tu resigned in the autumn of 759. For years he had cherished hopes of a political career. His resignation was a goodbye to all that, and an embrace, fuller than any he had yet attempted, of the contemplative life—the life of a poet.

So began his peregrinations in waste places west and south, his wanderings through borderlands at the margins of empire. Rationing food, forced to lean on his old contacts for succor, dodging bands of marauders, he traveled hundreds of miles across a war-torn land:

River-country mountains loom, impassable.
Far corner of earth, windblown cloud adrift:
 
year after year, nothing’s familiar. Nothing
anywhere but some further end of the line.
 
Poets both north and south found cold grief
out here, loss and confusion. My whole life
 
spent spirit-wounded—and now, I wander
every day a more profligate waste of road.

If home is the place where they have to take you in, then Tu and his family were homeless. He put together a few happy years in Ch’eng-tu, advising the provincial governor and living a quiet rural life in a thatched house outside the city, but all seeming shelter proved fugacious. Soon enough, with the governor dead, Tu was heading south down the Yangtze River, fleeing another outbreak of violence. “Life,” writes Carolyn Kizer in “Thwarted,” a 1964 poem written after Tu Fu and published in Poetry, “is one long, fragmented, murky episode.” One imagines the master nodding assent.

Enduring loss after loss (the deaths of Li Po and of a baby daughter) punctuated by periods of calm, Tu Fu the refugee was not merely homeless but homelandless, insofar as the dynastic order that had shaped his ambitions and in which he had been raised to earn a place had crumbled. Yet he was also, in the unsettled struggle of his life, in league with the universe. The cosmos in Chinese philosophy is “a majestic and nurturing Cosmos,” writes Hinton, “but also a refugee Cosmos: all change and transformation, each of the ten thousand things in perpetual flight, always on its way somewhere else.” Homesick and word-burdened to the end, borne on a tide of desire, Tu died in flight, on board a boat, trying one last time to return to the north. It is as if his estrangement, the demolition of the real he witnessed, brought him nearer to the deep truths of existence.

***

The enduring fascination that Tang literature still holds for Chinese readers and scholars has long been mirrored in the West, from Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915) to Wong May’s In the Same Light (2022)—the latter of which offers translations of Tang poems that to my eye and ear seem too contemporary by half: stilted, even uncouth when compared to the vigorous formal purity of Hinton’s renderings. Yet Tu Fu, in particular, has not always fared well in English. As late as 1972 it was possible to assert, as the Chinese-American poet and translator David Happell Hsin-Fu Wand did, that “no American poet has come close to capturing [Tu Fu’s] spirit.” (Wand’s hero Pound had aged out of the running.)

Partly this is owing to the untranslatable complexities of Chinese poetry, Tu’s supreme command of which serves to make his achievement more, not less, remote from Western readers. “A lone goose cries across borderland / autumn,” Tu tells us, and we feel the chill of solitude and vast spaces, but miss the deeper meaning. Hawkes glosses this wildlife image like so: “The migratory wild goose is a symbol of autumn; but a well-known literary convention also associates it with an exile’s letter from home.” Appropriate, since Tu is worrying in this poem over the unknown fates of his beloved half-brothers, from whom he’s had no news: “Letters sent never arrive.” Chinese poems drew by convention on a poet’s direct experience: in keeping with Ch’an principles, Tu’s images represent the things themselves, immediate to his senses, but are also symbols—often not singular but multivalent, and overloaded with import. Dismissing imitations by such poets as Kizer and Paul Blackburn, Wand wondered “if any Sinologist will train himself to be a poet to do justice to the poetry of Tu Fu in an American version.”

In this light, Hinton’s The Selected Poems of Tu Fu (1989; revised 2020) is a great boon, and a bonafide treasury. Though I appreciate, even love, some of Rexroth’s and A. C. Graham’s translations, Hinton seems best able to capture the “inner wilds”—as he calls them—of Tu’s poetry, without betraying the master’s obvious formalism. (Hinton does, at times, offer unwieldy equivalents for terms he deems philosophically significant, and one major quirk is that he now insists—unlike in his 1989 Selected—on translating place names into their literal meanings, so that Ch’ang-an, for instance, becomes “Peace-Perpetua.” He might with equal justice render Philadelphia as “Brother-Love.”)

But every translation is a pruning, a choice of this over that; multiple versions proliferate as substitutes for the ramifying meanings of the original. Take this portion of a late poem, likely written in the spring of 767, “Night Thoughts While Travelling” (Rexroth):

My poems have
Made me famous but I grow
Old, ill and tired, blown hither
And yon; I am like a gull
Lost between heaven and earth.

Compare the same lines in Hinton’s translation (he names the poem “Traveling at Night”):

How could poems bring honor? Career
lost into age and sickness, I soar wind-
 
drifted. Is there anything like it: endless
Heaven and Earth, and a lone sand-gull?

Neither translation is exhaustive; Hinton’s Tu Fu certainly doesn’t believe that his poems have made him famous, as Rexroth’s does, while the simile comparing Tu to a lost gull, clear as air in Rexroth’s rendition, is murky or missing in Hinton’s, which seems to literalize the bird—a “sand-gull” spotted somewhere between heaven and earth. Hawkes’s literal character-by-character translation of the final lines is:

Drifting-drifting what-am like
Sky-earth one sand-gull

Eliding the first-person pronoun, classical Chinese grammar evades the foundational assumption of Western language: that of a distinct self apart from the world, seeing and singing, the romantic visionary of the Orphic tradition (“I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired,” trilled Keats, and “I was the world in which I walked,” blared Stevens). With the lyric “I” suppressed, Tu himself is nowhere except by implication. In Ch’an terms, his consciousness partakes more fully of mirror-mind emptiness, dissolving the barrier between self and world. The Chinese poet is figured as—and actively aims to be—part of the gestalt, not separate from it; consciousness interpenetrating cosmos. It is a miracle of Tu Fu’s poetry that he balances Taoist/Ch’an detachment and passionate engagement, the pathos of direct experience and the kenosis of the self. And so translators, lured by his supple fluency, yet hobbled by conceptual frameworks alien to the eighth-century poet, endlessly pursue him through the unforced astonishments of his fructive lines, an absent presence drifting and soaring forever out of reach.

***

The latest attempt to come to grips with this many-sided poet in English is Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu (New Directions, 2024). Writing in New York during the pandemic, Weinberger sought to compose a “fictional autobiography” of the Chinese poet; not a direct translation of individual poems but an impressionist mosaic, a tissue of texts deriving from Tu’s characteristic images and themes. Weinberger’s project has an ancient pedigree: in the late Tang it became conventional, Lewis tells us, “to write chronological biographies of poets based on their collected verse.” Tu’s, in fact, is the earliest chronological collections of Chinese poetry we know.

The question of how one writes poetry amid calamity overshadows Weinberger’s book. Eternally relevant, the question feels especially pressing now; and the most compelling poems here draw their moods and images from the upheaval of war. Long familiar with Tang poetry, author of the classic study Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987), Weinberger answers with short, plainspoken lyrics cobbled out of direct statements that leave much unstated, in which most of the meaning is implied. Lines in classical Chinese poetry are nearly always end-stopped—a custom that Tu Fu at times daringly broke—and Weinberger mimics this trait in stark compositions that can resemble haikus or lunes, but with longer lines:

A white horse with two arrows in its empty saddle.
 
The corpses lying by the road change so much in a single day.
 
I wish I could talk with someone.

Buried emotion like distant bells rings through the verse, despite its rigorously objective tone. It has a kind of dignity of expression, purged of sentiment but full of suppressed or half-suppressed feeling. Weinberger’s Tu carries his Ch’an-mind like a chalice through abandoned villages where “the new ghosts are in torment and the old ghosts weep for them.” Blunt epiphanies abound: at a time when military service could be brutal, not to say fatal, Weinberger’s Tu declares: “Better to have a daughter who can marry the neighbor; a son will just end up in the ground.” And: “There are no men left; they’re conscripting boys.”

Many lines begin with “I thought of,” followed by the name of a Chinese general or sage whose legendary actions Weinberger treats as emblematic, or ironizes. He reflects on one administrator who “spent the whole time playing the zither and the city was well-governed”; richly amusing, what this implies about bureaucrats I leave it to others to unpack. Weinberger’s Tu is very much the migrant Tu, worried by endless war, dragging his wife and children along into impoverished exile—even if other concerns also intrude on these large events, the dailiness of things wearing him down: “You’ll weep for reasons other than the war.” Sorrow, as ever, has ten thousand sources.

For the last poem in his book, Weinberger takes up “Brimming Water,” the final Tu Fu poem in Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (1956). Here is Rexroth’s version:

Under my feet the moon
Glides along the river.
Near midnight, a gusty lantern
Shines in the heart of night.
Along the sandbars flocks
Of white egrets roost,
Each one clenched like a fist.
In the wake of my barge
The fish leap, cut the water,
And dive and splash.

Rexroth readily admitted the liberties he took with his translations from the Chinese—"In some cases they are very free, in others they are as exact as possible”—but Weinberger goes further, deconstructing the verse like an haute-cuisine chef, deboning it of verbs, liquifying the linkages, making an emulsion of objects and animals: “The moon, the river, the boat, an egret, a fish, a splash, / a lamp rocking in the wind.” An evocative double handful of the ten thousand things, each image isolate and yet connected in a sequence whose import can be inferred, translated by the mind’s eye. I’m unreconstructed enough to prefer Rexroth’s clenched and roosting egrets to Weinberger’s itemized nouns, which are saved by that rocking lamp from being bland. Yet even broken down to his most basic elements, Tu Fu retains in this skeletal, almost spectral form the feel of authentic poetry, rooted in a discernible ethos. Weinberger’s verse achieves not only the linearity of narrative but also a leveling effect—putting a fish on par with the moon. In Taoist/Ch’an cosmology, all things are equally in a state of becoming, are manifestations of being which arise from and lapse back into nonbeing. Far from the ordered life of the capital, Tu Fu pursued a poetry illuminating at once the nonhierarchical, embodied chaos of the real as well as the interplay of absence and presence that defines the Tao. Even in Rexroth’s translation, the moon does not hover above or superintend the river but glides along it. Beauty inheres in the arrangement, as an unpretentious elegance inheres in the subject.

***

“Wandering for ten years,” remarks Weinberger’s Tu Fu, again dodging the first-person singular, “trying to alight on one safe branch.” Needless to say, Tu’s refugee life bore little resemblance to the fellowships, faculty appointments, writer’s residencies, and other privileged perches from which so many contemporary poets publish their work, with every pretense of having launched missiles from behind enemy lines. No people have “ever eluded shield and sword,” Tu knows. Yet if only we could beat those swords into ploughshares, return to the good earth, “till every inch of lost fieldland”:

Don’t condemn warriors to weep heavy rains: leave
our
men to grain, women to silk. Let us all go in song
again.

By the end, burning in “malarial fire,” his worldly striving long past, Tu was content simply to let things come, cataloging the world of his senses in its inexhaustible forms; content to watch Orion rise, to see “azure peaks ranged above maple shorelines.” The last lines of his final poem (as translated by Hinton) are rich with resignation, though still exquisitely Taoist/Ch’an in their apprehension of the oceanic existence-fabric he was ebbing into:

When my spirits ebb away, I feel relieved.
And when grief comes, I let it come. I drift
 
shorelines of life, both sinking and floating,
occurrence now a perfect ruin of desertion.

Or, as a very different poet would put it more than a millennium later: “The honey of heaven may or may not come, / But that of earth both comes and goes at once.” So that there is something of the exile in all of us, traversing as we do all our days the borderlands, the middle-earth between being and nonbeing, caught in a constant rush of arrivals and relinquishments as if in a storm of wings, surrounded by things being shat into existence and sucked away again, by things growing and fading and dying before our eyes, as in a time-lapse film; and, in keeping with Taoist/Ch’an wisdom, we are not apart from this eternal process, not disinterested observers; we are ourselves always already arriving and relinquishing. We are ourselves the storm. Such are “the monumental proportions of being merely human,” in Hinton’s words, which Tu Fu illuminates.

I have felt these grand proportions myself, have wanted to fill them out like a hand-me-down garment one might grow into. “I write poems about what I see, for things pass so quickly,” says Weinberger’s poet. (Reader, they do.) So at a monastery in the New Mexico desert, the remotest monastery in the Western hemisphere, I read beside an electric fireplace Tu Fu’s last poems, far from their forlornness in space and time, and further still by reason of modern comforts. Then I go out into the February cold of the courtyard where snow covers the cacti and sifts down on the wooden Christ standing with broken arms extended to the far mesas, as if to enfold the world; and I try to have an eye, a mind, like a Chinese poet’s. All around me the world of ten thousand things lies but poorly concealed, edged by asperous moonlight. Under my feet, rags of snow and river pebbles. Above, the static avalanche of the Milky Way like a wide white haze ribbons from one horizon to the other, while all around, growing ever more numerous as my eyes adjust, beaming their being toward me on all sides, across inconceivable distances, sifted over every inch of the sky’s black dome, glitter the bone-white snowflakes of the stars.

 

Author's Note: Following my chief sources, I have persisted in calling the subject of this essay Tu Fu, following the Wade–Giles system, not Du Fu (or Dù Fǔ), as pinyin would have it. The same goes for Li Po, as well as other personal names and place names—such as the Yangtze—likely to be familiar to English readers. The title of Weinberger’s book is The Life of Tu Fu, Hawkes’s A Little Primer of Tu Fu, and Hinton’s The Selected Poems of Tu Fu; it would seem perverse and unhelpful in this context to contradict all of them. As for place names, my reasons have to do partly with familiarity and partly with a desire to differentiate modern Chinese cities from their ancient equivalents (Ch’eng-tu instead of Chengdu, for example). For less familiar and less load-bearing terms, however, such as the jinshi exam, I have used pinyin. Hawkes, too, employs a combination of Wade–Giles and pinyin in his book, deeming it in fact “less confusing than any alternative would have been.” Speaking personally, I have a relationship with a poet named Tu Fu, and it is out of my deep passion for and long familiarity with his life and work that this essay emerged.