Tu Fu (712–770 C. E.) has for more than a millennium been widely considered by the Chinese to be their greatest poet, and Hinton’s original Selected Poems played a key role in extending that reputation to America. Most of Tu Fu’s best work was written in the last decade of his life as he fled the devastation of civil war. In the midst of his refugee struggles, Tu Fu’s always personal poems managed to encompass a remarkable range: elegant simplicity and great complexity, everyday life and grand historical drama, private philosophical depth and social engagement in a world consumed by war. Through it all, his wisdom grew only more elemental: “Armies haunt my homeland still, and war   drums throb in this far-off place. A guest    overnight here in this river city, I return   again to shrieking crows, my old friends.”

The Selected Poems of Tu Fu: Expanded and Newly Translated by David Hinton PDF

The list of books you might like