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Du Fu

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Writers and critics

                                Names
         Chinese: 杜甫
          Pinyin: Dù Fǔ
      Wade-Giles: Tu⁴ Fu³
              Zi: Zǐměi 子美
   Also known as: Dù Shàolíng 杜少陵
                  Dù Gōngbù 杜工部
                  Shàolíng Yělǎo 少陵野老
   There are no contemporaneous portraits of Du Fu; this is a later
   artist's impression
   Enlarge
   There are no contemporaneous portraits of Du Fu; this is a later
   artist's impression

   Du Fu or Tu Fu (712–770) was a prominent Chinese poet of the Tang
   Dynasty. Along with Li Bai (Li Po), he is frequently called the
   greatest of the Chinese poets. His own greatest ambition was to help
   his country by becoming a successful civil servant, but he proved
   unable to make the necessary accommodations. His life, like the whole
   country, was devastated by the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, and the last
   15 years of his life were a time of almost constant unrest.

   Initially unpopular, his works came to be hugely influential in both
   Chinese and Japanese culture. He has been called Poet-Historian and the
   Poet-Sage by Chinese critics, while the range of his work has allowed
   him to be introduced to Western readers as "the Chinese Virgil, Horace,
   Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Béranger, Hugo or
   Baudelaire". (Hung p. 1).

Life

   Traditionally, Chinese literary criticism has placed great emphasis on
   knowledge of the life of the author when interpreting a work, a
   practice which Watson attributes to "the close links that traditional
   Chinese thought posits between art and morality" (p. xvii). This
   becomes all the more important in the case of a writer such as Du Fu,
   in whose poems morality and history are so prominent. Another reason,
   identified by the Chinese historian William Hung, is that Chinese poems
   are typically extremely concise, omitting circumstantial factors which
   may be relevant, but which could be reconstructed by an informed
   contemporary. For modern western readers therefore, "The less
   accurately we know the time, the place and the circumstances in the
   background, the more liable we are to imagine it incorrectly, and the
   result will be that we either misunderstand the poem or fail to
   understand it altogether" (p. 5). Du Fu's life is therefore treated
   here in some detail.

Early years

   Most of what is known of Du Fu’s life comes from his own poems. Like
   many other Chinese poets, he came from a noble family (they claimed
   descent from the emperor Yao) which had fallen into relative poverty
   (although Hung estimates that his family income was still eleven times
   that of an averagely comfortable family). He was born in 712: the
   birthplace is unknown, except that it was near Luoyang, Henan province
   (Gong county is a favourite candidate). In later life he considered
   himself to belong to the capital city of Chang'an.
   Du Fu's China
   Enlarge
   Du Fu's China

   Du Fu's mother died shortly after he was born, and he was partially
   raised by his aunt. He had an elder brother, who died young. He also
   had three half brothers and one half sister, to whom he frequently
   refers in his poems, although he never mentions his stepmother.

   As the son of a minor scholar-official, his youth was spent on the
   standard education of a future civil servant: study and memorisation of
   the Confucian classics of philosophy, history and poetry. He later
   claimed to have produced creditable poems by his early teens, but these
   have been lost.

   In the early 730s he travelled in the Jiangsu/ Zhejiang area; his
   earliest surviving poem, describing a poetry contest, is thought to
   date from the end of this period, around 735. In that year he travelled
   to Chang'an to take the civil service exam but was unsuccessful, to his
   surprise and that of centuries of later critics. Hung concludes that he
   probably failed because his prose style at the time was too dense and
   obscure, while Chou suggests that his failure to cultivate connections
   in the capital may have been to blame. After this failure he went back
   to travelling, this time around Shandong and Hebei.

   His father died around 740. Du Fu would have been allowed to enter the
   civil service because of his father's rank, but he is thought to have
   given up the privilege in favour of one of his half brothers. He spent
   the next four years living in the Luoyang area, fulfilling his duties
   in domestic affairs.

   In the autumn of 744 he met Li Bai (Li Po) for the first time, and the
   two poets formed a somewhat one-sided friendship: Du Fu was by some
   years the younger, while Li Bai was already a poetic star. We have
   twelve poems to or about Li Bai from the younger poet, but only one in
   the other direction. They met again only once, in 745.

   In 746 he moved to the capital in an attempt to resurrect his official
   career. He participated in a second exam the following year, but all
   the candidates were failed by the prime minister (apparently in order
   to prevent the emergence of possible rivals). Thereafter he never again
   attempted the examinations, instead petitioning the emperor directly in
   751, 754 and probably again in 755. He married around 752, and by 757
   the couple had had five children — three sons and two daughters — but
   one of the sons died in infancy in 755. From 754 he began to have lung
   problems (probably asthma), the first of a series of ailments which
   dogged him for the rest of his life.

   In 755 he finally received an appointment as Registrar of the Right
   Commandant's office of the Crown Prince's Palace. Although this was a
   minor post, in normal times it would have been at least the start of an
   official career. Even before he had begun work, however, the position
   was swept away by events.

War

   The An Lushan Rebellion began in December 755, and was not completely
   crushed for almost eight years. It caused enormous disruption to
   Chinese society: the census of 754 recorded 52.9 million people, but
   that of 764 just 16.9 million, the remainder having been killed or
   displaced. During this time, Du Fu led a largely itinerant life, being
   kept unsettled by wars, associated famines and imperial displeasure.
   This period of unhappiness, however, was the making of Du Fu as a poet:
   Eva Shan Chou has written that, "What he saw around him– the lives of
   his family, neighbors, and strangers– what he heard, and what he hoped
   for or feared from the progress of various campaigns– these became the
   enduring themes of his poetry" (Chou, p. 62).

   In 756 Emperor Xuanzong was forced to flee the capital and abdicate. Du
   Fu, who had been away from the city, took his family to a place of
   safety and attempted to join up with the court of the new emperor (
   Suzong), but he was captured by the rebels and taken to Chang’an. In
   the autumn, his youngest son Du Zongwu (Baby Bear) was born. Around
   this time Du Fu is thought to have contracted malaria.

   He escaped from Chang'an the following year, and was appointed Reminder
   when he rejoined the court in May 757. This post gave access to the
   emperor, but was largely ceremonial. Du Fu's conscientiousness
   compelled him to try to make use of it: he soon caused trouble for
   himself by protesting against the removal of his friend and patron Fang
   Guan on a petty charge; he was then himself arrested, but was pardoned
   in June. He was granted leave to visit his family in September, but he
   soon rejoined the court and on December 8, 757, he returned to Chang’an
   with the emperor following its recapture by government forces. However,
   his advice continued to be unappreciated, and in the summer of 758 he
   was demoted to a post as Commissioner of Education in Huazhou. The
   position was not to his taste: in one poem, he wrote:

   "I am about to scream madly in the office/Especially when they bring
   more papers to pile higher on my desk."

   He moved on again in the summer of 759; this has traditionally been
   ascribed to famine, but Hung believes that frustration is a more likely
   reason. He next spent around six weeks in Qinzhou (now Tianshui, Gansu
   province), where he wrote over sixty poems.

Chengdu

   In 760 he arrived in Chengdu ( Sichuan province), where he based
   himself for most of the next five years. By the autumn of that year he
   was in financial trouble, and sent poems begging help to various
   acquaintances. He was relieved by Yen Wu, a friend and former colleague
   who was appointed governor general at Chengdu. Despite his financial
   problems, this was one of the happiest and most peaceful periods of his
   life, and many of his poems from this period are peaceful depictions of
   his life in his famous "thatched hut". In 762 he left the city to
   escape a rebellion, but he returned in the summer of 764 and was
   appointed military advisor to Yen, who was involved in campaigns
   against the Tibetans.

Last years

   Luoyang, the region of his birthplace, was recovered by government
   forces in the winter of 762, and in the spring of 765 Du Fu and his
   family sailed down the Yangtze, apparently with the intention of making
   their way back there. They travelled slowly, held up by his ill-health
   (by this time he was suffering from poor eyesight, deafness and general
   old age in addition to his previous ailments). They stayed in Kuizhou
   (now Baidi, Chongqing) at the entrance to the Three Gorges for almost
   two years from late spring 766. This period was Du Fu's last great
   poetic flowering, and here he wrote 400 poems in his dense, late style.
   In autumn 766 Bo Maolin became governor of the region: he supported Du
   Fu financially and employed him as his unofficial secretary.

   In March 768 he began his journey again and got as far as Hunan
   province, where he died in Tanzhou (now Changsha) in November or
   December 770, in his 59th year. He was survived by his wife and two
   sons, who remained in the area for some years at least. His last known
   descendant is a grandson who requested a grave inscription for the poet
   from Yuan Zhen in 813.

   Hung summarises his life by concluding that, "He appeared to be a
   filial son, an affectionate father, a generous brother, a faithful
   husband, a loyal friend, a dutiful official, and a patriotic subject."

Works

   Part of Du Fu's poem "On Visiting the Temple of Laozi", as copied by a
   16th-century calligrapher.
   Part of Du Fu's poem "On Visiting the Temple of Laozi", as copied by a
   16th-century calligrapher.

   Criticism of Du Fu's works has focused on his strong sense of history,
   his moral engagement, and his technical excellence.

History

   Since the Song dynasty Du Fu has been called by critics the "poet
   historian" (詩史 shī shǐ). The most directly historical of his poems are
   those commenting on military tactics or the successes and failures of
   the government, or the poems of advice which he wrote to the emperor.
   Indirectly, he wrote about the effect of the times in which he lived on
   himself, and on the ordinary people of China. As Watson notes, this is
   information "of a kind seldom found in the officially compiled
   histories of the era" (p. xvii).

   Du Fu's political comments are based on emotion rather than
   calculation: his prescriptions have been paraphrased as, "Let us all be
   less selfish, let us all do what we are supposed to do". (Chou p. 16)
   Since his views were impossible to disagree with, however, his
   forcefully expressed truisms enabled his installation as the central
   figure of Chinese poetic history.

Moral engagement

   A second favourite epithet of Chinese critics is that of "poet sage"
   (詩聖 shī shèng), a counterpart to the philosophical sage, Confucius. One
   of the earliest surviving works, The Song of the Wagons (from around
   750), gives voice to the sufferings of a conscript soldier in the
   imperial army, even before the beginning of the rebellion; this poem
   brings out the tension between the need of acceptance and fulfilment of
   one's duties, and a clear-sighted consciousness of the suffering which
   this can involve. These themes are continuously articulated in the
   poems on the lives of both soldiers and civilians which Du Fu produced
   throughout his life.

   Although Du Fu's frequent references to his own difficulties can give
   the impression of an all-consuming solipsism, Hawkes argues that his
   "famous compassion in fact includes himself, viewed quite objectively
   and almost as an afterthought". He therefore "lends grandeur" to the
   wider picture by comparing it to "his own slightly comical triviality"
   (p. 204).

   Du Fu's compassion, for himself and for others, was part of his general
   broadening of the scope of poetry: he devoted many works to topics
   which had previously been considered unsuitable for poetic treatment.
   Zhang Jie wrote that for Du Fu, "everything in this world is poetry"
   (Chou p. 67), and he wrote extensively on subjects such as domestic
   life, calligraphy, paintings, animals and other poems.

Technical excellence

   Du Fu's work is notable above all for its range. Chinese critics
   traditionally used the term 集大成 (jídàchéng- "complete symphony"), a
   reference to Mencius' description of Confucius. Yuan Zhen was the first
   to note the breadth of Du Fu's achievement, writing in 813 that his
   predecessor, "united in his work traits which previous men had
   displayed only singly". (Chou, p. 42) He mastered all the forms of
   Chinese poetry: Chou says that in every form he "either made
   outstanding advances or contributed outstanding examples" (p. 56).
   Furthermore, his poems use a wide range of registers, from the direct
   and colloquial to the allusive and self-consciously literary. The tenor
   of his work changed as he developed his style and adapted to his
   surroundings (" chameleon-like" according to Watson): his earliest
   works are in a relatively derivative, courtly style, but he came into
   his own in the years of the rebellion. Owen comments on the "grim
   simplicity" of the Qinzhou poems, which mirrors the desert landscape
   (p. 425); the works from his Chengdu period are "light, often finely
   observed" (p. 427); while the poems from the late Kuizhou period have a
   "density and power of vision" (p. 433).

   Although he wrote in all poetic forms, Du Fu is best known for his
   lǜshi, a type of poem with strict constraints on the form and content
   of the work. About two thirds of his 1500 extant works are in this
   form, and he is generally considered to be its leading exponent. His
   best lǜshi use the parallelisms required by the form to add expressive
   content rather than as mere technical restrictions. Hawkes comments
   that, "it is amazing that Tu Fu is able to use so immensely stylized a
   form in so natural a manner" (p. 46).

Influence

   In his lifetime, and immediately following his death, Du Fu was not
   greatly appreciated. In part this can be attributed to his stylistic
   and formal innovations, some of which are still "considered extremely
   daring and bizarre by Chinese critics" (Hawkes, p. 4). There are few
   contemporary references to him — only eleven poems from six writers —
   and these describe him in terms of affection, but not as a paragon of
   poetic or moral ideals (Chou, p. 30). Du Fu is also poorly represented
   in contemporary anthologies of poetry.

   However, as Hung notes, he "is the only Chinese poet whose influence
   grew with time" (p. 1), and in the ninth century he began to increase
   in popularity. Early positive comments came from Bai Juyi, who praised
   the moral sentiments of some of Du Fu's works (although he found these
   in only a small fraction of the poems), and from Han Yu, who wrote a
   piece defending Du Fu and Li Bai on aesthetic grounds from attacks made
   against them. By the beginning of the 10th century, Wei Zhuang had
   constructed the first replica of his thatched cottage in Sichuan.

   It was in the 11th century, during the Northern Song era that Du Fu's
   reputation reached its peak. In this period a comprehensive
   re-evaluation of earlier poets took place, in which Wang Wei, Li Bai
   and Du Fu came to be regarded as representing respectively the
   Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian strands of Chinese culture (Chou p. 26).
   At the same time, the development of Neo-Confucianism ensured that Du
   Fu, as its poetic exemplar, occupied the paramount position (Ch'en p.
   265). Su Shi famously expressed this reasoning when he wrote that Du Fu
   was "preeminent... because... through all his vicissitudes, he never
   for the space of a meal forgot his sovereign" (quoted in Chou, p. 23).
   His influence was helped by his ability to reconcile apparent
   opposites: political conservatives were attracted by his loyalty to the
   established order, while political radicals embraced his concern for
   the poor. Literary conservatives could look to his technical mastery,
   while literary radicals were inspired by his innovations. Since the
   establishment of the People's Republic of China, Du Fu's loyalty to the
   state and concern for the poor have been interpreted as embryonic
   nationalism and socialism, and he has been praised for his use of
   simple, " people's language". (Chou p. 66)

   Du Fu's popularity grew to such an extent that it is as hard to measure
   his influence as that of Shakespeare in England: it was hard for any
   Chinese poet not to be influenced by him. While there was never another
   Du Fu, individual poets followed in the traditions of specific aspects
   of his work: Bai Juyi's concern for the poor, Lu You's patriotism, and
   Mei Yaochen's reflections on the quotidian are a few examples. More
   broadly, Du Fu's work in transforming the lǜshi from mere word play
   into "a vehicle for serious poetic utterance" (Watson 1984, p. 270) set
   the stage for every subsequent writer in the genre.

   Du Fu has also been influential beyond China, although in common with
   the other High Tang poets, his reception into the Japanese literary
   culture was relatively late. It was not until the 17th century that he
   was accorded the same respect in Japan as in China, but he then had a
   particular influence on Matsuo Basho. In the 20th century, he was the
   favourite poet of Kenneth Rexroth, who has described him as "the
   greatest non- epic, non dramatic poet who has survived in any
   language", and commented that, "he has made me a better man, as a moral
   agent and as a perceiving organism" (Rexroth pp 135, 137).

Translation

   There have been a number of notable translations of Du Fu’s work into
   English. The translators have each had to contend with the same
   problems of bringing out the formal constraints of the original without
   sounding laboured to the western ear (particularly when translating
   lǜshi), and of dealing with the allusions contained particularly in the
   later works (Hawkes writes that "his poems do not as a rule come
   through very well in translation" — p. ix). One extreme on each issue
   is represented by Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems From the Chinese.
   His are free translations, which seek to conceal the parallelisms
   through enjambement and expansion and contraction of the content; his
   responses to the allusions are firstly to omit most of these poems from
   his selection, and secondly to “translate out” the references in those
   works which he does select.

   An example of the opposite approach is Burton Watson's The Selected
   Poems of Du Fu. Watson follows the parallelisms quite strictly,
   persuading the western reader to adapt to the poems rather than vice
   versa. Similarly, he deals with the allusion of the later works by
   combining literal translation with extensive annotation.

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