The Life of Tu Fu

by Eliot Weinberger

A book-length poem by “our best living literary essayist” (Forrest Gander). For over fifty years Eliot Weinberger has been celebrated for his innovative literary and political essays―translated into over thirty languages―as well as his trailblazing translations from the Spanish. In his exquisite new book The Life of Tu Fu , Weinberger has composed a montage of fifty-eight poems that capture the life and times of the great Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu (712–770 AD). As he writes in a note to the edition, “This is not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images, and allusions in the poetry.” Through lines as penetrating as a classical tanka and as fluid as a mountain stream, themes of endless war and ongoing pandemic surround the wandering life of the ancient Chinese master.

Genres: Poetry, China, Nonfiction, Classics, Biography

64 pages, Paperback

Published April 2, 2024

About the author

Eliot Weinberger is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in some thirty languages.
Weinberger first gained recognition for his translations of the Nobel Prize winning writer and poet Octavio Paz. His many translations of the work of Paz include the Collected Poems 1957-1987, In Light of India, and Sunstone. Among Weinberger's other translations are Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights. His edition of Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review of this wonderful book here: https://www.barrelhousemag.com/blog/w...

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slim book filled with poignant poems on themes of war by a master translator.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Mackenzie King]

I don't feel like I can fairly rate this book since I read this for class and am not familiar with Tu Fu or the broader historical context of the biography, but I will say, there was some really beautiful language, and it was a super quick read.

[Floris Meertens]

Het concept van dit boek is spannend, vindingrijk en een tikje vermetel. Essayist en vertaler Weinberger neemt de poëzie van Du Fu, husselt het en schrijft daarmee biografie van het leven van de dichter. Even voor de duidelijkheid: Du Fu is een icoon in China, alle kinderen moeten zijn gedichten leren, en hij wordt gezien als de dichter van het volk.

Maar dat is niet het enige wat Weinberger doet. In zijn nawoord vertelt hij over Wen Tianxiang, die de verzen van Du Fu declameerde en omvormde, terwijl hij vastzat in de gevangenis omdat hij zich had verzet tegen de Mongolen. In gevangenschap waren de woorden van Du Fu alles wat hij nodig had, alles wat hij wilde zeggen, was al door hem gezegd. Hij hoefde het alleen maar in een nieuwe vorm te gieten. Weinbergers verzamling is hetzelfde, maar voor deze tijd: schrijven als troost en herkenning in de gevangenis van de Covid-19 pandemie.

Dat levert erg mooie gedichten op, die weeklagen over een kille en bittere wereld, over vervagende hoop, over de dagelijkse eenzaamheid en aftakeling, over wantrouwen in het systeem dat oprechtheid niet beloont, over de dood die alles omringt.


Wat me verraste aan de vertalingen was het veelvuldige "ik"; in zijn essay "19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei" stipt Weinberger juist het probleem aan van dit woord in de klassiek Chinese poëzie, aangezien het amper voorkomt maar vaak zacht geïmpliceerd wordt, en dat dit voor vertalingen in Europese talen een hoofdpijndossier is. Wil je duidelijkheid dat het gaat over de ervaring van een individu, of wil je mensen in die ervaring brengen, alsof het je eigen ervaring is? Als je kijkt naar de mist over de bergen, denk je dan: "ik kijk naar de mist over de bergen" of denk je "mist over de bergen" (in zoverre je een gedachte of een zintuiglijke ervaring in woorden kan overbrengen natuurlijk)? Vragen waarop ik geen antwoord heb.



Ondanks dat alles had ik ook veel twijfels over de precieze aanpak:

1. Het is me onduidelijk hoeveel Weinberger nou heeft gesleuteld, en ik heb niet echt iets daarover kunnen vinden. Heeft hij zinnen veranderd, of alleen de samenstelling van de zinnen? Bovendien is er enorm veel vrijheid om klassiek Chinese gedichten te vertalen, omdat het een extreem bondige stijl heeft, en je wel extra moet interpreteren, om überhaupt een Engelse/Nederlandse zin te kunnen maken. Omdat de zinnen uit allerlei verschillende gedichten zijn gehaald, kan ik niet makkelijk controleren hoe vrij de vertaling is. Maar hoeveel is de zin dan nog van Du Fu, en hoeveel van Weinberger? Een deel van de magie is immers dat deze 1000-jarige oude verzen nog zo toepasbaar zijn op het nu. Met hoeveel aanpassing is dat?

2. Soms is de combinatie van verzen enorm sterk, maar regelmatig vind ik de samenhang moeilijk te vinden en dan begin ik me af te vragen: "Als je de verzen willekeurig zou sorteren, zou ik dan niet ook geraakt worden door de beelden?" Grotendeels vind ik het de kracht van de losse zinnen die me hier raakt. Zit er dan veel toegevoegde waarde in de rangschikking van verzen?

3. Het laatste punt gaat over de vergelijking van toen en nu. In andere recensies zie ik toespelingen op oorlogen in Oekraïne, Ethiopië of Myanmar, en dan kan ik me vinden in de parallellen. Maar Weinberger benoemt in zijn nawoord dat hij het schreef tijdens de Covid-19 pandemie, die hij in New York uitzat. Hoe verschrikkelijk en angstaanjagend en vereenzamend de pandemie ook was, vergelijkingen met premoderne oorlogen en isolatie vind ik dan niet zo logisch, omdat die situaties geheel anders zijn. Voor mij (en voor Weinberger, verwacht ik) was een periode waarin je overweldigd werd door media die je constant op de hoogte hield, in een huis met stromend water en een verwarming en genoeg eten. Vereenzaming bestond ondanks dat je elkaar kon bellen of appen, en men koesterde meer de angst om je zekerheden te verliezen, in plaats van dat we onze zekerheden echt verloren. De dood was misschien over om je heen te zien, maar op het beeldscherm, niet op straat.

Maar nog steeds fascinerend en erg mooi!

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

True, my mind moves as slowly as a cloud, but a cloud moves on.

These days the poets sit on a log and wait for a fish.

Du Fu: the wisest man who ever lived. (Eliot Weinberger: not too far behind.)

They say that when it rains for seven days, a leopard does not hunt, and cultivates the patterns in its coat.

They say there is a certain thunderclap when a carp turns into a dragon.

They say that a chicken has five virtues: civil talents, military talents, courage, moral rectitude, and fidelity.

They say that when a master archer shoots, his prey drops at the twang of the bowstring.

No one understood when I wrote: "The sun rises from its bath like a duckweed."

The sea accepts the water from all the streams.

...

There's no path to my cottage, but I'd clear one for you.

When melons get ripe in the fall, I think of you in Melon Village.
How are the melons this year?

[Raven]

"I lift my face to watch the birds./
I turn my head, thinking someone has called me."

"I thought of the story of the blind man in the Nirvana Sutra. A doctor shaved his eyeballs with a golden scalpel and cured him, but he did not know how to see."

"The corpses lying by the road change so much in a single day.

I wish I could talk with someone."

"They say that rocks turn into swallows in the rain, and back to rocks when it clears."

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The" life not "A" life is the title, in other words expressing the whole and inner life of the poet and as Weinberger says in the note, a fictional autobiography. It's expressed through a set of exquisite poems, moments of that life being a consciousness in the world, not narrative. If the world were a perfect place Eliot Weinberger would be its guide.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fragments of a life that for once do add up to more than the sum of the parts. Surprisingly funny.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essay in 3 Quarks Daily

1.

American poet, essayist, and translator Eliot Weinberger opens his new book, The Life of Tu Fu, describing a seminal moment in the Tang dynasty poet’s life, when he had just failed the Imperial Examination —for the second time. Weinberger, it should be said, has not written a biography of the eighth century poet as the title of the book might suggest. Nor has he come out with a new translation of Du Fu’s work. Rather, Weinberger has created a montage of fifty-eight original poems inspired by Du Fu’s life. And in his opening gambit, taking on the voice of the young poet, he compares all the candidates who failed the examination that day to hundreds and hundreds of chickens:

They say this is the only tree in the world that has these pears, for these pears have no desire to propagate elsewhere.

I thought of The Old Man Who Called His Chickens. He had hundreds of chickens, each with its own name. He could call its name and the chicken would come. I thought of him when all the candidates, including me, failed the exam.

One wonders: how is it possible that one of the greatest minds the world has ever known failed the examination not once –but twice? Scholars continue to argue about it. But one thing is clear: this second failure was only the start of Du Fu’s troubles!

2.

Considered by some people, and I am one of those people, to be China’s greatest poet, Du Fu’s work never went out of style in China. Not even during the Cultural Revolution, when so much traditional culture was canceled, did Du Fu’s light fade. The reason usually cited for this is that Du Fu has always been considered the poet of the common people. He gave voice to their suffering. And he also understood that violence, natural disasters, and war fell disproportionately onto their heads; for unlike the elite, the poor had few options open to them when things got rough. British historian and documentary film-maker Michael Wood, in his wonderful 2023 travelogue In the Footsteps of Du Fu, writes about China’s millennium-long love affair with the Tang dynasty poet. Tracing Du Fu’s life across the vastness of China, from the mountains of Sichuan to the great lakes of Hunan, he wonders whether there has ever been any other poet in the pre-modern world, who “so urgently recorded what it feels like to be a refugee, fleeing for your life?”

When asked: “Why Du Fu?” Wood replies that Du Fu is fascinating for many reasons, not least of all having been born at the precise moment of lift-off of the glorious Tang, considered to be one of China’s great ages of cultural and literary flowering. While Du Fu began life comfortably well-off during the heyday of the Tang, by mid-life he was suffering through the worst of the great chaos following the An Lushan uprising, which saw millions dead with countless more people fleeing for their lives.

Here is Weinberger again:

An abandoned courtyard: an old tree:
A temple bell lying on its side:
The world I live in.

They win and we lose; we lose and they win.
Vines wrap around the rotting bones.

She knows he won’t come back from the army, but patches the clothes he left just in case.

As Forrest Gander recently writes in his review of Weinberger’s book in the Los Angeles Review of Books, this poem “could as easily reference Chang’an, where Tu Fu lived in the Tang dynasty, as Ukraine in 2024.”

Timeless Du Fu.

3.

春望 杜甫
國破山河在，城春草木深。
感時花濺淚，恨別鳥驚心。
峰火連三月，家書抵萬金。
白頭搔更短，渾欲不勝簪。

I think it is safe to say that all Chinese people know Du Fu’s poem “Spring Scene,” written in 757, just months after the collapse of the Tang dynasty during the An Lushan Rebellion. The emperor had fled the capital and so too did Du Fu attempt to flee—only to be captured by the rebels and brought back to the city, where he was held in captivity. The events would see him lose a beloved child to starvation and cause him to wander from place to place with his family trying to find somewhere safe to plant a garden. It wasn’t all bad, of course, but his was a tough life—and this struggle is something that can be felt in all his poems, which constantly remind us that if life is this hard for him, imagine what it must be like for those of a less comfortable background?

Wood takes some time to try and imagine what it is like to read a Tang poem. And he makes the point that reading in classical Chinese was necessarily a more creative activity than we experience reading modern poems with clearly stated pronouns and grammatical inflections. Ancient Chinese is highly abbreviated. At first glance looking at a Tang poem, one sees what appears as a series of nouns. A modern reader, then, is forced to make some interpretations— adding verb tense and connective terms, for example. Readers must actively “fill in the blanks”—and as Wood insists, this was something ancient Chinese readers had to do as well.

Because modern Japanese makes use of so many Chinese characters, as a Japanese translator “Spring Scene” is mostly intelligible to me. But here is what I see:

country broken/ mountains rivers remain
city springtime/grass trees dense

feel times/flowers shed tears
hate partings/birds startle heart

beacon fires/continue three months
home letters/worth 10,000 taels

white hair/ scratch made shorter
about to/hairclip unable hold

There are so many questions. Without pronouns, how do we read the second set of couplets? Are the flowers crying because of the (troubled) times or is the poet feeling sad and wondering if the flowers are not also shedding tears? In Japanese, you don’t need to take a position regarding the pronouns, but you do at least have to add verb endings and some conjunctions.

Weinberger, in his poems, not only follows the basic contours of Du Fu’s life, but he also captures the wonderfully abbreviated quality of Du Fu’s classical Chinese, which is prized for its magnificent sonorous couplets.

They say failure in early life will bring success in the end,
but birds know when they’re tired of flying,
and clouds have no will of their own.

I scratch my head and knock out a hairpin,
more concerned with medicines than poetry.

Around here no one does a thing.
Even minor clerks are surly toward me.

I think if Du Fu read Weinberger’s poem, he would see his own “Spring Scene” reflected within it beautifully. There is the couplet-esque “birds tired of flying” and “clouds with no-will-of-their-own.” We also meet the scratching man with his hairpin again; a poet who is now so worn down by the world that he cares more about medicine than poetry.

Weinberger’s poetry also captures Du Fu’s unsettling —almost hallucinatory— juxtaposition of images. Here is Weinberger evoking Du Fu’s Autumn Meditations:

Mt. Wu lit up by the moon.
Who put the stars up there?

I thought of the story of the blind man in the Nirvana Sutra. A doctor shaved his eyeballs with a golden scalpel and cured him, but he did not know how to see.

Of course, Weinberger is very good at this. In his 2016 book, written with Octavio Paz, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he analyzes the opening lines of a poem by Wang Wei, beginning with the literal translation:

Empty/mountain(s) [or]hills/negative/ to see/person [or] people

From this launching off point, the translator has countless choices to make. And clearly Weinberger finds that fun. Like Wood, Weinberger is not a Sinologist, and it is not clear how much Chinese he can read. But for whatever reason, some of the greatest “translations” of Tang poets are written by non-Chinese readers—famously starting with Ezra Pound, the list includes translations by Kenneth Rexroth and my own favorite David Young, whose Du Fu: A Life of Poetry I cannot recommend enough.

For even more exploration of what it is like to translate Du Fu, there is A Little Primer of Tu Fu, by David Hawkes, which does what Weinberger does in his study of the Wang Wei Poem and analyzes translation choices for 30 such poems by Du Fu.

4.

As all Du Fu translators say again and again: over a thousand years separates us from the Tang dynasty. And yet the poet’s voice remains clear and timely. It is perhaps not surprising that both Weinberger and Wood came to study Du Fu during the sad days surrounding the pandemic and lockdown; for this was also a time when the world felt full of suffering and death—again it was pain falling disproportionately hard on the less privileged. Then, as now, poets can only watch and bear witness as the world falls apart outside their windows. And like many poets —and people— before and after, in the midst of all the terrible violence and chaos, disease and death, Du Fu would locate and celebrate the peace of the natural world.

As Du Fu famously declared in his poem “Spring Scene”: the country might be destroyed, but the mountains and rivers remain 國破山河在

An early poem by Du Fu introduces something of the solace of the simple life—a theme which runs across so much Chinese poetry. In “An Evening Banquet at Mr. Zuo’s Country House,” the poet recalls the darkness unfolding outside the villa, and the sounds of spring water flowing as the fragrance of flowers fills the air. Sounds and smells… Then more sounds arrive from the plucking of a qin, as he feels the dampness of the dew. Above is a constellation of stars. Going inside, much wine is imbibed as precious books and swords are appreciated. Mr. Zuo is a military man and a scholar, so poems are composed and recited. Finally, folksongs are chanted in the dialect of the southern Yangzi River delta (Jiangnan).

It is a magical evening —but what does the poet recall most of all from the evening? The story of Fan Li, a general who lived during the late Spring and Autumn period, in the 5th century BCE. After helping the king win a decisive victory over his enemies, Fan Li refused all rewards and instead boarded a small boat and sailed away, living a life of peaceful seclusion with his wife Xi Shi, one of the great beauties of the time.

Oh, the quiet life…..

夜宴左氏荘（杜甫）

夜宴左氏荘
風林繊月落、衣露浄琴張。
暗水流花径、春星帯草堂。
検書焼燭短、看剣引盃長。
詩罷聞呉詠、扁舟意不忘。

A slender moon sinks into trees —swaying in the wind,
Clothing dampened by dew, I hear the pure tones of a zither.
In the darkness spring water winds a path perfumed by flowers,
As a constellation of spring stars embraces the thatched roof.
Looking things up in books —the candles slowly burn down,
I appreciate a fine sword as another cup of sake comes around.
Reading our poems aloud, we listen to Wu songs being chanted,
Even now I can’t forget someone mentioning Fan Li’s small boat.

Again and again in his poetry, Du Fu reminds us that in times of chaos, the wise person takes to the hills. And it is there, when one quiets the mind and stills the heart, that solace can be found.

Or in the words of Weinberger’s poem:

The moon, the river, the boat, an egret, a fish, a splash, a lamp rocking in the wind.

While Du Fu always said he considered himself to be a Confucian at heart, Wood (following David Hinton) contends that his poetry evoked a deep understanding of Daoist-informed Chan Buddhism.

Certainly, Du Fu was many things.

Weinberger captured something of Du Fu’s rich philosophical outlook in his poem

The war goes on: I live among deer.
I sit out in the moonlight and moonlight shines on my knees.
I sit out even when it rains.

I thought of the sage Wang Hui-Chih who was appointed to the Ministry of Mounts. Asked what his duties were, he said he did not know, but people were always bringing him horses. Asked how many horses, he said a sage doesn’t think about horses.

At the end of his book, Michael Wood reminds us how centuries after the death of Du Fu, China’s great female poet Li Qingzhao would be forced to join the great ride of “panic-stricken refugees flooding south after the fall of Kaifeng in 1127 with her precious scrolls of Du Fu’s poetry.” Lady Li would write of keeping those treasured scrolls clutched to her chest as she fled south. She would later in life —perhaps inspired by Du Fu—take on the sobriquet of a person who is easily satisfied—or someone 易安 “easily contented.”

Du Fu’s lasting fame would have astonished no one more than the great Du Fu himself. It is a miracle that his work even survived, insists Wood. Having watched the great promise of his life fall into a million broken pieces, he must have felt himself to be a failure. And yet a thousand years later an American poet feels so inspired by the man and his life that he writes his own poems in homage, while a British historian writes of being so drawn to him as to visit all the Du Fu literary pilgrimage sites of China. Du Fu’s poems accept the evanescence of a person’s time on earth, exploring the pathos of a life without enduring impact. And yet, one can never know the ultimate impact of one’s life across the stretch of time. Du Fu has surely taught us that.

++

Further Reading:

My essay at Lithub: A Room of One’s Own: the Importance of Stillness and Contemplation For Writers and Translators (About Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood and Byung-Chul Han’s Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity).

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spectacular, and impendingly re-readable.

[Paul Scott]

TU FU, WHO also shows up in internet searches as Du Fu, was the other great Tang Dynasty poet besides Li Po (circa 8th century CE). Weinberger explains in an afterword that this book "is not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images, and allusions in the poetry."

What to make of that description? I don't know. How faithful a portrait of Tu Fu this book is, how close these texts come to recreating Tu Fu's poems in English, whether these texts correspond even roughly to Tu Fu's actual poems--I have no idea.

The book worked for me, though. I think it was Hugh Kenner who wrote of Ezra Pound's Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius that in looking far away from the here and now of Europe during World War I, Pound responded all the more profoundly to the crisis. The Life of Tu Fu is like that. It manages to evoke the mood of the pandemic and the final chaotic year of the first Trump administration--the dislocations, the ruptures, the estrangements, the sense of being in endless free fall--with renderings of the lines and images of a Chinese poet (and beleaguered bureaucrat) who lived thirteen centuries ago.


Soldiers still guard the ruined palace: rats run across the tiles.

A squirrel with folded hands outside his broken nest.

That dandelion in the wind once had roots.

Live like a wren, unnoticed on a high branch, and you'll stay alive.

It's been so many years: I imagine her face, looking at me skeptically.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weinberger has been an independent essayist, critic, and researcher for over 50 years now (not affiliated with any university). He is also a translator (Chinese, Japanese and Spanish), poet, and fiction writer. A liberal version of Ezra Pound (a lot of his recent writing has been political).
But during the COVID pandemic he authored this short book. As he says in his Note at the end, it is not a translation. Rather it is a poetic reimagining of Tu Fu's life and poetry (aka Du Fu). It has been awhile since I read Tu Fu, so I just went back and read his info on Wikipedia, to get the basics of his life. That was helpful. He moved about a lot, and much of his life was lived during a period of constant warfare in China (our 8th C, their Tang Dynasty).
58 poems in the style of Tu Fu, most short (Tu Fu wrote many poems longer than these short pieces), biographical - but also commenting on the current political situation in China. The dead, the starvation, the devastation. But oddly nothing about his family also travelling with him, or any consideration of what they must have been going through.
Perhaps for Weinberger fans only (I am a big one!), but it also is bringing me back to reading Tu Fu's own poetry (Hinton translation, although I am looking for a somewhat affordable copy of the Watson). And, of course, for those interested in Classical Asian literature.
A bit odd having a 21st C Western writer compose in the style of an 8th C Chinese poet - but it works. And in the end is a commentary on both ourselves, and the life and times of the poet Tu Fu.
4 out of 5. Maybe 4.5 out of 5.

[Steven Severance · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very slight book. It will pass through your fingers like water.
It is usless as a time passer. It has only whispers of a narative arc.
The Author describes it as a "Fictional" Biography of the great Tang dynasty poet Du Fu written in fifty some poems. Eliot's book is justly anti-war and full of meloncholly but misses the power and the devestation pressed into Tu Fu's real poetry.

I have read the complete poems of Tu Fu put out by Stephan Owen (it is 7 volumes I think).
Tu Fu's life was way more dramatic and heartbreaking than indicated by Eliot's fictional account.

Please anyone interested in Tu Fu, or his times, or his poetry I beg you read one single poem by him: "Going from the Capital to Fengxan County singing my feelings [in] 500 words." This is a radical poem! This poem captures his times. This poem will break you heart and then run your soul through a garlic press.

[Larry Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gem of a little book, Eliot Weinberger becomes ancient poet Tu Fu today. Having worked with Tu Fu's verse and his life, he takes on the outlook and style charmingly. He tells you upfront, "This is not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images, and allusions in the poems." Tu Fu is good company, and like a close friend his character rubs off on you. I too succumbed to his way of being in 2015 with my Tu Fu Comes to America, a Novel in Verse. Such depth of perception allowing wisdom to speak through the world and the road we are on together. Here's a sample:
"When birds call they call to their own kind. / Gibbons hang from branches and imitate each other. / Gulls stand in a line side by side and think only of themselves."
Such humble sharing is sweet and right for us all.

[Ava · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was given to me by a former professor of mine, a dear friend of Weinberger’s. We read Weinberger’s famous book on Wang Wei for this class, a book which thrilled me. And I am pleased to report that Weinberger has excelled once again. With his metempsychotic autobiography (emphasis on the autos) Weinberger has concocted perhaps the most impressive pandemic project since King Lear, casting the peripatetic loneliness of a famous poet from the war-torn Tang Dynasty onto all of us readers. We, like Weinberger, are Tu Fu, that timeless and boundless conduit for coping with solace and grief. Fascinating in its concept and arresting in its execution, The Life of Tu Fu is a must-read—albeit, on a day with time available to spend in melancholy.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully meditative and insightful "fictional autobiography", essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger channels Chinese poet Tu Fu (712-770 AD) in this captivating book-length poem. It's tranquil, ambient, and largely told in four line snippets. Like this: "So dark I eat dinner at breakfast. / So rainy I imagine the mountain washing away. / The downpour so strong fish in the river sank. / The mud so bad I was sorry I asked you over." Or this: "In these mountains I imagine I hear / bears and leopards and tigers and baboons, / but all I see is a man on a ladder, / cutting bamboo."

[Kiah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it would have been helpful to know more about Tu Fu but I loved the concept of writing a fictitious auto biography / poetry collection from a long dead poet. Me and audrey read this in one sitting before bed.

The guy who owns my favorite local bookstore recommended this to me as we were chatting about the barrier to entry on poetry. He suggested reading this because he felt it was very accessible. I agree that it was easy to read but I still have the feeling someone else is getting a lot more detail out of the poems than I am.

[Alvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weinberger magically turns a mass of disjunctive prose fragments - observations of the natural world, accounts of a cruel war, and personal confession - into a triste-but-beautiful missive from a distant but eerily familiar world.

[Evan Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

an elegy for America.

[David N. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Page 35.

[BAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is short and thought provoking.

[Fredore Praltsa]

A testament to the forces of juxtaposition and precise observation.

"The moon, the river, the boat, an egret, a fish, a splash, a lamp rocking in the wind."

[Olivia Nahmias · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3 stars*
Observational and not all that awe inspiring. Kind of reminds me of my own notes app.

[Irmakafsar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Silly little book

[Ivan Zhao · Rating 4 out of 5]

did not realize it was not tu fu writing it

there's smth interesting here about translation vs computation vs producing

[Ronin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A small book not worth purchasing but definitely worth borrowing from a friend.

[W GOSS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Timeless takes on social unrest, nature, and family. Tu Fu, the reader, and maybe Weinberger are drawn to some outer orbit of the self, a remove from which we see the truth.

[Becca Blanco]

Read for a class but I think I'm missing a lot of key cultural & historical context here so I'm not going to rate

[foolscap · Rating 1 out of 5]

it does not achieve the only thing I hoped from: creating a compelling narrative of a dead man