cover image The Selected Poems of Tu Fu

The Selected Poems of Tu Fu

Tu Fu, trans. from the Chinese by David Hinton. New Directions, $18.95 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-81122-838-1

Hinton translated the first full-length verse translation of Tu Fu (712–770 CE) to be published in America in 1989, and this newly translated and substantially expanded edition celebrating the 30th anniversary of that publication recasts the Tang Dynasty poet’s work for the new century, allowing poems rich with subtle insights on morality and history to find a new audience. With powerful, elegant lines, Fu contemplates the personal and the public, the unusual and the routine, all with a keen eye for visual detail: “Foundering rain, reckless wind: an indiscriminate ruins of/ autumn. Four seas and eight horizons, the whole world all// one cloud—you can’t tell horses going from oxen coming,/ or muddy Deep-Flow River from crystal-clear Moon-Field.” Elsewhere, the bloody An Lushan Rebellion, which resulted in the deaths of millions, pulsates behind Fu’s measured writing: “Sword and spear, those grand human affairs:/ turn, look away, and it’s all one single grief,” and “True and false// surely differ, but they’ve been blurred together for years.” New readers of Fu will find a captivating voice and a stirring, lasting vision of political unrest. (Feb.)