Little Primer of Du Fu, Poems 6-10

[x_los]

This is week 2/7 on 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.

This week we're reading poems 6 through 10, inclusive.

How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context's Chapter 15, "Du Fu: The Poet as Historian", is relevant to Hawkes' focus. (Next week's Additional Readings are more focused on poetics.)

Comments

Re: How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context's Chapter 15, "Du Fu: The Poet as Historian"

[x_los]

So like, what socioeconomic concerns actually caused this war? It probably wasn't Yang Yuhuan being too hot. (The Great Rack Theory of History over here.)
Just regional shit re the Turkic people involved?

So Du Fu gets his civil service job via poetry.

‘Carved open his bedridden father’s belly’ …the fuck? ??

'turned into fish' is this that fish on a stick cooking method people use in CQL and Word of Honour? like--skewered like a fish on a stick by a lance?

parabolic as in, of or expressed in parables.

apostrophic as in: Apostrophe is an exclamatory figure of speech. It occurs when a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes absent from the scene. Often the addressee is a personified abstract quality or inanimate object

Interesting that this camp follower substitution works for the officer. Does *she* have a better chance of coming home?

"an assumption of autobiographical truth" tbh I feel we could be a BIT cannier about that than Hawkes often is

hair still in knots--is this some youthful way of dressing it?

Is the old man going to war out of patriotism, nihilism or bc his wife gets a bonus she needs?

this post-apocalyptic return to a vanished village is striking and very unusual in Western poetic conceit

what does 'how could i still count as one of the common folk?' mean?

Re: How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context's Chapter 15, "Du Fu: The Poet as Historian"

[superborb]

Turned into fish, from reading the baike vernacular tl, seems to be something like, so many dead bodies like fish in the river.

The hair in knots is the way they're translating the way people would "bind their hair on coming of age" (dictionary defn).

Counting as a common person I think is roughly the equivalent of being able to hold your head up / looking at yourself in the mirror?