Joanne: Hello, I'm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And I'm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And this is Poetry for All. Abram: And today we're delighted to welcome Lucas Bender, Associate Professor in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University and the author of Du Fu Transforms. Professor Bender is here to discuss with us two poems by Du Fu, who is perhaps the most famous of many 8th century Chinese poets. Lucas Bender, welcome to the program. Thanks very much for having me. Let's jump right into it. Would you start off by reading the first poem, which is called Facing Snow? Lucas: Sure. So this is the Chinese, the title in Chinese is. In English, the poem is called Facing Snow, written in late 756 or early 757. Weeping of battles, many new ghosts Chanting in sorrow, a lonely old man Chaotic clouds press lower at twilight As fierce snow dances in the whirling wind My ladle discarded, there's no green in my cup. The brazier remains, the fire seems red. From several prefectures, news has been cut, so I sit worried, now writing words in the air. Abram: Thank you so much for that. So, I think maybe for our listeners, we should just back up and begin with the poet himself. Who, who was Du Fu, and why are we still reading his poetry? Lucas: Du Fu is generally considered the greatest poet in the Chinese poetic tradition, and that is no small accomplishment considering that the Chinese poetic tradition is almost certainly the world's largest. Pre modern China is probably the society where poetry was most considered most important and integrated most fully into the social life of the elite. So we have poets from 1, 100 who have 20, 000 surviving poems. Abram: We have poets who are very, very rarely read from around 1, 600 who have 40, 000 surviving poems. I mean, I haven't done a count, but, you know, there's just, there's a huge amount of stuff. And this is partly because In China, Confucius included among the six classics, a book of poetry. So the basic assumption has always been in the Chinese poetic tradition. That not only is poetry good and morally uplifting and good for society, but, but that it's one of the major legacies of the wise people of the past, of the ancient rulers, and that we can be. Need to have a robust poetic culture in order to have a flourishing society. And for that reason, poetry was in Du Fus' time and continued to be all the way through to the end of the kind of pre modern period, something that. Pretty much every educated person wrote. So not just read, but almost every educated person wrote poetry. It was a social occasional art, which meant that if you went to a party, one of the drinking games, That you would engage in would be to sit around and everybody would be forced to compose a poem and it might be timed, so the slowest person would have to drink a penalty , or the winner might be, you know, in a court context, might be gifted, you know, some fancy robe or something along those lines if your friend was leaving on a long journey. You would go with them part of the way and you would then write a poem to say goodbye. You might send them a poem as a letter, you know, poetry in Du Fu’s period was actually sort of like your CV. So you would, if you wanted to make it into the higher echelons of society, You would circulate a collection of poetry. Poetry was tested on the civil service examination. So if you were someone who wanted to become a high government official, you would study poetry in order to do it. So poetry in China has this kind of place that is. Pretty, I would say unfamiliar from the Western context and for that reason to say the greatest of all time, Chinese poets means quite a lot. Yeah, I could see that. Joanne: Yeah, this is, this is, I, you might've heard me chuckling toward the end of what you were just saying. I'm just saying, because I mean, it's just mind boggling the world that you're describing. There's a couple of things I'm hearing there, and maybe this will end up in the podcast. Maybe it won't, but I'm just thinking this through. I heard a couple of really important things there. One was that it was embedded in Confucian philosophy, that it was sort of a part of one's education to understand the value of poetry in this very social, philosophical, spiritual way. But I'm also hearing you say that precisely because of that and because people, figures in power so prized it, perhaps that's the very reason why we have so many of these poems preserved in the way that we do. Abram: That's the part that really strikes me is the integration with governance and the idea that to be educated and to be a good governor, to, to, to rule the state well meant to practice the arts of poetry well. And that to rise in government meant to be a good poet, or at least to be a good poet would help you rise in the, in the civil state. That, that's the part that's so striking to me, and maybe that helps us zero in a little bit on where we are with Du Fu and, and the Tang Dynasty and what's happening at that time that's in a certain way causing him to write and write in the way that he does. Can you give us a little context about what's happening in the Tang Dynasty when he's writing this first poem that you read for us? Lucas: Sure. Du Fu was born in 712, which is the first year of the reign of Tang Emperor Xuanzong, who is known at his time and has been known ever since as the brilliant emperor. And Du Fu, by the time he was 40, had lived through basically 40 years of what is often called the Haitang period. It's one of the biggest empires the world has ever seen. It was very militarily successful in this period. It was a period of sustained economic expansion. There's a lot of cosmopolitan influences because the Tang controls the Silk Roads and it was a, you know, relatively stable period in Chinese history. It's a period of, of kind of great prosperity. And it's also. Thought to have been and was thought in its own time to have been this great period of flourishing, particularly in literature and the arts. So Du Fu grows up in this period of great optimism and what he really wants to be is he wants to be someone who participates in government and, you know, his study of poetry probably started out aimed primarily at getting him a government position. Now, what happens what really changes the trajectory of Du Fu's life and of the Tang Empire as a whole, and a lot of people say actually of Chinese history as a whole, Is that in the very end of 755, one of the Tang Dynasty's great generals named An Lushan decides to turn his armies around and attack the capital and basically declare himself emperor. Now, there had been a period of kind of gathering clouds before this, but this is nonetheless. A remarkable collapse, a kind of sudden collapse of this great empire. And it opens the curtain on, I think it's about eight years of civil war during which period, it just a huge number of people either die or are displaced. And Du Fu's hopes essentially of, of ever reaching high government office during this period are going to be completely dashed and he's going to spend most of the rest of his life drifting about kind of in exile, experimenting with all sorts of new forms and new ideas. So this poem, Facing Snow, is probably memorized even nowadays by almost every single middle school student in China. Is one of the, one of his most famous poems. And it's written maybe around one year after the beginning of this great rebellion, Du Fu has been captured by the rebels and his family is off in another place where he had kind of left them. He doesn't know if they're alive or dead. He's not getting any news and it's kind of the depths of winter and he's writing poetry. Joanne: I would love to ask what you could say about the shape or the form of this poem. How is it structured? Just so our readers can sort of visualize it and understand its emotional and historical value. Lucas: So this isn't a new form and that's actually crucial for this particular poem. The form that Du Fu is using is called regulated verse and regulated verse is a very strictly well regulated form. Generally it can be more lines or sometimes fewer, but it's generally eight lines as this poem is. The lines are always organized into couplets. The last character of each couplet always rhymes. It always rhymes in Du Fu's period on a particular tone, which is a level tone, and the sequence of alternations of the tones of each character in the poem is prescribed. They have to vary in a, in a set order. And on a meaning level as well, there is a formal regulation. So the middle couplets of a regulated verse. have to have meaning rhymes between each character of the corresponding lines. So, for example, if we look at the second couplet of this poem, we have chaotic clouds and fierce snow. Those two things are in the same position of the line and they have to rhyme. So you have chaotic Fierce, clouds, snow, press lower and dance, light and whirling wind. These all correspond. Joanne: Right. So there's sort of a parallel movement between those two lines that would be anticipated by the listener or reader, but also it would be a source of pleasure for them as well. Right? Lucas: Correct. Yeah. It's a requisite part of the form and people devote a huge amount of attention and Engenuity to how to set up very interesting meaning rhymes between these sorts of lines. Joanne: Well, can I, can I jump in then and just ask, can I ask about how that works in the first two lines of the poem, right? So the poem begins, Weeping of battles, many new ghosts. That's the first line. And then chanting in sorrow, a lonely old man. Now that you've explained this structure, I can see how that's working in these first two lines as well. Right? Do you want to say a bit about what these first two lines initiate in the poem? Lucas: There's clearly this sort of interesting parallel and contrast that's being drawn. Between the many new ghosts and the new ghosts are of course, the people who have died in the battles and the lonely old man, even though the many new ghosts weeping in battles is what is causing the lonely old man to chant, right? So there's a, there's a way in which the relationship between these lines is complex. There's a contrast, but there's also a causative relationship between them. A lot of Chinese poetry is very elusive. I'll probably have to say this again. You can't understand it without knowing the textual tradition that it's drawing upon. Abram: Could I just pause right there? Because one of the things that we have often emphasized in this podcast, and it's worth kind of noting here at this point, is that poetry often sets itself up as kind of solitary or it might seem like it's you know, somebody's from the romantic era. We get this sense of a private poet sort of spilling emotions on the page and solitude, but actually so much poetry is in conversation with poetry. Poems that have come before that are alluding to them, that are building off of them, that are speaking back and forth to one another. So it's actually sort of cacophonous in a way. And if we could think of through the illusions, we'd begin to see what's going on. So, what sorts of illusions or what sorts of conversations with other poetry are happening in this poem? Lucas: Chinese poetry has to be elusive because it's so short, right? The illusions are what enables it to be short because Through an illusion, you can access a whole world of thought and a whole set of ideas that if you had to spell it out in the poem itself, it would just take a lot of time, but if you can just allude to it and everybody knows that for, you know, in this particular case, ghosts cause storms, we know this. From one of these classical histories, the George one and new ghosts are big ghosts, so they cause big storms. Ghosts actually get smaller over time. And so when Du Fu hears weeping of battles, what he's actually hearing is the howling of the wind. This is a kind of a coded way of saying. I'm sitting alone here and I'm hearing the howling wind of this giant snowstorm. And I know what must be causing it on the basis of having read these books is that there are all these new ghosts out there and we're supposed to hear this resonance. between the wailing of the winds, which is the weeping of the ghosts and the sorrowful chanting of this lonely old man. So you can see how all parts of this couplet kind of work together. There's resonance, there's contrast, and there's causation. And you know, this is kind of the ideal form of a parallel couplet is that, you know, you create complex, Connections between what seemed to be different, disparate parts of the scene. That's remarkable. Yeah. So this, this is the art. This is the art. Joanne: This is so helpful because I would have had no access to this. If you had not sort of explained the conventions of this poetic expression. And now to think about what he's saying. And his situation, it's so upsetting. I think there's a few things in those first four lines. I'm very interested in it. We haven't even talked yet about your choices as a translator in English, which is, you know, I don't read Chinese, so your English translation is all I have to sort of grasp onto, but I'm looking at weeping, chanting. There's a sense of this poem unfolding in the moment in which it's expressed, right? With those gerunds, weeping of battles. And then there's how many new ghosts there are. The sorrow, the chaos in those chaotic clouds pressing. There's pressure there. That's an interesting verb. Chaotic clouds press lower at twilight. Twilight is in between time before complete darkness as fierce snow. What an interesting choice for an adjective as fierce snow dances in the whirling wind. There's this sense of constant movement and evolution, but also turmoil in each of these word choices that I find very interesting to explain why the clouds are chaotic and the snow is fierce. Lucas: I mean, the obvious reason is that Du Fu is thinking of the situation and the state. There's also a suggestion that his mind is slightly unhinged. Not all is right with him. Maybe he's not fully in control of his perception. And if you take that back and you look at the chaotic crowd, clouds and the fierce snow, and you hear the wailing of the wind as ghosts. Then there's this sense that maybe he's projecting all of this onto what is kind of just a normal snowstorm. The assumption in Chinese poetry is that it's being written at the moment, narrated. The assumption is that something is really happening and you're observing it. And what's interesting is the way that you observe it and write about it. And so Du Fu is working with this snowstorm. By imposing upon it his feelings about the collapsed empire. Joanne: Okay. But this is, I think that this is probably one of the many reasons why we still read his poems to this day is that quality of attention, right? So several episodes ago. We were speaking with the poet, Ritchie Hoffman, and as wildly different and there's a huge, there's centuries, centuries separate the work of contemporary American poet, Ritchie Hoffman, from Du Fu, but what they have in common is this really careful sense of form. Focus and quality of attention on the objects right in front of them, right? And figuring out what the insight is just from paying attention to those objects, to that environment, to that climate, right? And then what that tells you about the frame of mind of the poetic speaker, right? So that's really powerful. And then that leads us to the final couplet. Everything that you're saying, by the time we get to that final couplet, that becomes really resonant and powerful. From several prefectures, news has been cut, so I sit worried, now writing words in the air. Wow. That is such a sense of foreboding there, right? Lucas: Yeah, so foreboding, I think, you know, he doesn't, He doesn't know whether his family is alive or dead. He doesn't know how the war is going. You know, this resonates with that alone in the very first couplet of the poem. And there's another allusion in this couplet as well, that is actually really crucial for understanding. The poem, there was a general earlier in Chinese history who lost a catastrophic battle and was basically demoted and it broke his mind. And with other people, he showed no emotion, but when he was unobserved or when he thought he was unobserved, he sat using his finger to write in the air, the characters. Sigh, sigh, it is strange, just over and over and over again. And so this writing words in the air with which Du Fu ends the poem is drawing a connection between his writing this poem and that general's, you know, writing sigh, sigh, it is strange. You know, there's a way in which Du Fu has taken. What was a social art form, poetry, and he's alone here. And in fact, he's not sure he's ever going to have anybody who could ever read this poem. And he's comparing his obsessive writing of poetry in this moment, in this moment of catastrophe, the fact that he's still writing poetry. Maybe as crazy as that general's using his finger to write sigh, sigh, it is strange in the air. Abram: It reminds me actually of another episode we did on, on Lisa Mueller again, centuries apart, very different context, but she's got this poem when I am asked and it's about how she, how and why she started writing poetry and it's about the death of her mother and there being nobody there with her. And she sits alone on this. Stone bench and she says at the end of that poem, so I put my grief in the mouth of language, the only thing that would grieve with me. And so this idea that there is a kind of reaching out, but you don't know if anybody's going to receive it, but you've got language itself to grieve with you and so you're, you're using it anyway. Joanne: It's amazing. Beautiful. Abram: So Lucaswith all that we've learned, would you be willing to read this first poem of Du Fus again? Lucas: Sure. So, Fu. Shǔ zhōu, xiào xǐ duàn, chǒu zuò, zhèng shū kōng, facing snow, weeping of battles, many new ghosts, chanting in sorrow a lonely old man, chaotic clouds press lower at twilight as fierce snow dances in the whirling wind. My ladle discarded, there's no green in my cup. The brazier remains, the fire seems red. From several prefectures, news has been cut, so I sit worried, now writing words in the air. Joanne: So beautiful. Wow. Abram: Thank you, Lucas Bender, so much Lucas: Thank you very much, Joanne and Abram. This was a lot of fun. Joanne: Thank you. Abram: As always, please remember to subscribe to Poetry For All wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Joanne: Thank you for listening.