Regulated Verse: form of poetry that dominated Tang Dynasty poetics; it has a determined number of characters per line that must use parallelism and a set rhyme pattern.

Couplet: a pair of lines in verse.

Five Elements: (a.k.a. Five Phases) A complex Chinese cosmological series of natural associations that include elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, water), directions (east, south, center, west, north), colors (green, red, yellow, white, blue), seasons (spring, summer, change-of-seasons, autumn, winter), among other qualities. These associations inform poetic parallelism as well as many other Chinese aesthetics.

Literati: From the Sui to the Qing, scholars who were trained in the Confucian classics, who mastered calligraphy and verse, and who passed a rigorous imperial examination gained high-level posts in the state structure.

• Learn aesthetic principles of regulated verse and parallelism based on traditional Chinese cosmological perspective that shaped Chinese poetics.
• Understand the importance of translation between different cultures as important process of understanding other cultures in a multi-cultural world.

The An Lushan Rebellion (755-763 BCE) is a major rebellion that engulfed the Tang Dynasty and caused millions of deaths. An Lushan (703-757 BCE) was an ambitious general of Sogdian descent who took advantage of widespread discontent with the extravagance of the Chang’an court during a time beset by natural disasters. An Lushan was successful in defeating the imperial army guarding the capital city and forcing Emperor Xuanzong and his court to flee to Sichuan. Eventually, the Emperor abdicated the throne in favor of his son and the Tang court formed alliances with Turkish tribes from Central Asia and the Imperial forces successfully retook the capital.

Initially, Du Fu left Chang’an at the outbreak of the rebellion in order to ensure his family was out of harm’s way, but he personally returned to Chang’an in an attempt to join the Crown Prince’s court, but he was captured by the Rebellion forces and taken to Chang’an. He eventually escaped an joined the Tang court, but never achieved a great post he seemed destined for. The experiences of the war and his disappointment of never achieving a worthy office to serve the state inform the tone of his overall work, which are widely regarded as one of the greatest literary achievements in both Chinese and world literature.

Columbia University’s Asia for Educators program has a very brief introduction to Du Fu that students might want to review before the class. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/eacp/asiasite/topics/index.html?topic=DuFu+subtopic=Intro

• 1. Distribute document 1: Facing Snow – a Chinese Poem by Du Fu. Review the keywords/vocabulary so that students understand some aesthetic principles behind a regulated verse poem in the Chinese tradition.
• 2. Divide the class up into four groups and assign them one couplet per group. Explain to students that they are to try and make sense of the relationship of each character to one another in a given line, as well as the relationship of the first line in the couplet to the second line. Once they have discussed what those relationships are, each group will come up with a grammatically correct translation of their couplet into English.
• 3. Have each group go to the board and write their couplet out. Once the entire poem has been written out on the board for the class to see, distribute document 2: Five Translations of Du Fu’s “Facing Snow.”

• 1. Does the class-translated poem read smoothly and intelligibly as a poem in English? What were the rationales behind each group translating their designated couplet?
• 2. Review the five translations by various translators; where does the class poem agree with these translations? Where does it differ?

• 1. Students write an essay about the An Lushan Rebellion and what the poem has to say about the experience of war based on the various translations they come up with.
• 2. Alternatively, students choose a different Chinese poem and work towards their own translation and compare it to other translations they can find by doing a library search of available translations.

• 1. David Hawkes, A Little Primer of Tu Fu (New York: Cheng & Tsui, 1988)
• 2. David Young (trans.), Du Fu: A Life in Poetry (New York: Knopf, 2008)
• 3. Zong-qi Cai, How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)
• 4. Du Fu’s poems available on-line: http://www.chinese-poems.com/du.html

• 1. Have students create a video that accompanies a voice-over reading of their translation; how do they accomplish the visual “translation” of a written work?
• 2. Have students research a particular modern military conflict (i.e. the Vietnam war) and gather both journalistic reports on the conflict and poetry that covers the war (i.e. New York Times articles on Vietnam and W.S. Merwin’s collection The Lice (1967)). What do these different sources tell us about how a culture understands its experience of the chosen military conflict? Where do they compliment one another; where do they perhaps conflict with one another?