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杜甫
杜甫像（后世画家创作）
出生	712年 中国河南省巩县
逝世	770年
职业	诗人
施影响于	白居易、苏轼、陆游、黄庭坚

杜甫（712年2月12日—770年），字子美，号少陵野老，祖籍襄阳（今湖北省襄樊市），生于中国河南省巩县（今巩义市），唐朝现实主义诗人。曾任左拾遗、检校工部员外郎，因此后世称其杜拾遗、杜工部；又因为他搭草堂居住在长安城外的少陵，也称他杜少陵、杜草堂。

杜甫与李白齐名，合称“李杜”，为了与另一位诗人“杜牧”区别，杜甫也常被称为老杜。杜甫与杜牧是远房宗亲，同为晋灭孙吴的大将杜预之后裔。

杜甫早年追求仕官，愿报效国家。但公元755年的安史之乱破灭了唐朝的盛世，也破坏了杜甫的生活。在他生命的最后15年中，杜甫的生活一直没能安顿下来。

杜甫的作品对中国与日本的文化均有深远的影响。杜甫存世的诗作大约有500首。中国人将杜甫称为“诗圣”，将他的诗称为“诗史”。在杜甫的作品被介绍给西方读者时，他常被比作是“中国的维吉尔、贺拉斯、奥维德、莎士比亚、弥尔顿、伯恩斯、华兹华斯、贝朗瑞、雨果或波德莱尔”。

生平

在传统上，当中国的文艺评论家在评论一篇作品时，会重点地强调作者的生活经历；Watson将此惯例归因于“中国传统思维中艺术与道德的紧密联系”。而在评论像杜甫这样的作家时，这种因素变得更为重要。中国历史学家洪业（William Hung）认为的另一个原因是因为中国诗歌是特别简明的，会根据情况省略掉有联系的一些因素，不过这些因素却能被熟知那个时代的人所重构。因此，对现代的西方读者来说，“我们对那个时代的背景知道得越少，我们就越容易去展开错误的想象，最终的结果便是我们会对诗歌本身的含义误解乃至不理解”。

早年

大部分所知的杜甫生平都来源于他创作的诗歌。与许多中国诗人一样，杜甫出生在一个贵族家庭（他们自称为尧的后代），但他们的生活已经不像以前那样富裕（不过，洪业估计他们的家庭收入依旧是当时一户小康之家的11倍）。杜甫出生于712年，确切的出生地点不可考，大概在今河南省洛阳一带（最有可能的是巩县）。后来杜甫认为自己是长安人。

Du Fu's China

杜甫的母亲在生他后不久便死去了，他是由自己的二姑母带大的。杜甫还有一个早夭的兄长，以及三名同父异母的弟弟与一名同父异母的妹妹，在他的诗中经常提到他们，不过杜甫从未提到过自己的继母。

杜甫幼年时曾As the son of a minor scholar-official, his youth was spent on the standard education of a future civil servant: study and memorisation of the Confucian classics of philosophy, history and poetry. He later claimed to have produced creditable poems by his early teens, but these have been lost.

In the early 730s he travelled in the Jiangsu/Zhejiang area; his earliest surviving poem, describing a poetry contest, is thought to date from the end of this period, around 735. In that year he travelled to Chang'an to take the civil service exam but was unsuccessful, to his surprise and that of centuries of later critics. Hung concludes that he probably failed because his prose style at the time was too dense and obscure, while Chou suggests that his failure to cultivate connections in the capital may have been to blame. After this failure he went back to travelling, this time around Shandong and Hebei.

His father died around 740. Du Fu would have been allowed to enter the civil service because of his father's rank, but he is thought to have given up the privilege in favour of one of his half brothers. He spent the next four years living in the Luoyang area, fulfilling his duties in domestic affairs.

In the autumn of 744 he met Li Bai (Li Po) for the first time, and the two poets formed a somewhat one-sided friendship: Du Fu was by some years the younger, while Li Bai was already a poetic star. We have twelve poems to or about Li Bai from the younger poet, but only one in the other direction. They met again only once, in 745.

In 746 he moved to the capital in an attempt to resurrect his official career. He participated in a second exam the following year, but all the candidates were failed by the prime minister (apparently in order to prevent the emergence of possible rivals). Thereafter he never again attempted the examinations, instead petitioning the emperor directly in 751, 754 and probably again in 755. He married around 752, and by 757 the couple had had five children—three sons and two daughters—but one of the sons died in infancy in 755. From 754 he began to have lung problems (probably asthma), the first of a series of ailments which dogged him for the rest of his life. It was in that year that Du Fu was forced to move his family due to the turmoil of a famine brought about by massive floods in the region.

In 755 he finally received an appointment as Registrar of the Right Commandant's office of the Crown Prince's Palace. Although this was a minor post, in normal times it would have been at least the start of an official career. Even before he had begun work, however, the position was swept away by events.

战乱

The An Lushan Rebellion began in December 755, and was not completely crushed for almost eight years. It caused enormous disruption to Chinese society: the census of 754 recorded 52.9 million people, but that of 764 just 16.9 million, the remainder having been killed or displaced. During this time, Du Fu led a largely itinerant life, being kept unsettled by wars, associated famines and imperial displeasure. This period of unhappiness, however, was the making of Du Fu as a poet: Eva Shan Chou has written that, "What he saw around him– the lives of his family, neighbors, and strangers– what he heard, and what he hoped for or feared from the progress of various campaigns– these became the enduring themes of his poetry". Even when he learned of the death of his youngest child, he turned to the suffering of others in his poetry instead of dwelling upon his own misfortunes. Du Fu wrote:

"Brooding on what I have lived through, if even I know such suffering, the common man must surely be rattled by the winds."

In 756 Emperor Xuanzong was forced to flee the capital and abdicate. Du Fu, who had been away from the city, took his family to a place of safety and attempted to join up with the court of the new emperor (Suzong), but he was captured by the rebels and taken to Chang’an. In the autumn, his youngest son Du Zongwu (Baby Bear) was born. Around this time Du Fu is thought to have contracted malaria.

He escaped from Chang'an the following year, and was appointed Reminder when he rejoined the court in May 757. This post gave access to the emperor, but was largely ceremonial. Du Fu's conscientiousness compelled him to try to make use of it: he soon caused trouble for himself by protesting against the removal of his friend and patron Fang Guan on a petty charge; he was then himself arrested, but was pardoned in June. He was granted leave to visit his family in September, but he soon rejoined the court and on December 8 757, he returned to Chang’an with the emperor following its recapture by government forces. However, his advice continued to be unappreciated, and in the summer of 758 he was demoted to a post as Commissioner of Education in Huazhou. The position was not to his taste: in one poem, he wrote:

"I am about to scream madly in the office/Especially when they bring more papers to pile higher on my desk."

He moved on again in the summer of 759; this has traditionally been ascribed to famine, but Hung believes that frustration is a more likely reason. He next spent around six weeks in Qinzhou (now Tianshui, Gansu province), where he wrote over sixty poems.

成都

In 760 he arrived in Chengdu (Sichuan province), where he based himself for most of the next five years. By the autumn of that year he was in financial trouble, and sent poems begging help to various acquaintances. He was relieved by Yan Wu, a friend and former colleague who was appointed governor general at Chengdu. Despite his financial problems, this was one of the happiest and most peaceful periods of his life, and many of his poems from this period are peaceful depictions of his life in his famous "thatched hut". In 762 he left the city to escape a rebellion, but he returned in the summer of 764 and was appointed military advisor to Yan, who was involved in campaigns against the Tibetans.

晚年

Luoyang, the region of his birthplace, was recovered by government forces in the winter of 762, and in the spring of 765 Du Fu and his family sailed down the Yangtze, apparently with the intention of making their way back there. They travelled slowly, held up by his ill-health (by this time he was suffering from poor eyesight, deafness and general old age in addition to his previous ailments). They stayed in Kuizhou (now Baidi, Chongqing) at the entrance to the Three Gorges for almost two years from late spring 766. This period was Du Fu's last great poetic flowering, and here he wrote 400 poems in his dense, late style. In autumn 766 Bo Maolin became governor of the region: he supported Du Fu financially and employed him as his unofficial secretary.

In March 768 he began his journey again and got as far as Hunan province, where he died in Tanzhou (now Changsha) in November or December 770, in his 59th year. He was survived by his wife and two sons, who remained in the area for some years at least. His last known descendant is a grandson who requested a grave inscription for the poet from Yuan Zhen in 813.

Hung summarises his life by concluding that, "He appeared to be a filial son, an affectionate father, a generous brother, a faithful husband, a loyal friend, a dutiful official, and a patriotic subject."

作品

Part of Du Fu's poem "On Visiting the Temple of Laozi", as copied by a 16th-century calligrapher.

Criticism of Du Fu's works has focused on his strong sense of history, his moral engagement, and his technical excellence.

History

Since the Song dynasty Du Fu has been called by critics the "poet historian" (诗史 shī shǐ). The most directly historical of his poems are those commenting on military tactics or the successes and failures of the government, or the poems of advice which he wrote to the emperor. Indirectly, he wrote about the effect of the times in which he lived on himself, and on the ordinary people of China. As Watson notes, this is information "of a kind seldom found in the officially compiled histories of the era".

Du Fu's political comments are based on emotion rather than calculation: his prescriptions have been paraphrased as, "Let us all be less selfish, let us all do what we are supposed to do". Since his views were impossible to disagree with, however, his forcefully expressed truisms enabled his installation as the central figure of Chinese poetic history.

Moral engagement

A second favourite epithet of Chinese critics is that of "poet sage" (诗圣 shī shèng), a counterpart to the philosophical sage, Confucius. One of the earliest surviving works, The Song of the Wagons (from around 750), gives voice to the sufferings of a conscript soldier in the imperial army, even before the beginning of the rebellion; this poem brings out the tension between the need of acceptance and fulfilment of one's duties, and a clear-sighted consciousness of the suffering which this can involve. These themes are continuously articulated in the poems on the lives of both soldiers and civilians which Du Fu produced throughout his life.

Although Du Fu's frequent references to his own difficulties can give the impression of an all-consuming solipsism, Hawkes argues that his "famous compassion in fact includes himself, viewed quite objectively and almost as an afterthought". He therefore "lends grandeur" to the wider picture by comparing it to "his own slightly comical triviality".

Du Fu's compassion, for himself and for others, was part of his general broadening of the scope of poetry: he devoted many works to topics which had previously been considered unsuitable for poetic treatment. Zhang Jie wrote that for Du Fu, "everything in this world is poetry", and he wrote extensively on subjects such as domestic life, calligraphy, paintings, animals and other poems.

Technical excellence

Du Fu's work is notable above all for its range. Chinese critics traditionally used the term 集大成 (jídàchéng- "complete symphony"), a reference to Mencius' description of Confucius. Yuan Zhen was the first to note the breadth of Du Fu's achievement, writing in 813 that his predecessor, "united in his work traits which previous men had displayed only singly". He mastered all the forms of Chinese poetry: Chou says that in every form he "either made outstanding advances or contributed outstanding examples". Furthermore, his poems use a wide range of registers, from the direct and colloquial to the allusive and self-consciously literary. The tenor of his work changed as he developed his style and adapted to his surroundings ("chameleon-like" according to Watson): his earliest works are in a relatively derivative, courtly style, but he came into his own in the years of the rebellion. Owen comments on the "grim simplicity" of the Qinzhou poems, which mirrors the desert landscape; the works from his Chengdu period are "light, often finely observed"; while the poems from the late Kuizhou period have a "density and power of vision".

Although he wrote in all poetic forms, Du Fu is best known for his lǜshi, a type of poem with strict constraints on the form and content of the work. About two thirds of his 1500 extant works are in this form, and he is generally considered to be its leading exponent. His best lǜshi use the parallelisms required by the form to add expressive content rather than as mere technical restrictions. Hawkes comments that, "it is amazing that Tu Fu is able to use so immensely stylized a form in so natural a manner".

Influence

In his lifetime, and immediately following his death, Du Fu was not greatly appreciated. In part this can be attributed to his stylistic and formal innovations, some of which are still "considered extremely daring and bizarre by Chinese critics". There are few contemporary references to him—only eleven poems from six writers—and these describe him in terms of affection, but not as a paragon of poetic or moral ideals. Du Fu is also poorly represented in contemporary anthologies of poetry.

However, as Hung notes, he "is the only Chinese poet whose influence grew with time", and in the ninth century he began to increase in popularity. Early positive comments came from Bai Juyi, who praised the moral sentiments of some of Du Fu's works (although he found these in only a small fraction of the poems), and from Han Yu, who wrote a piece defending Du Fu and Li Bai on aesthetic grounds from attacks made against them. By the beginning of the 10th century, Wei Zhuang had constructed the first replica of his thatched cottage in Sichuan.

It was in the 11th century, during the Northern Song era that Du Fu's reputation reached its peak. In this period a comprehensive re-evaluation of earlier poets took place, in which Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu came to be regarded as representing respectively the Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian strands of Chinese culture. At the same time, the development of Neo-Confucianism ensured that Du Fu, as its poetic exemplar, occupied the paramount position. Su Shi famously expressed this reasoning when he wrote that Du Fu was "preeminent... because... through all his vicissitudes, he never for the space of a meal forgot his sovereign". His influence was helped by his ability to reconcile apparent opposites: political conservatives were attracted by his loyalty to the established order, while political radicals embraced his concern for the poor. Literary conservatives could look to his technical mastery, while literary radicals were inspired by his innovations. Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Du Fu's loyalty to the state and concern for the poor have been interpreted as embryonic nationalism and socialism, and he has been praised for his use of simple, "people's language".

Du Fu's popularity grew to such an extent that it is as hard to measure his influence as that of Shakespeare in England: it was hard for any Chinese poet not to be influenced by him. While there was never another Du Fu, individual poets followed in the traditions of specific aspects of his work: Bai Juyi's concern for the poor, Lu You's patriotism, and Mei Yaochen's reflections on the quotidian are a few examples. More broadly, Du Fu's work in transforming the lǜshi from mere word play into "a vehicle for serious poetic utterance" set the stage for every subsequent writer in the genre.

Du Fu has also been influential beyond China, although in common with the other High Tang poets, his reception into the Japanese literary culture was relatively late. It was not until the 17th century that he was accorded the same respect in Japan as in China, but he then had a particular influence on Matsuo Bashō. In the 20th century, he was the favourite poet of Kenneth Rexroth, who has described him as "the greatest non-epic, non dramatic poet who has survived in any language", and commented that, "he has made me a better man, as a moral agent and as a perceiving organism".

Translation

There have been a number of notable translations of Du Fu’s work into English. The translators have each had to contend with the same problems of bringing out the formal constraints of the original without sounding laboured to the western ear (particularly when translating lǜshi), and of dealing with the allusions contained particularly in the later works (Hawkes writes that "his poems do not as a rule come through very well in translation"—p. ix). One extreme on each issue is represented by Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems From the Chinese. His are free translations, which seek to conceal the parallelisms through enjambement and expansion and contraction of the content; his responses to the allusions are firstly to omit most of these poems from his selection, and secondly to “translate out” the references in those works which he does select.

An example of the opposite approach is Burton Watson's The Selected Poems of Du Fu. Watson follows the parallelisms quite strictly, persuading the western reader to adapt to the poems rather than vice versa. Similarly, he deals with the allusion of the later works by combining literal translation with extensive annotation.

See also

• Tang Dynasty art
• List of Chinese people

References

• Ch'en Wen-hua. T'ang Sung tzu-liao k'ao.
• Chou, Eva Shan; (1995). Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44039-4.
• Cooper, Arthur (translator); (1986). Li Po and Tu Fu: Poems. Viking Press. ISBN 0-14-044272-3.
• Ebrey, Walthall, Palais, (2006). East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Hawkes, David; (1967). A Little Primer of Tu Fu. Oxford University Press. ISBN 962-7255-02-5.
• Hung, William; (1952). Tu Fu: China's Greatest Poet. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-7581-4322-2.
• McCraw, David; (1992). Du Fu's Laments from the South. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0824814223.
• Owen, Stephen (editor); (1997). An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-97106-6.
• Rexroth, Kenneth (translator); (1971). One Hundred Poems From the Chinese. New Directions Press. ISBN 0811201805.
• Watson, Burton (editor); (1984). The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-05683-4.
• Watson, Burton (translator); (2002). The Selected Poems of Du Fu. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-12829-0.

External links

• Tu Fu's poems included in 300 Selected Tang poems, translated by Witter Bynner
• Du Fu's poems organized roughly by date written; shows both simplified and traditional characters
• 开放目录项目中的“PhiLiP/工作台/杜甫”