The Selected Poems of Tu Fu: Expanded and Newly Translated by David Hinton

TU FU (712-770 C.E.) has for more than a millennium been widely considered in China as their greatest poet, and Hinton's original Selected Poems played a key role in extending that reputation to America. Most of Tu Fu's best work was written in the last decade of his life as he fled the devastation of civil war. In the midst of his refugee struggles, Tu's always personal poems managed to encompass a remarkable range: elegant simplicity and great complexity, everyday life and grand historical drama, private philosophical depth and social engagement in a world consumed by war. His poems sound remarkably contemporary, and through it all, his wisdom grew only more elemental: "Armies haunt my homeland still, and war / drums throb in this far-off place. A guest // overnight here in this river city, I return / again to shrieking crows, my old friends."

This volume is published simultaneously with a book of Hinton's essays that discuss the deep philosophical framework and untranslatable dimensions of Tu Fu's poems: Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry (Shambhala).

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Fu, Tu
Published: 02/25/2020
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 9780811228381
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.90d