Facing Snow by Du Fu Translated by Stanton Hager

NG

OW by Du Fu Battle-slaughter musters fresh legions of weeping ghosts;

Old, alone, fretful,

I mutter poems, hum tunes.

A chaos of clouds, thrusting down, swallows dusk's last glints;

Dense unceasing snow is danced about and about by the wind.

Draining a wine cask of its green dregs,

I cast aside the ladle;

The fire's gone out, yet a faint red warmth clings to the stove.

Here, as everywhere, war has stemmed the flow of news;

Perennial news in books?

How vain and prattling they seem now! Translated by Stanton Hager in Huangshan:

Poems from the T'ang Dynasty (Cape Cod: 21st Editions, 2010).

This poem by Du Fu, like nearly all Du's poems and the poems of other T'ang poets, evokes Nature to give an elemental correlative and a Human or Humans to evoke a personal correlative, so as to give the poem full realization and resonance.

Thus, this "
war poem" is placed inside a snowstorm, and, inside war and snowstorm suffers a man. - Stanton Hager

2012, 2010, 2006