April 2nd: The Life of Tu Fu
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Eliot Weinberger will discuss his new book The Life of Tu Fu with Madeleine Thien.
This event will take place live at 192 Books at 192 10th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd avenue, on Tuesday, April 2nd at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is on a first come, first served basis. The discussion will be streamed directly on this page. A recording will be archived.
Eliot Weinberger—The Life of Tu Fu (Published by New Directions, 2024)
For over fifty years Eliot Weinberger has been celebrated for his innovative literary and political essays—translated into over thirty languages—as well as his trailblazing translations from the Spanish. In his exquisite new book The Life of Tu Fu, Weinberger has composed a montage of fifty-eight poems that capture the life and times of the great Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu (712–770 AD). As he writes in a note to the edition, “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.” Through lines as penetrating as a classical tanka and as fluid as a mountain stream, themes of endless war and ongoing pandemic surround the wandering life of the ancient Chinese master.
Photo by Nina Subin
Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao, the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, and the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China. Among his translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz’s In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. His work has been translated into over thirty languages, and he has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.
Photo by Basso Cannarsa
Madeleine Thien is the author of four books of fiction, most recently Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for The Booker Prize, The Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize, and won The Giller Prize and the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages, and her essays and stories can be found in The New Yorker, Granta, Brick, The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Since 2018, she has been a professor of English at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York.
Tu Fu (712–770) was a Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty. His poetry prominently features themes of morality and history, and is known for its adherence to strict structural forms. Tu Fu lived during the devastating An Lushan Rebellion and this experience was reflected in his later work.