Tu Fu Poetry
No other author we have read so far in this class has grabbed my attention and interest as Tu Fu did. It could be that as a history major I strive to discover what the past holds, and Tu Fu is an excellent primary source. Or it could be that I can relate to the Time of Troubles, since many of my family have perished in civil strife, concentration camps and war. Still, his poems are full of emotion, virtue, sincerity and realism. It is the latter that I will try to emphasize my paper on. Reality of the modern day USA is not the reality of the majority of the world, although it can be hard to remember that. The suffering of this world has not diminished greatly since 8th century, and on the other side, the pleasures remain the same. The reality of Tu Fu is our reality too.
While this short discourse probably won't be up to par with works of contemporary and ancient scholars that have spent centuries analyzing Tu Fu, I still hold a droplet of hope that you will find the following text acceptable.
Ch'iang Village
Tu Fu
The chickens are letting out wild squawks
And while they still squabble the guests arrive -
We chase them into the trees
As a knock comes on the brushwood door:
It is four or five old men, come to ask after my long travels.
Each has brought something with him,
And out of their kettles come clear and dark wines.
They say, "Please don't mind that the wine is thin,
We have no one to plow the millet fields,
The wars have not yet stopped,
And the young are all fighting to the east."
I ask to sing for these elderly men,
These difficult timed -- I feel shame before their deep feelings.
The song done, I look to heaven and sigh,
And on a...
... middle of paper ...
...just came back from the emperor's court and is associated with the struggle, or is it because he himself is not fighting while the elder's children are? Or could it be the same kind of shame and guilt a survivor of a car crash feels before the parents of his friend, who perished in that same wreck? Whatever the answer is, they all feel for each other and "tears flow freely".
Ch'iang Village brings forward compassion for others and it has a really humane, warm touch. What starts out with ignorant chickens ends with tears. The emotions the elders feel get transposed onto Tu Fu himself. He is no stranger to adversity; he too was separated from his family. And yet instead of showing his strength to them, he cries with them. This is the kind of realism that grabs you and won't let go and this is the reason that 13 centuries later we can still relate to Tu Fu's poetry.
Jonathan Spence tells his readers of how Mao Zedong was a remarkable man to say the very least. He grew up a poor farm boy from a small rural town in Shaoshan, China. Mao was originally fated to be a farmer just as his father was. It was by chance that his young wife passed away and he was permitted to continue his education which he valued so greatly. Mao matured in a China that was undergoing a threat from foreign businesses and an unruly class of young people who wanted modernization. Throughout his school years and beyond Mao watched as the nation he lived in continued to change with the immense number of youth who began to westernize. Yet in classes he learned classical Chinese literature, poems, and history. Mao also attained a thorough knowledge of the modern and Western world. This great struggle between modern and classical Chinese is what can be attributed to most of the unrest in China during this time period. His education, determination and infectious personalit...
Bei Dao, "13 Happiness Street." Contemporary Literature of Asia. Ed. Arthur Biddle et al. Blair: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1996. 280-291.
Although still adopting a traditional literary form, the poetry writing can be regarded as an example of the heterogeneity and border-crossing of cultural-scape in globalization period. Those poems were produced under the brunt of the international mobility that is propelled by the capitalist globalization, but precisely and paradoxically, in a suspending situation caused by national regulation, a “state of exception” of this mobility. The juxtaposition of the frustration on foreign life and the flare of nationalist emotion (with the rhetoric emulating ancient barbarian-expelling heroes), may imply a paradoxical consequence in globalization: the international mobility undergirding the national awareness instead of undermining it. Following this thread, the publication of this kind of poetry in 1930s, the oblivion of it after war, and the subsequent re-discovery, recognition, and research of it can be all taken as symptomatic traces of the localization, articulation, and transformation of national consciousness (both as “Chinese” and “American”) in the continuous globalization. Needless to say, those poems are deeply flawed in terms of aesthetics due to the rather poor literacy of their authors. It would be invoking to put these poems beside those “high art” works also produced in globalization context, such as the works on the Eiffel Tower and the London fog by Huang Zunxian (黄遵宪), a late Qin intellectual caught in between the East and the West, the
Gordon’s voice is sad and stressful but all of this just what she thinks about the history, but Chinese Poetry is different, they has a lot of diversity voice in there, some sad, some depressed, some hopeless, but there are some of them is hopeful and want to have a better life in America. In my opinion, I like the way people who look into the history to learn and improve themselves than just getting angry and sad with something happened long time ago. Reading Chinese Poetry, I can feel the sadness of them Chinese and Vietnamese have similar culture and I could understand why they were so anxious and stressful. China is far away from the America, the Chinese Immigrants have to go really far to get into American with hopefully that they could have a better life for them. In fact, the Chinese immigrants did not be treat as they respected.
Chapter one, The Observers, in the Death of Woman Wang demonstrates the accuracy of the local historian; Feng K'o-ts'an, who compiled The Local History of T'an-ch'eng in 1673. The descriptive context of the Local History helps the reader to understand and literally penetrate into people's lives. The use of records of the earthquake of 1668, the White Lotus rising of 1622 and rebels rising vividly described by Feng the extent of suffering the people of T'an-ch'eng went through. Jonathan Spence stresses on how miserable the two-quarter of the seventeen-century were to the diminishing population of the county. The earthquake claimed the lives of nine thousand people, many others died in the White lotus rising, hunger, sickness and banditry. P'u Sung-ling's stories convey that after the loss of the wheat crops there were cases of cannibalism. On top of all of this came the slaughtering of the entire family lines by the bandits. The incredible records of women like Yao and Sun in the Local History present the reader the magnitude of savagery the bandits possessed. All of these factors led to the rise of suicides. The clarity of events Spence given to the reader is overwhelming.
After war Daru had requested to be transferred to a small town, where the silence of the town echoes in the schoolhouse; and it was hard on him. Now that he has company the same silence still muter the house. He thought about war and how he fought next to other men, whom he got to know and to love. The presence of the Arab imposes on Daru a feeling of brotherhood that he knew very well, and that he didn’t want to share. Men that fought together, or share rooms, or were prisoners or soldiers grow a peculiar alliance. However, Daru tries not to think about it, such feelings aren’t good for him. Daru wishes the Arab runs away because he feels as much of a prisoner as the
The second part of the journey visits, ancient China in 1500 BCE, a thousand years prior to the formation of the Daoism school of thought. (Brodd, Little and Ny...
The Asian literature is quite different in terms of character admiration than that of previous reviewed section. It is apparent that the characters did not suffer near as much quite as much tragedy as that of other cultures, but yet still generate thair own respect in terms of admiration. While still having to rise above the rest ,these characters seem to have to deal with less in the first place. Two prime examples of this are Policeman 663 in ChungKing Express and Rat in the book A Wild Sheep Chase.
The family's personal encounters with the destructive nature of the traditional family have forced them to think in modern ways so they will not follow the same destructive path that they've seen so many before they get lost. In this new age struggle for happiness within the Kao family, a cultural barrier is constructed between the modern youth and the traditional adults, with Chueh-hsin teeter tottering on the edge, lost between them both. While the traditional family seems to be cracking and falling apart much like an iceberg in warm ocean waters, the bond between Chueh-min, Chueh-hui, Chin and their friends becomes as strong as the ocean itself. While traditional Confucianism plays a large role in the problems faced by the Kao family, it is the combination of both Confucianism and modernization that brings the family to its knees. Chueh-hsin is a huge factor in the novel for many reasons.
In his poem, “Notes from the City of the Sun”, Bei Dao utilizes obscure imagery consistent with the Misty Poets and veiled political references to illustrate the struggles in Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution. The poem is sectioned into fourteen short stanzas containing imagery that are symbolic of the cultural hegemony in China under the rule of Mao Zedong. Bei Dao, born Zhao Zhen-kai, is an anti-revolutionary poet and one of the founders of a group known as the Misty Poets. The Misty Poets wrote poems that protested the Cultural Revolution led by Mao Zedong. Therefore, a lot of Bei Dao’s poems speak out against the Cultural Revolution and the restrictions that it placed on any form of art. Bei Dao’s poetry is categorized as “misty” because of the ambiguity in its references to Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. An obscure imagery that occurs twice in “Notes” is the sun imagery. Another imagery that depicts the injustice of the Cultural Revolution is the description of freedom as scraps of paper. In the poem, Bei Dao also equates faith to sheep falling into a ditch; this is a depiction blind faith during the Cultural Revolution. The purpose of this essay is to analyze how Bei Dao’s use of the Misty Poet’s ambiguous imagery and implicit political context in the poem “Notes from the City of the Sun” to illustrate the cultural hegemony in China under Mao.
This type of writing interests me because it was used as a tool to open people’s eyes to the brutality of war. In a way it protested and spoke up against this injustice and most importantly gave a voice to the people who became the biggest victims of war – the soldiers themselves.
"Lu Xun (Chinese Writer)." Encyclopedia Britannica. N.p., 6 May 2013. Web. 14 Nov. 2014. http://global.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/350231/Lu-Xun
Du Fu, a poet of the Tang dynasty also known as Tu Fu. Du Fu is consider to be one of the greatest Chinese poets in Chinese history as “readers of many different periods and types have considered Du Fu to be the greatest poet of the Chinese tradition” (Owen 413). His work is very diverse and “marked by stylistic variations” (Watson 30). Annotations of Du Fu’s poem helps reader understand who Du Fu is, in which most of his poems are autobiographical. Most of Du Fu works traditionally been “read in the context of the stages of his life” (Owen 413). His most remarkable works comes much later in life after he failed the imperial examination for the civil servant and started his exploration of the world. After Du Fu ambitions failed for a government
The Cultural Revolution destroyed countless lives; while some died during reeducation, the Revolution drove others to suicide, madness, or depression by the shame, humiliation, and isolation they faced. The government of China, however, often denies that such suffering occurred. Instead, it promotes a positive, romanticized image of the Cultural Revolution in sanctioned fiction and in official history. Therefore, one of the few ways we can see the true effects of the Communist regime is through the fiction that the disillusioned Chinese citizens wrote about the actual experience and impact of the era. Through these writings, we can see clearly who were the victims and who were the oppressors
... cannot be shared in the legal Chinese media. Moreover, despite the repeated refusal of the label “political poet,” political reading of his work remain an exasperating continual practice and fortunately for him, he cannot avoid being read by his Chinese readers against the social context of coeval China.