Little Primer of Du Fu, Poems 31 - 35

[x_los]

This is week 7/7 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 31 through 35, inclusive.

 

How to Read Chinese Poetry (https://dankodes.dreamwidth.org/1483.html?thread=16843#cmt16843) has two chapters on forms Du Fu uses extensively:

 

Ch 8, Recent Style Shi Poetry, Pentasyllabic Regulated Verse (Wuyan Lüshi) 

Ch 9, Recent Style Shi Poetry, Heptasyllabic Regulated Verse (Qiyan Lüshi) 

 

Three other chapters on other verse forms Du Fu sometimes employs, or which people quoting Du Fu employ, also mention him:

 

Ch 10,  Recent Style Shi Poetry, Quatrains (Jueju): some mention of Du Fu’s “Three Quatrains, No. 3”

Ch 14, Ci Poetry,  Long Song Lyrics on Objects (Yongwu Ci): some mention of Du Fu's “Beautiful Lady” (Jiaren)

Ch 18, A Synthesis:  Rhythm, Syntax, and Vision of Chinese Poetry: some mention of Du Fu’s poem “The Jiang and Han Rivers” 

 

Additional Reading for this Week: Ch 4 of Chinese Poetry in Translation, “Purpose and Form: On the Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry”

Comments

Re: 31. 觀公孫大娘弟子舞劍器行 Guān Gōng-sūn dà-niáng dì-zǐ wǔ jiàn-qì xíng

[x_los]

Is that ALL the fuckin title? Du Fu. We gotta talk about what a title is.

Recording skips most of the title/preface.

Interesting for being one of few poems in the collection about women artists.

“danced by a female performer in military costume and seems to have been some kind of war dance involving much violent movement.” Oh huh, just as art or for any ceremonial reason?

“the fu, a sort of euphuistic essay in mixed prose and verse.” Oh, neat clear def of a fu

Euphuism is a peculiar mannered style of English prose. It takes its name from a prose romance by John Lyly. It consists of a preciously ornate and sophisticated style, employing a deliberate excess of literary devices such as antitheses, alliterations, repetitions and rhetorical questions. 

Astrakhan: this is a low dense curled wool russian style hat

The dancing mistress, her pupil and Du Fu, the observer, seem to jump between the palace and the regions they hail from originally or are otherwise active in (Yè-xiàn and Yǎn-chéng) in a way that I don’t quite get.

It’s interesting that Du Fu thinks, apparently after this calligrapher, that watching this artist in a very different field can inspire one’s own art practice. I wouldn’t necessarily have thought it of dance, particularly.

“Her flashing swoop was like the nine suns falling, transfixed by the Mighty Archer’s arrows;” this is interesting bc I might have identified her with Yi, the dextrous and skilled shooting agent, rather than the object of his skill

“This ‘freezing’ in the midst of violent action is familiar to anyone who has watched battle scenes in Chinese opera.” Oh neat

Du Fu seems very ambivalent re whether this elderly (?) woman is hot or not. She’s past her prime! She’s handsome! Her looks are fading! Just enjoy your admiration boner, Du Fu, it’s chill.

'will someone come and judge my boner??' it's like 767 and you're out of favour, living in the boonies: Nobody Cares

“like a flick of the hand” is this an invocation of the motion of the dance itself?

“Royal tombs, like other royal buildings, face the south.” Interesting. Why?

“On the rocky walls of Ch’ü-t’ang the dead grasses blow forlornly” what’s this do?

“The moon rises in the east;” any special significance?

What do we make of the ending?

“The grass writing is a kind of style of calligraphy that breakthroughs the strict forms of Chinese characters, making the Chinese characters being written simpler”

Re: 31. 觀公孫大娘弟子舞劍器行 Guān Gōng-sūn dà-niáng dì-zǐ wǔ jiàn-qì xíng

[pengwern]

I cannot read grass/cursive _(´ཀ`」 ∠)_ Though apparently if you hand write enough it becomes clear (muscle...understanding of where the shortcuts occur?).
I think I’ve seen Gongsun daniang as a character in some games? Can’t remember where though.
The third from last line [When pleasure is at its height, sorrow follows. The moon rises in the east] is so very directional — feels almost like a description of a movie/video moment.
I feel like chinese/brush calligraphy is very close to dance though, even if western calligraphy with nibs doesn’t work out that way (I say, blithely swooshing away at it with flex nibs and shiny ink) there’s a video out recently that I’ll try to find of a performance of the Lan Ting Xu, a famous Wei-Jin era piece of calligraphy.
㸌如羿射九日落 About the shooting the suns line, there’s no comma or pause in the original, so maybe it’s just this translation!
Re title did you ever see one of those poems that in these days would be an i stagram post, I think li bai or someone with full date + tagged people in the picture.....they title poems like I label test tubes XD
Her dance is...I’ve never quite seen this particular way it gets used 剑器, where it’s sword....artifact? probably not the right word. Qi 器 is -ware, machines, things created by artifice etc https://baike.baidu.com/item/剑器/198168
I see it’s some kind of ceremonial object, or at least not an actual blade, which makes sense. Most dances from ancient (Xia dynasty on) times that were recorded are the shamanistic formal kinds for seasons turning, rain, large enterprises/events etc, all the way attenuated into the Tang as just performances now...
But back in the day you’d get the aristocrats participating in the dances too!

Re: 31. 觀公孫大娘弟子舞劍器行 Guān Gōng-sūn dà-niáng dì-zǐ wǔ jiàn-qì xíng

[x_los]

"I feel like chinese/brush calligraphy is very close to dance though, even if western calligraphy with nibs doesn’t work out that way (I say, blithely swooshing away at it with flex nibs and shiny ink) there’s a video out recently that I’ll try to find of a performance of the Lan Ting Xu, a famous Wei-Jin era piece of calligraphy."

This is a real point, and the PERFORMANCE element I didn't think of, I can see in re dance. I was thinking really 2d about it, just--the end product.

Oh that's a REALLY neat temporal note, that it might well have once had religious dimensions and now it's largely artistic/entertainment.

Re: 31. 觀公孫大娘弟子舞劍器行 Guān Gōng-sūn dà-niáng dì-zǐ wǔ jiàn-qì xíng

[pengwern]

from what I've seen glancingly in webnovels (>_>), even the final 2d product is spoken of as the marking left from the movement (and hand) that produced it? (I am assuming stuff like seal script etc doesn't count but I should look). all those comments on how sinewy, strong, or how delicate, or rushing like the wind etc the calligraphy is - I need to look it up later, but the term for the mark formed by the brush being semi-dry and thus leaving lots of empty white space has one of those energetic, sky or wind related names.

Re: 31. 觀公孫大娘弟子舞劍器行 Guān Gōng-sūn dà-niáng dì-zǐ wǔ jiàn-qì xíng

[superborb]

Oh, euphuism sounds fascinating, esp since the wiki article says similar phenomena appeared in other European languages?

Optimally, Chinese buildings face south to maximize sunlight.

Weirdly, Baike says Du Fu was 6 when he saw the dancer?

Hawkes' “Bō-làn: lit. ‘big waves and little waves’: i.e. every movement and gesture.” is a bit odd to me. Baike's gloss is more like, "something with varying undulations, here used to indicate the artistic style of the dance".

I'd think the dead grasses are just to show how desolate it is?

The ending is lamenting the vicissitudes of life, no?

Re: 31. 觀公孫大娘弟子舞劍器行 Guān Gōng-sūn dà-niáng dì-zǐ wǔ jiàn-qì xíng

[x_los]

"Weirdly, Baike says Du Fu was 6 when he saw the dancer?"

This is odd/interesting bc there's a big contention in Victorian circles over how old Dickens actually WAS when he saw the famous clown Grimaldi, whose autobiography he ghost wrote, and he was about this young. People were saying he couldn't possibly remember the performance itself, and he was 'how very dare you' about it. So there's sort of a repeated case in a way of artists having STRONG early memories of other artists' work.

mm, I think I'm just looking at "an old man who does not know where he is going, but whose feet, calloused from much walking in the wild mountains, make him wearier and wearier of the pace." and thinking, what are the specific details herein adding.

Re: 31. 觀公孫大娘弟子舞劍器行 Guān Gōng-sūn dà-niáng dì-zǐ wǔ jiàn-qì xíng

[douqi]

Re titles: you will be grateful for Du Fu's titles after you meet Li Shangyin and his endless slew of poems all called 'Untitled', trust me.

Re: 'Her flashing swoop was like the nine suns falling, transfixed by the Mighty Archer’s arrows; her soaring flight like the lords of the sky driving their dragon teams aloft' — there's a mismatch in the translation, I think. The two lines are structured in the same way in the original, so their subjects should either be Mighty Archer/lords of the sky OR nine suns falling/dragon teams. Not the current pick-and-mix.

Re: 31. 觀公孫大娘弟子舞劍器行 Guān Gōng-sūn dà-niáng dì-zǐ wǔ jiàn-qì xíng

[x_los]

ah right so agent/agent or object/object