The Life of Tu Fu 杜甫一生 (Bilingual Edition) - by Eliot Weinberger (Hardcover)

About the Book

Drawing inspiration from a vast oeuvre of more than a thousand poems, Eliot Weinberger has composed fifty-eight poems derived and adapted from the lines, images, and feelings in Tu Fu's poetry.

Book Synopsis

Drawing inspirations from a vast oeuvre of more than a thousand poems, Eliot Weinberger has deftly composed a montage of fifty-eight poems derived and adapted from the lines, images, and feelings in Tu Fu's poetry. These poems weave a tapestry of Tu Fu's turbulent life and times of war and disaster.
In the post-pandemic era, we may appreciate the profound solitude and desolation in Tu Fu's poetry that still resonates across the span of a millennium. More than an homage to the life of Tu Fu, this work is a meditation on the self, suffering, and our transient beings.

Review Quotes

This is a book concerned with mortality, friendship, and regret. The psyche looking back at its life. As such, The Life of Tu Fu sometimes feels like a poetic biography of my own life, or maybe yours.--Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize Winner, 2019

About the Author

Eliot Weinberger, described by The New York Times as "one of the world's great essayists," is a celebrated author, translator, and editor. His books include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints, as well as Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. He is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao, the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, and the general editor of the series "Calligrams: Writings from and on China." Weinberger's work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. His debut poetry collection, The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press, 2023), was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's T. S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize.