Du Fu’s Chicken-coop: one of the worst (or best) poems by “China’s greatest poet”

Du Fu was considered the “greatest poet” even in the Tang, but our current image of Du Fu took shape several centuries later, in the Song Dynasty. That image of the Du Fu as the perfect Confucian has shaped editing, anthologizing, and criticism to the point that the poet disappears into his image. But there are actually many Du Fu’s, and this talk will look outside the standard image of the poet and find a different kind of poetry.

 

Stephen Owen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and a member of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of Comparative Literature. Born in St. Louis in 1946, he received both his B.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1972) from Yale University. After teaching for a decade at Yale in East Asian Languages and Literature and in the Literature Major, he moved to Harvard in 1982. He has held a Fulbright and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. In 2005 he received the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award. He is the author of twelve books on Chinese literature and comparative literature, the most recent being The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry (2006) and The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827-860) (2006). An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Earliest Times to 1911 (1996) was in 1997 as outstanding translation of the year by American Literary Translators Association. He has been the author of numerous articles, including the entry on “poetry” in the most recent edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). With the exception of the anthology and one book published in Chinese, the other ten of his books have been translated into Chinese, and he has been the subject of numerous studies in Chinese and one in English. He was the editor of the first volume of The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (2010).

 

He has a complete translation of the poetry of Du Fu, published in a dual-language version by DeGruyter in 2015, available both in print and open-access on the Web. This will make up the first, inaugural volumes of the Library of Chinese Humanities, which he helped to found, with the goal of making pre-modern Chinese works available in dual-language versions both in print and on the Web. His new book on Chinese song lyric (ci), through the early twelfth century, is forthcoming.