Tu Fu (712–770)
The nation is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain.
This spring the city is deep in weeds and brush.
Touched by the times even flowers weep tears.
Fearing leaving the birds tangled hearts.
Watch-tower fires have been burning for three months
To get a note from home would cost ten thousand gold.
Scratching my white hair thinner
Seething hopes all in a trembling hairpin.
Translated by Gary Snyder
Tu Fu
North and south of my cottage, spring waters everywhere—
All I can see are a flock of terns that come day after day;
The flowery path has not been swept for any guests,
Only today do I finally open my gate for you.
The market is far, so our supper platter lacks variety,
Our family is poor, so the wine flask holds but old home-brew;
If you’re willing to sing with the gaffer next door,
I’ll call across the fence for him to finish the last cup.
Translated by Victor H. Mair
Recruiting Officer of Shih-hao
Tu Fu
At dusk I sought lodging at Shih-hao village,
When a recruiting officer came to seize men at night.
An old man scaled the wall and fled,
His old wife came out to answer the door.
How furious was the officer’s shout!
How pitiable was the woman’s cry!
I listened as she stepped forward to speak:
“All my three sons have left for garrison duty at Yeh;
From one of them a letter just arrived,
10 Saying my two sons had newly died in battle.
Survivors can manage to live on,
But the dead are gone forever.
Now there’s no other man in the house,
Only a grandchild at his mother’s breast.
The child’s mother has not gone away;
She has only a tattered skirt for wear.
An old woman, I am feeble and weak,
But I will gladly leave with you tonight
To answer the urgent call at Ho-yang—
20 I can still cook morning gruel for your men.”
The night drew on, but talking stopped;
It seemed I heard only half-concealed sobs.
As I got back on the road at daybreak,
Only the old man was there to see me off.
Translated by Irving Y. Lo
At the Sky’s End, Thinking of Li Po
Tu Fu
Cold winds rise from the edge of heaven
True Gentleman how fares your thought
wild geese what hour is your arrival
4 river and lake swell with autumn waters
literature is adverse to good fortune
marsh trolls relish the passerby
you ought to share a word with the slandered spirit
8 hurl a poem to him in the Mi-lo River
Translated by David Lattimore
Tu Fu sat for the highest civil service examinations but failed to attain the coveted rank of Presented Scholar. Only in 755 was he given a minor post as a district police commissioner (which he rejected), and he never succeeded in gaining the higher echelons of government to which he aspired. Eventually he moved his family to Ch’eng-tu, Szechwan, where he built a thatched cottage that has become a famous symbol of his poetic sensibility.
In his verse, the poet reflects poignantly on the pressing issues of his own times while grounding himself solidly in the poetic tradition that he inherited. Where Li Po (see selection 35), the other most celebrated poet of the T’ang period (the Golden Age of Chinese poetry), revealed a Taoistic predisposition, Tu Fu was more conventionally Confucian in his outlook.
Tu Fu was forty-seven years old when he wrote this poem in the year 759. He had just quit his disappointing career in the state bureaucracy and had begun the wanderings that would occupy the rest of his life. His first stop was Ch’in-chou on the northwestern frontier of China, at the “edge of heaven.”
Writing from Ch’in-chou, Tu Fu thinks of his elderly friend and mentor, the poet Li Po (see selection 35), who has been exiled (unjustly, Tu Fu believes) to the far south, and who now lives near Lake Tung-t’ing on the middle Yangtze, that is, in the region of “river and lake” (line 4). Tu Fu would like to know what thoughts Li Po has for him. But the autumn winds and waters rise—it is not a time of easy communication. In folklore, migrating geese can carry a letter from a loved one far away; but as it is now fall, the geese are going in the wrong direction. Not until spring can they deliver a letter to Tu Fu from his friend in the south.
Tu Fu’s poem contains two folkloric references: to goose-messengers and to “trolls” of marshes (such as those around Lake Tung-t’ing) and mountain pools. These references make a gesture of courteous sympathy toward Li Po’s characteristic themes, which especially include folklore, fantasy, and sublime scenery peopled with legendary beings. Goose-messengers also suggest intense affection for Li Po, since geese carry news between lovers or spouses.
Two other references in the poem express an extreme respect for Li Po.
First, in line 2 Tu Fu addresses Li Po not as chün (“milord”) but, even more deferentially, as chün-tzu, a term which in Confucius and Mencius signifies the True Gentlemen. We are reminded that Li Po’s poetry, besides its aspect of Taoist fantasy and self-abandon, displays as well a complementary aspect of Confucian earnestness and social concern, shown especially in his series of fifty-nine poems written to ancient airs or evoking an ancient atmosphere (see selection 35, last group).
Second, Tu Fu implies a likeness between Li Po and Ch’ü Yüan (see selection 122), the earliest Chinese poet to have come down to us with a distinct persona. Ch’ü Yüan is mentioned here as the “slandered spirit” (line 7). As writers, a certain similarity exists between the often extravagant Li Po and the rhapsodic, visionary, mythopoetic Ch’ü Yüan. From the more austere viewpoint of the Central Plain, both were poets of romantic outer regions: Li Po of Shu in the west (Szechwan), Ch’ü Yüan of Ch’u in the south (Hunan). Between the two there was also a relationship of contiguity, since Li Po now lived, as had Ch’ü Yüan, in the region of Ch’u.
There is a further similarity between Ch’ü Yüan and Li Po—as slandered spirits. Ch’ü Yüan, a minister to the king of Ch’u, had been slandered to his ruler and dismissed. He eventually drowned himself in the Mi-lo River (line 8), south of Lake Tung-t’ing. More than a thousand years later, Li Po had served, perhaps under duress, in the entourage of an illegitimate claimant to the throne, for which he had been jailed and later exiled. The charge that his friend had voluntarily joined a rebellion was regarded by Tu Fu as slanderous. Unstated is the fact that Tu Fu, an unappreciated loyal critic of the ruler—in which respect he, too, resembled Ch’ü Yüan—had reason to regard himself likewise as a slandered spirit. As such, he sends a poem to his fellow-spirit Li Po, suggesting that Li in turn offer a poem to their antique fellow sufferer in his watery resting place.
Li Po was pardoned in 759 but continued to live in the Yangtze area. Tu Fu now warns his reckless old friend that what happened before can happen again. Poets are their own worst enemies; their compulsive candor makes the literary life “adverse to good fortune” (line 5). But poets have external enemies too, envious slanderers or “trolls” (line 6) always happy to pounce upon and devour the straying traveler.
For Tu Fu’s posthumous readers his lines have a poignancy that Li Po, because he predeceased Tu Fu, could not have felt—if in fact he ever received the poem. Twelve years after he wrote this poem and eight years after Li Po had died, Tu Fu’s late wanderings, richly chronicled in his verses, carried him at last to the region of Ch’u. There he, too, died while traveling the rivers south of Lake Tung-t’ing. Ch’ü Yüan, Li Po, and Tu Fu, who with T’ao Ch’ien (see selection 20) and Su Shih (see selection 56) rank as China’s most famous poets, all concluded their lives of adversity in the land of rivers and lakes.