On the trail of ‘China’s Shakespeare’
“SPRING VIEW” is one of the most celebrated poems in Chinese literature. Du Fu wrote it in his mid-forties, having left a war-torn city (Chang’an) littered with corpses: “The country is broken but the mountains and rivers remain. Grasses and trees have deepened in the spring city. Even the flowers are shedding tears, so please don’t blame the crying birds” (my translation). In his final years he observed that “all my life I have teetered on the edge of disaster”. This is an understatement, given the poet’s well-known bad temper, impulsiveness and alcoholism. Arguably, his life was a disaster: repeated court exam failures; long spells of unemployment; constant relocations owing to civil wars and poverty; under-recognition by successive emperors; and comorbidities including asthma, arthritis and diabetes.
During his lifetime, Du Fu (712–70) operated very much in the margins. Yet he is now often regarded as China’s Shakespeare, has been called “the saint of poetry”, and has undoubtedly shaped the modern Chinese language and state of mind. Taken together his 1,400 surviving poems are a dazzling chronicle reflecting the rise and fall of the Tang dynasty, the chaos of famine, migration and homelessness, the fragile connections between humans and nature, the complicated cross-pollination of Buddhism and Confucianism, and, at the heart of it all, the meaning or meaninglessness of human suffering.
By all accounts Du Fu was a deeply intransigent person, and his work is hardly easy to read. So why and how has he been “canonized”? He may well appeal today because his hard life speaks to our fascination with the outsider. But it has taken the anglophone world a long time to read him. Given his excellent reputation in nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century China, why wasn’t he, like Li Bai, immortalized by Ezra Pound in Cathay (1915)? Why wasn’t he translated by the doyen of modernist English translators, Arthur Waley? And why did the first complete translation of his work into English appear only in 2016?
His biography and work, like those of most cultural icons, have been subject to the influences of mythology and propaganda. Initially his poetry was considered minor and criticized for being formally complex, musically edgy and thematically antiimperial. From the eighth century to the tenth it was not widely read and received a mixed reception. Indeed, for a long time it seemed that even the Chinese struggled to understand it. It gained deeper and broader recognition only in the Song dynasty, particularly during the reign of the Emperor Huizong (1082–1135), himself a renowned poet, painter and calligrapher, who encouraged a revival of Confucianism and
