Chinese poetry, a literary tradition in which tenses are absent, pronouns rare, and the use of the singular and plural obscure at best, is well known for seeming ambiguous at times. And because Du Fu, like Shakespeare, is known for great breadth-in subject, in the way he uses language to convey different registers (see “ Out with the Sake, In With the Ale”) and layered meanings-he is one of the most challenging poets to translate. The result, published by De Gruyter ($210 for all six printed volumes but available free online under an open access license at the publisher's website), is more than twice the length of Owen’s earlier Norton anthology. The translation of Du Fu’s poetry, although simpler because it represents the work of one just one man, was in some ways even more ambitious. Those references could easily have been lost if multiple translator-scholars had worked together on the single volume. Doing it all himself, he explained, allowed him to capture literary allusions across centuries, linking each text back to earlier works. Owen’s earlier, monumentally ambitious work-translating an entire anthology of representative Chinese literature by himself, in the 1990s-was described in “ Anthologizing as a Radical Act.” At the time, Owen said that in order to preserve the variety of the anthology’s different poetic voices, and prevent the English versions from sounding like the work of one man, he thought of himself as translating a great play with many characters. Ten years in the making, and comprising six volumes and 3,000 pages, The Poetry of Du Fu is the latest published work of Conant University Professor Stephen Owen.
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