The Life of Tu Fu [Paperback]

For over fifty years Eliot Weinberger has been celebrated for his innovative literary and political essaystranslated into over thirty languagesas well as his trailblazing translations from the Spanish. In his exquisite new bookA book-length poem by our best living literary essayist (Forrest Gander). My favorite essayist is Eliot Weinberger. His remarkable breadth of calm concern is impressive. Combining scholarly authority with a moral allegiance to the arcane, the translator and editor Weinberger creates genre-bending essays and prose poems to help us see the world anew. His essays use lists, collages of information, and sometimes, as poetry does, varying line breaks. They dont read like anyone elses work. Weinbergers verse achieves not only the linearity of narrative but also a leveling effectputting a fish on par with the moon&Tu Fu pursued a poetry illuminating at once the nonhierarchical, embodied chaos of the real as well as the interplay of absence and presence that defines the Tao. Few books offer in so few words such a marvelously damning vision of humanity. The Life of Tu Fu is a sobering and laconic reminder that the mountain and the mosquito will be here long after we are gone. Brief, profound, and at times heartbreakinga finely wrought?genre-defying work by one of the great literary essayists and translators of our era.