★★★★☆ Communications from aliens

Poems

Li Po, Tu Fu, Arthur Cooper (translator)

Of all the arts, poetry is the one most tied to specific languages. This is why you will hear French speakers claiming that there is no such thing as English poetry -- English poetry is a different art from French poetry, so it's easy for a connoisseur of French poetry to dismiss English poetry. This question is especially pressing when a native English speaker (me) wants to read the poetry of two famous Chinese poets, Li Po and Tu Fu, who flourished in eighth-century China. (Don't be confused if you see their names written differently. Li Po, for instance, is also called Li Bai and Li Bo.) Chinese is a very different language from English, far more so than English is from French, and because Chinese is a living language, we can be confident that the Chinese of Li Po and Tu Fu was rather different from modern Chinese. If you have ever struggled to understand Geoffrey Chaucer's Middle English, you will appreciate this.

Translator Arthur Cooper undertakes the challenging job of bringing Li Po and Tu Fu to life for Modern English readers. He is fully aware of the difficulty. The book begins with 101 pages of front matter. Most of that is an 86-page introduction in which Cooper discusses the Culture of Tang China and Li Po and Tu Fu's place in it. He also, at considerable (and, it must be admitted, tedious) length discusses Chinese Poetic Prosody and how he rendered it in English. He ends with an admonition to read the poems aloud, and instructions on how to do so. Poets always tell you to read aloud, and I usually ignore them, but this time I did it. Every morning for a month and a half I read one poem aloud.

Li Po and Tu Fu were not only contemporaries -- they were friends and admirers of each other's work. They are, however, very different. Li Po's poems are often about drinking and idling -- he clearly had the ability to laugh at the world, including himself. Tu Fu's poetry is more serious. I found Tu Fu easier to understand, but the words that will stick with me are Li Po's. I definitely had the feeling that Cooper loves Tu Fu a bit more, although I'm sure he would claim that he loves all his children equally.

Cooper accompanies each poem with notes describing the circumstances under which they were written. These are especially useful in the case of Tu Fu's poems, which often relate to his career and to the historical upheavals of the time. Li Po's poems are more common and more universal.

Like most Penguin Classics collections, this is a well-constructed book.

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