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A superb evocation of the Chinese master and his travels To our shame, few of us outside China know much about the country’s classical poetry. It doesn’t help that the way the names of leading poets are transliterated has changed so often. Many writers included in Ezra Pound’s groundbreaking collection Cathay, published in 1915, are unrecognisable by name today. Only a generation or so ago we called one of China’s greatest poets Li Po; nowadays we know him as Li Bai. And Li Bai’s friend and contemporary, the magnificent Du Fu, was until recently called Tu Fu in the west; different enough to put people who don’t speak Chinese off the scent in an online search.Even more elusive is the poetry itself. Du Fu, who Michael Wood, in his superb new book, unequivocally calls “China’s greatest poet” (some scholars may have other ideas about that, though personally I think Wood is right) wrote many of his finest poems in couplets of seven impressionistic characters each. This makes him ferociously difficult to translate into the far more discursive forms of most European-language poetry. Here, for instance, are a couple of lines from one of Du Fu’s best-known poems, Ballad of Lovely Women: “Tài nóng yì yuǎn shū qiě zhēn / Jī-lǐ xì-nì gǔ-ròu yún.” The scholar David Hawkes, whose book A Little Primer of Tu Fu first got me interested in translating Chinese poetry, turned that literally into: “Appearance gorgeous thoughts remote pure and true / Complexions delicate bones-flesh well-proportioned.” Continue reading...