POETRY

The River Village

By Tu Fu translated by Florence Ayscough & Amy Lowell     VOLUME 59 No. 2

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The river makes a bend and encircles the village with its current.
All the long Summer, the affairs and occupations of the river village are quiet and simple.
The swallows who nest in the beams go and come as they please.
The gulls in the middle of the river enjoy one another, they crowd together and touch one another.
My old wife paints a chess-board on paper.
My little sons hammer needles to make fish-hooks.
I have many illnesses, therefore my only necessities are medicines.
Besides these, what more can so humble a man as I ask?



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This poem is in the public domain.

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FLORENCE WHEELOCK AYSCOUGH was born in Shanghai on January 21 in either 1875 or 1878. A Sinologist, editor, writer, and translator of Chinese literature, she published her first book, Fir-Flower Tablets (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921), translations of Chinese poems, with Amy Lowell. Her numerous other works include A Chinese Mirror (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925); Tu Fu, the Autobiography of a Chinese Poet (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932); The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926); and Chinese Women Yesterday and To-day (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937). A lecturer on Chinese art and literature, as well as the librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai, Wheelock Ayscough died in Chicago, IL, on April 24, 1942.

AMY LOWELL (1874–1925) was an American critic, lecturer, and a leading poet of the Imagist school. She pioneered the use of “polyphonic prose” in English, mixing formal verse and free forms. Later she was drawn to and influenced by Chinese and Japanese poetry. This interest led her to collaborate with translator Florence Wheelock Ayscough on Fir-Flower Tablets in 1921. Lowell had a lifelong love for the poet John Keats, whose letters she collected and whose influence can be seen in her poems. She believed him to be the forbearer of Imagism. Her biography of Keats was published in 1925, the same year she won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection What’s O’Clock (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925). A dedicated poet, publicity agent, collector, critic, and lecturer, Amy Lowell died on May 12, 1925.

TU FU, also called Du Fu, was a major Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty. He was born in the year 712 in Gongxian, China.


VOLUME 59 No. 2