Eliot Weinberger's The Life of Tu Fu

This book rules.

One of my favorite writers is Eliot Weinberger. It’s hard to say what he does exactly. He calls his work “essays,” and I suppose in some ways they are. To me, they can often feel like prose poems based on (or reinterpreted versions of, or amalgamations of) primary sources. Sometimes they are catalogues of dreams (say, dreams actual people dreamed in Iceland in 1900, or documented dreams by people with the name Chang), or a brief list and life descriptions of saints named Hyacinth, or a linked free-verse essay/long poem about stones whose sources run from Greek mythology to the Bible to alchemy to Meister Eckhart to Pseudo-Plutarch.

Here’s a quick excerpt from that one, called “A Calendar of Stones”:

People are pebbles.

Deucalion and Pyrrha were the only ones to survive Zeus’ wrathful flood. Lonely on earth, they sought the counsel of the goddess Themis, who told them to throw the bones of the Great Mother over their shoulders. Realizing that the bones of Mother Earth are rocks, they tossed stones. His became men, hers women.

Pebbles (laas), then, became people (laos).

He’ll reinterpret (rewrite? I don’t even know what to call it) an academic text on naked mole-rats or an early American explorer’s journal. His book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei walks you through nineteen different translations of Wang Wei’s poem “Deer Grove,” which was written in the 700s. And check out how he ends his rendition of the story of Giuseppe Desa, aka St. John of Cupertino:

On September 18, 1663, after six years of solitary confinement, Giuseppe, in a fever, whispered, “The donkey is climbing the mountain.” The next day, preparing the body for embalmment, the monks discovered that his heart was bloodless, completely shriveled and dry. He had once said of the Virgin Mary: “My mother is very strange; if I bring her flowers, she says she does not want flowers; if I bring her cherries, she will not take them; and if I then ask her what she wants, she replies, ‘I want your heart, for I live on hearts.’”

These essays can be devastating, or funny, or beautiful, or interesting—and usually, all of those things at once—but above all they are playful, and they remind you how much of writing and reading really is just play. That can’t ever be forgotten, not if anything is ever going to be any good. I think at this point I’ve read just about all of Weinberger’s books. They bring me a lot of joy.

Anyway, all that to say, the other day I realized Eliot Weinberger had come out with a new book in 2024 and somehow I’d missed it, The Life of Tu Fu. It’s a fictionalized autobiography of the great Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu, who I think is pretty much the best to ever do it (“it” being “writing poetry”). I mean, come on, a book like this is catnip to me. I tracked it down and bought it immediately.

About the book, Weinberger says “This is not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images, and allusions in the poetry.” This is what I mean by play. In writing you can pretty much do whatever you want, so long as it’s good. You got a crazy idea? Go for it! But this is also a thing about play: it can be deadly serious business. I got home, book in hand, sat down and got straight to reading. I read it straight through, then read it again (it’s only 63 pages, which is more or less a perfect length for a book).

I kind of can’t believe this book. I can’t believe anybody pulled it off.

I mean, this shit is beautiful.

Here’s the entirety of page 22:

There are cuckoos in West Sichuan but no cuckoos in
East Sichuan.
There are cuckoos in Yunnan but no cuckoos in Fuzhou.
They say when a cuckoo cries it sounds like the words
“You should go home.”

Friends with good jobs have stopped writing.

Reader, my heart was filled with so much joy I nearly threw the book across the room. This is exactly the kind of thing I’m here for. I was so excited I had to do a lap around the neighborhood.

Check out page 36:

Mt. Wu lit by the moon.
Who put the stars up there?

I thought of the story of the blind man in the Nirvana
Sutra. A doctor shaved his eyeballs with a golden scalpel
and cured him, but he did not know how to see.

Or God, page 48:

A white horse with two arrows in its empty saddle.
The corpses lying by the road change so much in a single
day.

I wish I could talk with someone.

I had this whole plan where I would talk about the life of Tu Fu and give background on the poet and the turbulent times in which he lived, but you can look all that up yourself. What I’m here for is the way this book evokes Tu Fu’s style, his poetry, his life, without telling you any damn thing about him. If information is what you’re after, you could just read David Young’s Du Fu: A Life in Poetry, which both gives you an amazing translation of Tu Fu’s poems as well as a whole lot of history and information about the time and place they were written. That book is excellent, I’m glad it exists, and I’m so happy I read it. But there’s space in the world for any number of books about one of the greatest poets who ever lived, and Eliot Weinberger decided to create this strange little object while cooped up in his apartment during the pandemic. That’s one of the great things about writing, and about life. Sometimes weird things get to exist, and we get to enjoy them. I love this book. It feels like it was written just for me.

Okay, I’m done now. This isn’t much of a newsletter. It’s just me quoting something I like and being excited about it. Maybe that’s good enough.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with all of page 9, because I love it so much:

The music stops; moonlight shines on the planks of the
floor.

Send me a letter.