Du Fu's Laments from the South (review)

216 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 was engaged in a contest between good and evil. Unforeseen problems began to surface in 1985, when twelve thousand Chinese came to die United States to study and, only four years later, forty-thousand Chinese were in the United States. What geopolitics! No one wanted to go back to China. Why should they go back to their country when they had no answers about how to help it? The American institutions that hosted these Chinese, in die same breath, excused themselves from any responsibility to understand the causes and consequences of their own actions. Democracy. I chose to present this last because it is the capstone to Madsen's moral inquiry. He says that democracy "is not simply about freedom; it is about voluntary, accepted discipline, enforced by legitimate institutions, based on public agreement arrived at rationally through vigorous debate." I found this definition compelling because it places emphasis on the importance of community— something relevant to all societies. In the aftermath ofTiananmen, Madsen maintains that Americans need to ask which side diey are on—the side of a people who demand human rights or that of a government that demands order? Madsen contends that we need to look inside ourselves to find ways to address our "foreign" relations. Peggy Spitzer Christoff Peggy Spitzer Christoffis afreelance consultant specializing in Sino-American relations , and Chairfor the International Relations Committee, the Oak Park/River Forest League ofWomen Voters. m David R. McCraw. Du Fus Lamentsfrom the South. Honolulu: University ofHawaii Press, 1992. xiv, 271 pp. Hardcover $42.00, isbn 0-8248-1422-3. Paperback $19.95, isbn 0-8248-1455-x. Professor David R. McCraw put all students and scholars of Chinese poetry in his debt with a rare study of seventeenth-century Chinese lyricists in 1990. Since then, he has made another important contribution to the field by assuming what he calls "the responsibility ofWestern sinologists" in tackling the rich and complex heritage of Du Fu. The American poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth once discussed ' 1996 by University Du fu ^^ ^^ Sapph0) Shakespeare, and Baudelaire, and calledhim "the world's greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language" (Classics Revisited [1965]). However, despite the efforts of scholars from William Hung (author ofa pathfinding biography in English) to David Hawkes (who ofHawai'i Press Reviews 217 compiled a short collection neatly tided A LittlePrimer), Du Fu, generallyacknowledged in China as the greatest poet in its history, remains largely unknown to the general public in the West, much to our common regret. The proclaimed aim ofthe book is to render Du Fu in English to inspire Western readers, to put him in his "deserved place among die world's greatest lyricists." Such an enterprising attempt takes the form ofthe translation and explication du texte oíWj regulated octaves from the last decade (760-770) ofthe poet's life, about one-fifth ofthe poet's entire oeuvre. The book has an ingenious structure. After an introduction that provides a general picture ofDu Fu's world and High Tang poetry, the first three chapters are devoted to a chronological survey ofhis work during the specified period while die poet lived a refugee's life in southwestern China. It is an appropriate, even indispensable, first step in assessing the achievements of the great "poet-historian." This is followed by a switch in the next eight chapters to a reading ofDu Fu's texts based on a combination of Western generic approach and traditional Chinese thematic classification. In the former grouping are the study ofDu Fu's vers de société, night verse (comparable to the French Nocturne and the German Nachtstück), poems on things (yungwu, a kind of Dinggedicht), and political poetry. In the latter we find a discussion of Du Fu's poetry in the categories of "views in the wilds" (denglan), "reclusive verse" (yingyi), "meditations on antiquity" (huaigu), and "autumn poems" (qiuri).1 The longest (twenty-eight pages) section of the book, the Conclusion, contains a general discussion of Du Fu's poetry in terms ofits worlds (the Chinese jingjie), its language, deviant forms, and structure of sequences, and in...