聞道今春雁
南歸自廣州
旄頭彗紫微
無複俎豆事
I hear the geese migrate strangely this spring
they fly further south past even Guangzhou
since the comet foretold An Lushan’s rebellion
ritual vessels have sat unused in the temple
translated from Chinese by George Life
Du Fu (712-770) was born into a prominent family in the Tang dynasty capital region of Chang’an. His largely fruitless attempts to establish a career early in life were fatally interrupted by the An Lushan rebellion in 755. He left the capital region with his family in 759, traveling first northwest, then southwest, then, in 765, he began a journey down the Yangzi River that would end with his death, in relative poverty and obscurity, somewhere in the region of Dongting Lake in present-day Hunan province. Du Fu’s poems, which number in present collections at over 1400, were first taken up as models in the early ninth century by Mid-Tang poets such as Han Yu and Bai Juyi, who paired them in excellence with those of Li Bai. Since at least the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) he has been generally regarded as China’s greatest poet.
Originally from North Carolina, George Life is currently a PhD student in the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Between 2003 and 2008 he studied, taught, and traveled for extended periods in China, including a year in Hunan province. Along with a projected two-volume translation of the late poems of Du Fu, he is working on a series of his own poems titled Precarity, selections from which have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review, New American Writing, Hambone, and elsewhere. He edits Tzak, an online journal of poetry and poetics.