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Little Primer of Du Fu, Poems 1-5
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.
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.
Re: 5. 哀王孫 Āi wáng-sūn
Huh why not lament for the young prince
“Parks” why parks? Like—outdoor statuary? Was there a lot? How do you LOOT that?
“The executions were carried out publicly, the hearts of the condemned being torn from their bodies and offered in sacrifice to the ghost of An Ch’ing-tsung, a son of An Lu-shan who had been married to a princess of the imperial family, and whom the Emperor had put to death as a reprisal when An Lu-shan rebelled.” WOW wow wtfffff
“some of them by having the tops of their heads prised off with iron claws. ” The FUCK even is this
“while princes and princesses of the blood were callously left behind” I mean /his own grandkids??/ fuck
Yeah I think if Du Fu had truly played the encounter like this he’d have been too shamed to publicise it, and it doesn’t really fit with him having hauled *ass* across the country to offer his service. Also he’s already REALLY suffered in this invasion so he’s hardly like, untried. It is super interesting that he’d choose to adopt a weaselly persona!
“Notice that in Chinese verse it is usually the couplets not the lines which are end-stopped. Translators often come unstuck through ignorance of this simple rule.” Huh
“Gǔ-ròu, literally ‘bone and flesh’, is the Chinese equivalent of our ‘flesh and blood’ in expressions like ‘his own flesh and blood turned against him’.”: this feels like a wiki note like a thing that comes UP in webnovel translations Nephrite is one of the two distinct minerals commonly known as jade.
“a Han parallel is regularly employed by a T’ang poet when he wishes to speak of the T’ang sovereign or his family or affairs.” Who the fuck is alive and active enough to censor you??
Ordos loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_Plateau
“The honorifics and humilifics in which Chinese speech once abounded are not, of course, to be translated literally unless one is deliberately aiming at an exotic, ‘Kai Lung’ effect.” wow who's gonna tell webnovel translators
“Kai Lung (開龍) is a fictional character in a series of books by Ernest Bramah, consisting of The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900)” Hey so is this basically like—Pu Songling for and by white ppl?
Tumuli: an ancient burial mound; a barrow. “favours shown him by his Sacred Majesty that at Hua-men he and all his warriors slashed their faces and vowed to wipe out this humiliation.” I was NOT gonna get this without help
How does the tomb emanation work, in their magical conception thereof?
Re: 5. 哀王孫 Āi wáng-sūn
The nominal founder of the T’ang dynasty was as a matter of fact also called Kao-tsu, but I don’t think he had a particularly famous nose - Hawkes is mistaken here. Kao-tsu (or Gaozu in contemporary pinyin) is not a personal name; it's a temple name often given to the founder of a dynasty, hence why there are so many 'Gaozus' in Chinese history.
Re: 5. 哀王孫 Āi wáng-sūn