You Fu

Names
Xìng 姓 :	Dù 杜
Míng 名 :	Foot
Zì 字 :	Zǐměi 子 美
Hào 號 :	Shàolíng Yělǎo 少陵 野老
aka:	Dù Gōngbù 杜 工部 Shīshèng 詩聖
Shì 謚 :	Wénzhēn 文 貞

Fictional portrait, no contemporary portrayal of Du Fu is known

Du Fu (also Tu Fu , Chinese  杜甫 , Pinyin Dù Fǔ ; * 712 in the district of Gong east of Luoyang , Henan province ; † 770 in the area of ​​Tangzhou (now Changsha ), Hunan province ) was one of the most important poets of the Chinese Tang Dynasty and contemporary of the poet Li Bai . His nicknames were, among other things, Dù Shàolíng ( 杜少陵 ) and Dù Gōngbù ( 工部 工部  - "You from the Ministry of Public Works"). Traditionally he was also referred to as Shisheng ( „  -" saint of poetry "), an equivalent to the" saint "of philosophy, Confucius .

Life

Du Fu's first four decades of life fall during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong , under whom the Tang empire flourished. His father was a county officer in Henan Province. Since his mother died early, he grew up with an aunt. Du Fu spent his apprenticeship and wandering years on the lower reaches of the Yangtze . In 736 he returned to the capital Chang'an - at that time probably the largest city in the world with a million inhabitants - to take the civil service examination . His first attempts failed: not because of a lack of talent, but because of a lack of family influence.

In 744 he met Li Bai / Li Po for the first time and a friendship developed, which was, however, very one-sided. Du Fu was a few years younger than Li Bai and still a beginner while Li Bai was already a famous poet. We know twelve poems by Du Fu to or about Li Bai, but only two in the opposite direction.

Du Fu's “ grass hut ” in Chengdu

In 752 Du Fu passed an extraordinary examination, but in 755 he was assigned a civil service post, which was three years, which was customary. Eventually he got a position as an adjutant in the palace guard of the Crown Prince. In the meantime, his youngest son had died of starvation.

The central event in Du Fu's life was the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, at times he was even captured by the rebels, and he spent the rest of his life in almost constant restlessness. In 760 he came to Chengdu ( Sichuan Province ), where he built his famous "grass hut" on the outskirts. In the autumn of that year he ran into financial difficulties and therefore sent poems to various addresses as a request for help. Eventually he was taken in by Yan Wu, a friend and former colleague who had become governor of Chengdu in early 762. Du Fu had to flee the city as early as July before a rebellion, but he returned in 764 and became an advisor to Yan Wu, who died the following year. The poems from the end of his life show Du Fu, drawn by malaria, restlessly on the move again. He died in 770 homeless and destitute on a boat trip.

plant

Excerpt from the poem “Visiting the Temple of Laotse ” from a 16th century manuscript

Du Fu mastered the modern and the old style , but he is above all a master of the “strict rhyme”, the lüshi composed of eight lines arranged in pairs with five or seven characters each , in which the third and fourth pair are both grammatical and grammatical have to form exact parallels in terms of content and the word tones had to follow a strict scheme. Since a tone has been lost since the Tang period and the tones often no longer correspond, the qualities of a Tang poem are difficult for a modern Chinese to recognize.

The poet likes to play with homophones : in a word, words written differently also sound. By double occupying individual words in just a few characters, he is able to concentrate a maximum of meaning. Famous for this is the poem Herbst , which is one of the most important and difficult works of classical Chinese poetry.

In contrast to Li Bai's poems, his poems often represent a political protest. Du Fu describes social injustice, famine and chaos from the perspective of ordinary people. A verse from the song in five hundred characters about my feelings during the journey from the capital to Fengxian County has become a popular phrase, which contrasts the extravagance of the rich with the misery of the common people on the eve of the An Lushan rebellion of 755.

"Behind high cinnabar gates, meat and wine stink.
The streets lined with the bones of the frozen."

- Translation by Raffael Keller

The vast majority of the over 1400 poems that have survived come from the troubled last 15 years of his life. It was extremely unusual for the time that you Fu made this life - and in it your private everyday life - an issue. A certain self-irony is also characteristic. Du Fu confronts his readers as a subject as early as the 8th century, something that was only achieved in the West in the Italian Renaissance, for example by Petrarch . In addition, in China poems were often written as thanks, dedications, farewells or for celebrations, so it is possible to largely reconstruct Du Fu's life from his poems.

However, the authorship of many of the poems ascribed to him is hypothetical. The selection of his works compiled shortly after his death, which is said to have included 290 poems, has been lost. The earliest surviving anthology, which also contains poems by Du Fu, dates from around 900. The standard edition today is the edition by Qiu Zhaoao (1638–1713), which comprises 23 scrolls.

effect

During his lifetime and immediately after his death, Du Fu was not recognized, which was probably due to his innovative style. However, its influence grew over time. It was based in part on his ability to reconcile apparent opposites: Political conservatives were drawn in by his loyalty to the existing order, while the radicals valued his dedication to the poor. Literary conservatives admired his masterly technique, literary radicals were inspired by his innovations.

Within China, Du Fu is now regarded as the high point of classical Chinese poetry, outside of China he influenced Japanese poetry , especially that of Matsuo Bashō . In the West, however, his contemporary Li Bai and Bai Juyi , a generation younger, were valued. While there is a rich literature by and about Du Fu in English, for a long time in Germany he was only present in anthologies.

The Austrian diplomat and sinologist Erwin von Zach translated Du Fu's poetic work completely into German for the first time. His translations, which were originally scattered in inaccessible journals, were philologically exact, but formally undemanding, and had the express purpose of serving as raw material for other sinologists and reviewers. In 1956 the writer Werner Helwig , who himself could not speak Chinese, used this to reproduce 50 poems by Du Fu in prose-like versions. It wasn't until 2009 that the sinologist Raffael Keller translated a selection of 100 poems directly from Chinese into German for the first time.

In Hermann Hesse's story from Klingsor last summer , the title character and her poet friend Hermann identify with Li Bai (Li Tai Pe) and Du Fu (Thu Fu).

literature

• Du Fu: poems. Translated from the Chinese and commented by Raffael Keller . Dieterich'sche Verlagbuchhandlung, Mainz 2009, ISBN 978-3-87162-069-0 .
• Erwin von Zach (translator): Tu Fu's longest poem . Asia Major Volume 2, 1925, pp. 152-162, PDF
• Erwin von Zach (translator): Tu Fu's poems . James Robert Hightower (Ed.). Harvard University Press , Cambridge, Mass. 1952.
• Werner Helwig : The great complaints of Tu Fu. Re-seals . Schünemann, Bremen 1956.
• Yan Zhao, Dieter Ziethen: I quietly hear blossoms fall. Chinese Classical Poems . Hefei Huang Verlag, Groebenzell 2009, ISBN 978-3-940497-24-6 .
• Du Fu sight of a spring poems. Translated by Helga Scherner, retouched by Erhard Scherner. HeRaS Verlag 2016, ISBN 978-3959140188

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Du Fu: Poems. Translated from the Chinese and commented on by Raffael Keller ..., p. 175.
2. ↑ Hans Christoph Buch: Until my drinking vessel shatters in the beat of the beat . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . February 22, 2010, p. 28

Web links

Commons : Du Fu  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Du Fu in the catalog of the German National Library