Du Fu

the setting itself, with a natural ease and beauty. As in this passage? pun intended?when the ship,with its indentured passengers, most of whom have never seen the ocean, anchors forone last night in Indian waters: "The last place from which themigrants would be able to view their native shore: this was Saugor Roads, a much trafficked anchorage in the lee ofGanga-Sagar, the island that stands between the sea and the holy river-The very name Ganga Sagar, joining, as itdid, river and sea, clear and dark, known and hidden, served to remind the migrants of the yawning chasm ahead; it was ifthey were sitting balanced on the edge of a precipice, and the island were an outstretched limb of sacred Jam budvipa, their homeland, reaching out tokeep them fromtumbling into the void." Reading this novel over a num ber of days?it takes its time and so it takes your time,but in only the best of ways?I came to understand thatall thegood books do that,don't they? Help tokeep us fromtumbling into the void. Du Fu: A Life in Poetry Trans. & ed. David Young (Knopf,2008) First aired on NPR November 24, 2008 An eighth-century Chinese poet named Du Fu, one of the most admired lyric poets in theworld, leftbehind some fourteenhundred poems and a record of a life that translator and editor David Young, himself a poet, has now turned into a biography in verse. Du Fu, who DU F U DAVID YOUNG lived from712 to 770, spent his life making his poems, raising a family, tryingto findpatronage at thecourts of emperors, and sometimes mov ing back and forthacross theChi nese countryside as warring armies advanced or retreated. The record he left of his ambitious apprentice days and inebriated young manhood as a poet taking in the natural world around him is superb. In a poem about crossing a famous lake near the capital, for example, he writes: "As we come to the lake's middle / we see in its dark depths // the southern mountains, mirrored / upside down in thewater // here and therea quiver / as ifthemoun tainmoved //maybe our boat will collide /with a highmountain tem ple //maybe the moon will swim / out of the mountain pass ..." But as a wife and children come to depend on him, he adds to his wonderful views of nature worrying lines about politics. "The State goes to ruin," he writes, but "mountains and rivers survive." He takes note of thepassing of time:his hair turns white, money grows scarce, his chil dren grow older. "Here's my wife at last /wearing a much-patched dress // sobbing uncontrollably / like any tumbling brook and there are my two daughters // their clothes all patched as well." But the still ness of nature's beautiful moments remains, no matter how tumultuous his personal life,his finest subject even as he and his familymake one of their many journeys because of political turmoil in the capital. "We leave at night / with carts," he writes, "overhead a moon / and a wilderness of stars //here and there / clouds andmist // thisuniverse is enormous, // my road goes on and on." As does his work, even into our present day. The Ghost in Love by Jonathan Carroll (Farrar, Straus& Giroux, 2008) Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago (Harcourt,2008) First aired on NPR December 9, 2008 Two new novels featuringtheAngel ofDeath were published inOctober: The Ghost inLove, by JonathanCar roll, and Death with Interruptions, by JoseSaramago. Expatriate writer Carroll is, toput itbluntly, thebest writer of fantastic?notice I didn't say fantasy?novels in English, and his new work is no exception. As the result of a seemingly temporary glitch in the age-old chain of life to March-April 2009 i 13

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