Life
| Names | |
|---|---|
| Chinese: | 杜甫 |
| Pinyin: | Dù Fǔ |
| Wade-Giles: | Tu⁴ Fu³ |
| Zi: | Zǐměi 子美 |
| Also known as: | Dù Shàolíng 杜少陵 Du of Shaoling Dù Gōngbù 杜工部 Du of the Ministry of Works Shàolíng Yělǎo 少陵野老 Shīshèng, 詩聖, The Saint of Poem |
| Du Fu | |||||||||||||||||
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| Chinese | 杜甫 | ||||||||||||||||
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| Hangul | 두보 | ||||||||||||||||
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| Hiragana | とほ | ||||||||||||||||
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Traditionally, Chinese literary criticism has placed great emphasis on knowledge of the life of the author when interpreting a work, a practice which Watson attributes to "the close links that traditional Chinese thought posits between art and morality". Since many of Du Fu's poems prominently feature morality and history, this practice is particularly important. Another reason, identified by the Chinese historian William Hung, is that Chinese poems are typically extremely concise, omitting circumstantial factors that might be relevant, but which could be reconstructed by an informed contemporary. For modern Western readers, "The less accurately we know the time, the place and the circumstances in the background, the more liable we are to imagine it incorrectly, and the result will be that we either misunderstand the poem or fail to understand it altogether". Owen suggests a third factor particular to Du Fu, arguing that the variety of the poet's work required consideration of his whole life, rather than the "reductive" categorisations used for more limited poets.
Read more about this topic: Du Fu
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing—it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)
“Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it does not come, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures; who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they find the grave?”
—Bible: Hebrew, Job 3:20-22.
“Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-class parents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement—a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.”
—David Elkind (20th century)