{"id":198,"date":"2009-04-16T23:42:01","date_gmt":"2009-04-17T04:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2009\/04\/16\/du-fu-remembering-li-bai\/"},"modified":"2009-04-16T23:44:26","modified_gmt":"2009-04-17T04:44:26","slug":"du-fu-remembering-li-bai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2009\/04\/16\/du-fu-remembering-li-bai\/","title":{"rendered":"Du Fu, “Remembering Li Bai on a Spring Day”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"du-fu-davidyoung.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\n

I know no poetry to equal his
\nhis mind must be unique<\/p>\n

freshness of Yu Xin
\nBao Zhao’s delicacy<\/p>\n

as I watch the trees leaf out
\nhere, north of the Wei<\/p>\n

he’s probably gazing at sunset
\nthere, east of the Yangzi<\/p>\n

when can we share
\na pot of wine again<\/p>\n

talk on and on about poetry
\nuntil it’s nearly daybreak?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Du Fu: A Life in Poetry<\/i><\/a> was translated by David Young<\/a> and published in late 2008. Last week, Knopf posted Young’s translation of “A Summer Outing<\/a>,” while Poetry Daily<\/i> posted two more poems<\/a>: “An Autumn Storm and Our Thatched Roof” and “Rain on a Spring Night.”<\/p>\n

(Here are several Du Fu poems<\/a>, but I’m afraid I don’t know who translated them. It certainly wasn’t Young; where Young’s “Autumn Thoughts” begins “Dew turns to jade-white ice \/ that scars and wilts the maple trees,” for example, the first line of this rendition of “Autumn Meditations” is “Jade dew withers and wounds the groves of maple trees.” I prefer the Young, myself.)<\/p>\n

Li Bai<\/a> was a contemporary of Du Fu, and the two are pretty much to Chinese poetry what Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio were to mid-20th-century American baseball, if Williams and DiMaggio had only ever met twice in their lifetimes. Du Fu wrote at least a dozen poems we know of about how great Li Bai was; only one of Li Bai’s poems about Du Fu survives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know no poetry to equal his his mind must be unique freshness of Yu Xin Bao Zhao’s delicacy as I watch the trees leaf out here, north of the Wei he’s probably gazing at sunset there, east of the Yangzi when can we share a pot of wine again talk on and on about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}