The Life of Tu Fu
Description
A book-length poem by “our best living literary essayist” (Forrest Gander).
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.
Praise for The Life of Tu Fu
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
