THE LYRICAL YU DAFU

About the Book: Without looking into the metrical compositions of Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and many of their iconoclast May Fourth contemporaries, a student of modern Chinese literature will never have a full grasp of the classical tradition in which they were fostered. It was a magical world of characters and wordplay as described by Cyril Birch as, “The written character was a most powerful agent. A world in a syllable, it held over the centuries its own semantic history within its own form, aesthetically satisfying and endlessly durable in its independence of phonological change.” This translation anthology renders 300 lyrical poems by Yu Dafu, about half of his extant oeuvre. They are representative of the poet’s literary merit and highly biographical of his life, covering his birth, family, education, social hangouts, love, traveling, and marriages. Predominately juejiu (quatrains) and lushi (full-length regulated verse), those lyrical poems are thought to be the finest among the writings of modern Chinese classical poetry. This translation tries to retain a Chinese rhythmic structure as much as possible, rhyming where the source poem rhymes. The reader may feel, at first, deprived of the comfort of English poetics. Yet, once he overcomes this initial uneasiness, he will soon comprehend the Chinese tonal pattern, which becomes more pleasing with reading as the rhyming grows more frequent and consistent.