Du Fu and the Good Life

What is a good life, and how do we make sense of the world when it seems like society is collapsing? In this episode, Lucas Bender joins us once again to discuss the work of Du Fu (712-770 C.E.), the great Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty. Luke helps us to see how Du Fu’s “Passing the Night by White Sands Post Station” can be read in multiple ways depending on how one translates each word of the poem. In doing so, he reveals the poem’s concerns with aging, disappointment, and the possibility of hope in difficult times.

“How do I make sense of a life that doesn’t look, in any standard way, like a good life?”

Du Fu, living on the edge of empire—exiled and without an audience—had to reimagine the purposes of poetry and its relevance for his own seemingly dismal ending. Traditionally a social art (poetry was even part of one’s government resume at the time), Du Fu’s poems were written outside the halls of power and with no clear sense of readership. Relatively unknown, lacking any influence, he wrote for an audience that did not yet exist.

That audience eventually came. And it came, in part, because his poetry bent the usual forms of the day. It went new ways. It experimented with new methods, a new ambiguity, a new ability to be read in multiple ways at once. Freed from the needs of the day by his own social and political failures, Du Fu innovated a poetry that could open itself to readers for centuries to come.

“Du Fu’s life could not have been the success it ultimately is if it hadn’t been the profound failure that it was.”

While Du wrote with no hope of return, no clear readers in mind, he nonetheless put images of hope in so many poems, including this one. He embraced humility before the future, not knowing what might happen to his name, his world, his work. Expecting to go down into obscurity, such images of hope have instead come to pass: Du Fu is now known as one of the greatest Chinese poets who ever lived. The fact that he was not appreciated in his own time enabled him to write the kind of poetry that would live for centuries to come.

We hope you enjoy this latest episode of Poetry For All, a wonderful reflection on success, failure, and the good life through the poetry of Du Fu.

https://poetryforall.fireside.fm/75

https://poetryforallpod.com/podcast/episode-65-du-fu-facing-snow/

This episode focuses on an earlier part of his life and explains the sudden, terrible war that surprised society and led to Du Fu’s downfall. It is perhaps the most famous poem of Du Fu:

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