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).
2012, 2010, 2006.
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
