The Complete Poetry of Du Fu presents a complete scholarly translation of Chinese literature alongside the original text in a critical edition. The English translation is more scholarly than vernacular Chinese translations, and it is compelled to address problems that even the best traditional commentaries overlook. The main body of the text is a facing page translation and critical edition of the earliest Song editions and other sources. For convenience the translations are arranged following the sequence in Qiu Zhao’an’s Du shi xiangzhu (although Qiu’s text is not followed). Basic footnotes are included when the translation needs clarification or supplement. Endnotes provide sources, textual notes, and a limited discussion of problem passages. A supplement references commonly used allusions, their sources, and where they can be found in the translation. Scholars know that there is scarcely a Du Fu poem whose interpretation is uncontested. The scholar may use this as a baseline to agree or disagree. Other readers can feel confident that this is a credible reading of the text within the tradition. A reader with a basic understanding of the language of Chinese poetry can use this to facilitate reading Du Fu, which can present problems for even the most learned reader.

This is the first collection of essays in English, contributed by well-known experts of Chinese literature as well as scholars of a younger generation, dedicated to the poetry of Du Fu, commonly regarded as the greatest Chinese poet. These essays are engaged in historically nuanced close reading of Du Fu’s poems, both canonical and less known, from new angles and in various contexts, and discuss a series of critical issues, including the local and the imperial; the body politic and the individual body; poetry and geography; perspectives on the complicated relation of religion and literature; materiality and contemporary reception of Du Fu; poetry and visual art; and tradition and modernity. Many of the poems discussed in this book were written in the backwater town of Kuizhou, far from Du Fu’s earlier residence in the capital city Chang’an, at a time when the Tang dynasty was going through devastating social and political disturbances. The authors contend that Du Fu’s isolation from the elite literary establishments allowed him to become a pioneer who introduced a new order to the Chinese poetic discourse. However, his attention to details in everyday reality, his preoccupation with domestic life and the larger issues embroiled in it, his humor, and his ability to surprise tend to be obscured by the clichéd image of the “poet sage” and “poet historian”—an image this collection of essays successfully complicates. “The scholarship that went into this collection of essays is extremely solid and fills an important gap in the study of China’s greatest poet Du Fu. The convincing and compelling collection of articles from distinguished scholars rereads Du Fu from fresh and different perspectives and informs the reader about the amazing power of intertextuality.” —Kang-I Sun Chang, Yale University “This rich and multilayered collection of essays about Du Fu, all written by major scholars, presents research of the highest quality and originality that succeeds most impressively in enriching and deepening our knowledge and appreciation of this great poet. This volume has the potential to engender a new stage of Du Fu studies.” —Antje Richter, University of Colorado, Boulder

In this "guided" anthology, experts lead students through the major genres and eras of Chinese poetry from antiquity to the modern time. The volume is divided into 6 chronological sections and features more than 140 examples of the best shi, sao, fu, ci, and qu poems. A comprehensive introduction and extensive thematic table of contents highlight the thematic, formal, and prosodic features of Chinese poetry, and each chapter is written by a scholar who specializes in a particular period or genre. Poems are presented in Chinese and English and are accompanied by a tone-marked romanized version, an explanation of Chinese linguistic and poetic conventions, and recommended reading strategies. Sound recordings of the poems are available online free of charge. These unique features facilitate an intense engagement with Chinese poetical texts and help the reader derive aesthetic pleasure and insight from these works as one could from the original. The companion volume How to Read Chinese Poetry Workbook presents 100 famous poems (56 are new selections) in Chinese, English, and romanization, accompanied by prose translation, textual notes, commentaries, and recordings. Contributors: Robert Ashmore (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Zong-qi Cai; Charles Egan (San Francisco State); Ronald Egan (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara); Grace Fong (McGill); David R. Knechtges (Univ. of Washington); Xinda Lian (Denison); Shuen-fu Lin (Univ. of Michigan); William H. Nienhauser Jr. (Univ. of Wisconsin); Maija Bell Samei; Jui-lung Su (National Univ. of Singapore); Wendy Swartz (Columbia); Xiaofei Tian (Harvard); Paula Varsano (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Fusheng Wu (Univ. of Utah)

Classical Chinese poetry reached its pinnacle during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and the poets of the late T'ang-a period of growing political turmoil and violence-are especially notable for combining strking formal inovation with raw emotional intensity. A. C. Graham’s slim but indispensable anthology of late T’ang poetry begins with Tu Fu, commonly recognized as the greatest Chinese poet of all, whose final poems and sequences lament the pains of exile in images of crystalline strangeness. It continues with the work of six other masters, including the “cold poet” Meng Chiao, who wrote of retreat from civilization to the remoteness of the high mountains; the troubled and haunting Li Ho, who, as Graham writes, cultivated a “wholly personal imagery of ghosts, blood, dying animals, weeping statues, whirlwinds, the will-o'-the-wisp”; and the shimmeringly strange poems of illicit love and Taoist initiation of the enigmatic Li Shang-yin. Offering the largest selection of these poets’ work available in English in a translation that is a classic in its own right, Poems of the Late T’ang also includes Graham’s searching essay “The Translation of Chinese Poetry” as well as helpful notes on each of the poets and on many of the individual poems.

The fu, or rhymeprose, is a major poetic form in Chinese literature, most popular between the 2nd century b.c. and 6th century a.d. Unlike what is usually considered Chinese poetry, it is a hybrid of prose and rhymed verse, more expansive than the condensed lyrics, verging on what might be called Whitmanesque. The thirteen long poems included here are descriptions of and meditations on such subjects as mountains and abandoned cities, the sea and the wind, owls and goddesses, partings and the idle life.

The deepest and most varied of the Tang Dynasty poets, Tu Fu (Du Fu) is, in the words of David Hinton, the “first complete poetic sensibility in Chinese literature.” Tu Fu merged the public and the private, often in the same poem, as his subjects ranged from the horrors of war to the delights of friendship, from closely observed landscapes to remembered dreams, from the evocation of historical moments to a wry lament over his own thinning hair. Although Tu Fu has been translated often, and often brilliantly, David Hawkes’s classic study, first published in 1967, is the only book that demonstrates in depth how his poems were written. Hawkes presents thirty-five poems in the original Chinese, with a pinyin transliteration, a character-by-character translation, and a commentary on the subject, the form, the historical background, and the individual lines. There is no other book quite like it for any language: a nuts-and-bolts account of how Chinese poems in general, and specifically the poems of one of the world’s greatest poets, are constructed. It’s an irresistible challenge for readers to invent their own translations.

Designed to work with the acclaimed course text How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology, the How to Read Chinese Poetry Workbook introduces classical Chinese to advanced beginners and learners at higher levels, teaching them how to appreciate Chinese poetry in its original form. Also a remarkable stand-alone resource, the volume illuminates China's major poetic genres and themes through one hundred well-known, easy-to-recite works. Each of the volume's twenty units contains four to six classical poems in Chinese, English, and tone-marked pinyin romanization, with comprehensive vocabulary notes and prose poem translations in modern Chinese. Subsequent comprehension questions and comments focus on the artistic aspects of the poems, while exercises test readers' grasp of both classical and modern Chinese words, phrases, and syntax. An extensive glossary cross-references classical and modern Chinese usage, characters and compounds, and multiple character meanings, and online sound recordings are provided for each poem and its prose translation free of charge. A list of literary issues addressed throughout completes the volume, along with phonetic transcriptions for entering-tone characters, which appear in Tang and Song–regulated shi poems and lyric songs.