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: 5. 哀王孫 Āi wáng-sūn

[douqi]

“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?? - look this is a culture where the subjects are routinely expected to change their names once a new emperor comes to the throne if they have characters in their names that are similar or similar-sounding to the ones in the new emperor's name. So yeah.

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

[x_los]

oooh so it could be habitual and self-willed, superstitious or respectful as a political loyalist, rather than just--aware of external censure as a prospect