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

[superborb]

We have nowhere to discuss his intro, but
"c is like ‘ts’ in ‘tsetse fly’"
Is this a word people generally know how to pronounce!

Also, I do not find the mix of various romanticization strategies to be more comprehensible, but okay.

Baike glosses that the 'divide the dawn from the dark' is that the mountain is so high that its north and south have different levels of brightness

Baike also tries to justify the 夫, which is some kind of modal particle, yet reading it just made me more confused about what it's doing there. It doesn't have a meaning, and is needed for ... vivid portrayal? a unique deftness????

Re: 1.望嶽 Wàng yuè

[x_los]

Yeah I assume that but this time people who know anything about the subject in English must have a FIRM idea of the names as names, like Confucius still, even though that's not the current romanisation. Interesting re: how that changed over time.

Re names, I was thinking about whether Meishan Yue is this Yue.

Good point re light and dark.

夫 is probably just to make the pentasyllabic and then like, inflection-based meter work, right? (I'm sure there's something Hawkes said was the poetic equivalent of the English stressed and unstressed in fuctional terms, but not sure it was called 'inflection'--whatever that was).

Re: 1.望嶽 Wàng yuè

[superborb]

It's Meishan Yu, not Yue