The Life of Tu Fu
Format:Paperback
Publisher:New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published:30th Apr '24
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For over fifty years Eliot Weinberger has been celebrated for his innovative literary and political essays—translated into over thirty languages—as well as his trailblazing translations from the Spanish. In his exquisite new book The Life of Tu Fu, Weinberger has composed a montage of fifty-eight poems that capture the life and times of the great Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu (712–770 AD). As he writes in a note to the edition, “This is not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images, and allusions in the poetry.” Through lines as penetrating as a classical tanka and as fluid as a mountain stream, themes of endless war and ongoing pandemic surround the wandering life of the ancient Chinese master.
"My favorite essayist is Eliot Weinberger. His remarkable breadth of calm concern is impressive." -- Gary Snyder - The New York Times Book Review
"Combining scholarly authority with a moral allegiance to the arcane, the translator and editor Weinberger creates genre-bending essays and prose poems to help us see the world anew." -- Daphne Kalotay - The New York Times
"His essays use lists, collages of information, and sometimes, as poetry does, varying line breaks. They don’t read like anyone else’s work." -- Christopher Byrd - The New Yorker
"Weinberger’s verse achieves not only the linearity of narrative but also a leveling effect—putting a fish on par with the moon…Tu Fu pursued a poetry illuminating at once the nonhierarchical, embodied chaos of the real as well as the interplay of absence and presence that defines the Tao." -- Brian Patrick Eha - Poetry Foundation
"Few books offer in so few words such a marvelously damning vision of humanity. The Life of Tu Fu is a sobering and laconic reminder that the mountain and the mosquito will be here long after we are gone." -- Eric Bies - Barrelhouse
ISBN: 9780811238052
Dimensions: 185mm x 114mm x 8mm
Weight: 61g
64 pages