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]

"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.