China and the West

Rexroth, Kenneth. Tu Fu : poems [ID D32237]. [Du Fu].
"Tu Fu is, in my opinion, and in the opinion of a majority of those qualified to speak, the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language."
This is certainly true, but it dodges the issue – what kind of poet is Tu Fu? Not epic, not dramatic, but not in any accepted sense lyric either. Although many of his poems, along with others of the Tang Dynasty, have been sung from that day to this, and although the insistent rhythms, rhymes, and tonal patterns of Chinese verse are lost in free-verse translation so that we do not realize how musical even the most irregular Chinese verse is (the most irregular curiously enough, owes its very irregularity to the fact that it' was written to pre-existing melodies), almost none of Tu Fu's verse is lyric in the sense in which the songs of Shakespeare, Thomass Campion, Goethe, or Sappho are lyric.
Rather, his is a poetry of reverie, comparable to Leopardi's "L'lnfinito", which might well be a translation from the Chinese, or the better sonnets of Wordsworth. This kind of elegiac reverie has become the principal form of modern poetry, as poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion "What man does with his aloneness".
It is this convergence of sensibilities across the barriers of time space, and culture that accounts for the great popularity of Chinese poetry in translation today, and for its profound influence on all major modern American poets. In addition, Tu Fu, although he was by no means "alienated" and at war with society like Baudelaire was in fact cut off from it and spent his life, after a brief career as a high official of Ming Huang, The Bright Emperor, as a wandering exile. His poetry is saturated with the exile's nostalgia and the abiding sense of the pathos of glory and power. In addition, he shares with Baudelaire and Sappho, his only competitors in the West, an exceptionally exacerbated sensibility, acute past belief. You feel that Tu Fu brings to each poetic situation, each experienced complex of sensations and values, a completely open nervous system. Out of this comes the choice of imagery—so poignant so startling, and yet seemingly so ordinary. Later generations of Chinese poets would turn these piercing, uncanny commonplaces into formulas, but in Tu Fu they are entirely fresh, newborn equations of the conscience, and they survive all but the most vulgar translations.
Tu Fu is not faultless. As Court Censor, a kind of Tribune of the Patricians, under Su Tsung, the son of Ming Huang, he seems to have been a cantankerous courtier. He took his sinecure job seriously and, an unregenerate believer in the Confucian classics, proceeded to admonish the Emperor on his morals and foreign policy. He was dismissed and spent the rest of his life wandering over China. He stayed longest in his famous grass hut in the suburbs of Ch'eng Tu in Szechuan. As the dynasty disintegrated and China entered on an interregnum, a time of troubles, he started wandering again, slowly, down the great river, always longing for the capital. His last years were spent on a houseboat, and on it, at 59, he died, possibly from overexposure during a flood and storm.
This is a troubled enough life, but Tu Fu writes of it with a melancholy that often verges on self-pity. He is a valetudinarian. By the time he was thirty, he was calling himself a white-haired old man. He always speaks of his home as a grass hut and presents himself as being very poor. Actually, though they were thatched, his various houses were probably quite palatial, and he seems never to have relinquished ownership of any of them and always to have drawn revenue from the farms attached to them. He had the mildest literary affection for his wife, whom he did not see for many years. He wrote no love poems to women; as with most of his caste, his passionate relationships were with men. Much of this is just convention, the accepted tone of Chinese poetry of the scholar gentry. Tu Fu's faults are microscopic in comparison with the blemishes that cover Baudelaire like blankets. Behind Baudelaire's carapace is a sensibility always struggling for transcendence. In Tu Fu the vision of spiritual reality is immanent and suffuses every item presented to the senses. Behind the conventions, behind the faults which make him human and kin to all of us, are a wisdom and a humanness as profound as Homer's.
No other great poet is as completely secular as Tu Fu. He comes from a more mature, saner culture than Homer, and it is not even necessary for him to say that the gods, the abstractions from the forces of nature and the passions of men, are frivolous, lewd, vicious, quarrelsome, and cruel and that only the steadfastness of human loyalty, magnanimity, compassion redeem the nightbound world. For Tu Fu, the realm of being and value is not bifurcated. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are not an Absolute, set over against an inchoate reality that always struggles, unsuccessfully, to approximate the pure value of the absolute. Reality is dense all one being. Values are the way we see things. This is the essence of the Chinese world view, and it overrides even the most ethereal Buddhist philosophizing and distinguishes it from its Indian sources. There is nothing that is absolutely omnipotent, but there is nothing that is purely contingent either.
Tu Fu is far from being a philosophical poet in the ordinary sense, yet no Chinese poetry embodies more fully the Chinese sense of the unbreakable wholeness of reality. The quality is the quantity the value is the fact. The metaphor, the symbols are not conclusions drawn from the images; they are the images themselves in concrete relationship. It is this immediacy of utterance that has made Chinese poetry in translation so popular with modern Western poets The complicated historical and literary references and echoes disappear; the vocal effects cannot be transmitted. What comes through stripped of all accessories, is the simple glory of the facts—the naked, transfigured poetic situation.
The concept of the poetic situation is itself a major factor in almost all Chinese poems of any period. Chinese poets are not rhetorical; they do not talk about the material of poetry or philosophize abstractly about life—they present a scene and an action "The north wind tears the banana leaves." It is South China in the autumn. "A lonely goose flies south across the setting sun." Autumn again, and evening. "Smoke rises from the rose jade animal to the painted rafters." A palace. "She toys idly with the strings of an inlaid lute." A concubine. "Suddenly one snaps beneath her jeweled fingers." She is tense and tired of waiting for her master. This is not the subject matter, but it is certainly the method, of almost all the poets of the modern, international idiom, whether Pierre Reverdy or Francis Jammes, Edwin Muir or William Carlos Williams, Quasimodo or the early, and to my taste best, poems of Rilke.
If Isaiah is the greatest of all religious poets, then Tu Fu is irreligious. But to me his is the only religion likely to survive the Time of Troubles that is closing out the twentieth century. It can be understood and appreciated only by the application of what Albert Schweitzer called "reverence for life." What is, is what is holy. I have translated a considerable amount of his poetry, and I have saturated myself with him for forty years. He has made me a better man, a more sensitive perceiving organism, as well as, I hope, a better poet. His poetry answers out of hand the question that worries aestheticians and critics, "What is poetry for?" What his poetry does superlatively is what is the purpose of all art.