In the Footsteps of Du Fu by Michael Wood review – the great poet’s progress | Biography books

To our shame, few of us outside China know much about the country’s classical poetry. It doesn’t help that the way the names of leading poets are transliterated has changed so often. Many writers included in Ezra Pound’s groundbreaking collection Cathay, published in 1915, are unrecognisable by name today. Only a generation or so ago we called one of China’s greatest poets Li Po; nowadays we know him as Li Bai. And Li Bai’s friend and contemporary, the magnificent Du Fu, was until recently called Tu Fu in the west; different enough to put people who don’t speak Chinese off the scent in an online search.

Even more elusive is the poetry itself. Du Fu, who Michael Wood, in his superb new book, unequivocally calls “China’s greatest poet” (some scholars may have other ideas about that, though personally I think Wood is right) wrote many of his finest poems in couplets of seven impressionistic characters each. This makes him ferociously difficult to translate into the far more discursive forms of most European-language poetry. Here, for instance, are a couple of lines from one of Du Fu’s best-known poems, Ballad of Lovely Women: “Tài nóng yì yuǎn shū qiě zhēn / Jī-lǐ xì-nì gǔ-ròu yún.” The scholar David Hawkes, whose book A Little Primer of Tu Fu first got me interested in translating Chinese poetry, turned that literally into: “Appearance gorgeous thoughts remote pure and true / Complexions delicate bones-flesh well-proportioned.”

You can see both the difficulty and the glorious challenge of making this something a speaker of English can get their mind around. Perhaps “Their lovely refinement shows itself in their pure, aloof beauty / Their delicate complexions and beautiful bodies?” No – that’s really rather clunky compared with the original. I once translated a bunch of Du Fu poems and actually had them published. When I checked them out for this review, though, I was depressed by the cack-handed quality of what I’d written.

Yet because we can’t match the luminous quality of Du Fu’s work it doesn’t mean we can’t delight in a book that describes his story and follows his route through life. Wood, who is one of the finest televisual guides to history, has visited the key places Du travelled to, describing them in his characteristically thoughtful way.

Du was a failed scholar who struggled all his life for government jobs, or even just handouts, to keep him and his family alive. So tough was his existence that one of his young sons died of hunger; something Du never forgot or forgave himself for. And yet despite the sorrowful quality of a lot of his poetry, there’s also much joy and love of good companionship. Du was good at making fun of himself, and even mocks his own poetry sometimes, which adds an agreeable aspect to his work.

Above all, though, he was a brilliant observer of his times. And what times they were! If you wonder why Xi Jinping keeps forcing large parts of China’s population to read his turgid Thoughts – even duller and more self-satisfied than those of Mao Zedong, who for all his huge failings was a poet himself – then you only have to look at Du Fu’s times to realise how easily China can slip from prosperity to utter disaster. The emperor for the first part of Du’s life was Xuanzong, (AD 685-762), clever and wonderfully cultured. China thrived, and Tang civilisation reached magnificent new heights. But Xuanzong fell under the spell of the beautiful Yang Guifei, who persuaded him to give jobs and vast amounts of money to her ravenous gang of relatives; and by 755 a leading general, An Lushan, staged an eight-year rebellion during which, according to the official census, up to 13 million out of a population of 50 million people died.

The uprising was a catastrophe: Du Fu watched it all unfold, writing his incomparable poems as he travelled through the dangerous landscape. For me, they have the quality of first-class journalism as well as art. Grieving for a Young Prince, for instance, is an account of his chance meeting on a street-corner in the capital, Xi’an, with a lost and hunted member of the imperial family. Du Fu would like to help him escape his pursuers, but is too scared; and afterwards he can’t forgive himself for his cowardice.

Wood’s account of this, and of so many other incidents, is beautifully written and thoroughly researched, as he travels to the setting for each stage of Du’s long but difficult life, talking to the scholars and the ordinary people he meets along his way. His publishers have served him remarkably well, displaying the text and illustrations with excellent quality. I shall take this book with me on all my journeys from now on, just as I have always taken Hawkes’s Little Primer of Tu Fu. Maybe – just maybe – it might help me become a slightly less clumsy translator of his incomparable poetry. John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor. In the Footsteps of Du Fu by Michael Wood is published by Simon & Schuster (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

To our shame, few of us outside China know much about the country’s classical poetry. It doesn’t help that the way the names of leading poets are transliterated has changed so often. Many writers included in Ezra Pound’s groundbreaking collection Cathay, published in 1915, are unrecognisable by name today. Only a generation or so ago we called one of China’s greatest poets Li Po; nowadays we know him as Li Bai. And Li Bai’s friend and contemporary, the magnificent Du Fu, was until recently called Tu Fu in the west; different enough to put people who don’t speak Chinese off the scent in an online search.

Even more elusive is the poetry itself. Du Fu, who Michael Wood, in his superb new book, unequivocally calls “China’s greatest poet” (some scholars may have other ideas about that, though personally I think Wood is right) wrote many of his finest poems in couplets of seven impressionistic characters each. This makes him ferociously difficult to translate into the far more discursive forms of most European-language poetry. Here, for instance, are a couple of lines from one of Du Fu’s best-known poems, Ballad of Lovely Women: “Tài nóng yì yuǎn shū qiě zhēn / Jī-lǐ xì-nì gǔ-ròu yún.” The scholar David Hawkes, whose book A Little Primer of Tu Fu first got me interested in translating Chinese poetry, turned that literally into: “Appearance gorgeous thoughts remote pure and true / Complexions delicate bones-flesh well-proportioned.”

You can see both the difficulty and the glorious challenge of making this something a speaker of English can get their mind around. Perhaps “Their lovely refinement shows itself in their pure, aloof beauty / Their delicate complexions and beautiful bodies?” No – that’s really rather clunky compared with the original. I once translated a bunch of Du Fu poems and actually had them published. When I checked them out for this review, though, I was depressed by the cack-handed quality of what I’d written.

Yet because we can’t match the luminous quality of Du Fu’s work it doesn’t mean we can’t delight in a book that describes his story and follows his route through life. Wood, who is one of the finest televisual guides to history, has visited the key places Du travelled to, describing them in his characteristically thoughtful way.

Du was a failed scholar who struggled all his life for government jobs, or even just handouts, to keep him and his family alive. So tough was his existence that one of his young sons died of hunger; something Du never forgot or forgave himself for. And yet despite the sorrowful quality of a lot of his poetry, there’s also much joy and love of good companionship. Du was good at making fun of himself, and even mocks his own poetry sometimes, which adds an agreeable aspect to his work.

Above all, though, he was a brilliant observer of his times. And what times they were! If you wonder why Xi Jinping keeps forcing large parts of China’s population to read his turgid Thoughts – even duller and more self-satisfied than those of Mao Zedong, who for all his huge failings was a poet himself – then you only have to look at Du Fu’s times to realise how easily China can slip from prosperity to utter disaster. The emperor for the first part of Du’s life was Xuanzong, (AD 685-762), clever and wonderfully cultured. China thrived, and Tang civilisation reached magnificent new heights. But Xuanzong fell under the spell of the beautiful Yang Guifei, who persuaded him to give jobs and vast amounts of money to her ravenous gang of relatives; and by 755 a leading general, An Lushan, staged an eight-year rebellion during which, according to the official census, up to 13 million out of a population of 50 million people died.

The uprising was a catastrophe: Du Fu watched it all unfold, writing his incomparable poems as he travelled through the dangerous landscape. For me, they have the quality of first-class journalism as well as art. Grieving for a Young Prince, for instance, is an account of his chance meeting on a street-corner in the capital, Xi’an, with a lost and hunted member of the imperial family. Du Fu would like to help him escape his pursuers, but is too scared; and afterwards he can’t forgive himself for his cowardice.

Wood’s account of this, and of so many other incidents, is beautifully written and thoroughly researched, as he travels to the setting for each stage of Du’s long but difficult life, talking to the scholars and the ordinary people he meets along his way. His publishers have served him remarkably well, displaying the text and illustrations with excellent quality. I shall take this book with me on all my journeys from now on, just as I have always taken Hawkes’s Little Primer of Tu Fu. Maybe – just maybe – it might help me become a slightly less clumsy translator of his incomparable poetry. John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor. In the Footsteps of Du Fu by Michael Wood is published by Simon & Schuster (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.