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: 34. 登岳陽樓 Dēng Yuē-yáng lóu

[x_los]

“Tu Fu left K’uei-chou” Hawkes always obscures the movements of the family and any retainers in these announcements of Du Fu’s perambulations, and it confuses and irks me

“he was to spend all the rest of his life in the South” ouch

“the creative writer in China cannot have found his elaborately formal medium quite so cramping and inhibiting as is sometimes suggested by iconoclastic modern critics” fair, honestly

“Qián and kūn are the names of the first two hexagrams in the divination scripture of the Confucian canon” I ching, or something else?

“Rheumatic diseases affect your joints tendons, ligaments, bones, and muscles. Among them are many types of arthritis, a term used for conditions that affect your joints.”

“Also while in K’uei-chou he became deaf in one ear and lost all his teeth.” That fucking toast—

“it should not be thought, from the rather frequent references to ill health which occur in his poems, that Tu Fu was a hypochondriac. During the occupation of Ch’ang-an he contracted malaria and some chronic respiratory disease, suffered from rheumatism a great deal during his stay in Ch’eng-tu (the ‘river city’), and after his move to K’uei-chou was, at any rate for a time, paralysed in his right arm. Also while in K’uei-chou he became deaf in one ear and lost all his teeth." I think we can safely conclude that Du Fu was Really Going Through It

“Old and ill I have only my solitary boat.” Is it his boat?

Re: 34. 登岳陽樓 Dēng Yuē-yáng lóu

[douqi]

Yes, Qian and Kun are the first two I-Ching (or Yijing) hexagrams.

Re: 34. 登岳陽樓 Dēng Yuē-yáng lóu

[superborb]

Baike says something about how the little boat on a big lake is symbolic of Du Fu, as he gazes at the lone boat from the tower. But also that the lone boat indicates the poet's whole family having to survive in a small boat.