Little Primer of Du Fu, Poems 1-5

[x_los]

This week we start David Hawkes' Little Primer of Du Fu. I'll replicate the poems themselves here, but this book contains considerable exegesis, so I do advise you to grab this copy.

Because this exegesis is relatively substantial, let's start by reading poems 1 through 5, inclusive. There are 35 poems in the collection, so this should take us about seven weeks (unless we scale either up or down, after speaking about it).

I'm gathering additional research materials, but for this first week I'd like us to concentrate on Hawkes' introduction and the first of these poems. 

Comments

Re: 1.望嶽 Wàng yuè

[x_los]

David Hawkes is, so far, my fav translator. I loved the Story of the Stone intro he wrote, and the intro to Little Primer is really funny at a couple places as well as quite informative.

Oh I didn’t know this about the WAY Yue can mean mountain. relevant to characters with this surname? 

Nice point about noon versus verb title

euphony /ˈjuːf(ə)ni/ the quality of being pleasing to the ear."the poet put euphony before mere factuality"
the tendency to make phonetic change for ease of pronunciation.



I do wish he pushed the poems to the front of these chapters!
 


“Jué zì rù guī niǎo 
Bursting eye-sockets enter returning birds”

 Du Fu wtf



Did not know that about grammatical inflections and word order
 


“The layered clouds begin at the climber’s heaving chest,”

 So it’s so high this happens?


Re: 1.望嶽 Wàng yuè

[(Anonymous)]

I *think* the 'bursting eye-sockets' bit is about widening his eyes to take in the full view inc of the returning birds. Baike agrees with me.

Re: 1.望嶽 Wàng yuè

[superborb]

The dictionary says 嶽 is either the surname Yue or highest mt. There are other Yue surname chars though.