Poetry, with Chinese characteristics

I attended a particularly stimulating talk at The Bookworm this week given by Nick Admussen, a young American academic and poet based in Beijing, examining some of the crossover between Classical Chinese and modern Western poetry.  (Here's a fuller account of the lecture, from Canaan Morse on Chinese translation website Paper Republic.)   I thought the most interesting piece Nick introduced was this, a sort of free-form riff on 'The Ballad of Lovely Women' (麗人行, Li Ren Xing) by Du Fu (or Tu Fu, 杜甫,  712-770) - widely considered to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest poet of the Tang Dynasty 'golden age'.  Many of his works, like this one, were bitterly satirical of the opulence, corruption and cruelty of the Tang court in its declining years.   The curious thing here is that the American poet, Frank Bidart, is a professor of English, and apparently knows no Chinese at all.  His version of the Ballad is adapted (with an infusion of some additional historical background) from a prose rendition published in 1967 in The Little Primer of Tu Fu by the British Sinologist David Hawkes (who died this summer: the link is to his obituary in The Guardian).  This book is, I'm told, an excellent introduction to the great poet's work, but has been long out of print (well, I had heard that it was recently reprinted again; but I haven't been able to find any evidence of that online).   Nick used both versions to raise the question of how one deals with references which are opaque to the modern audience.  Hawkes, like most academic translators, tried to remain faithful to the allusive spareness of the original, but provided voluminous explanatory footnotes.  Bidart chose to incorporate the 'footnotes' into the body of his poem: the significance of the pepper-flowers in Du Fu's work would be deeply obscure to most modern readers (and perhaps to many contemporaries also?), but Bidart found it such a striking image that he elaborated an extended gloss on it.  I was reminded that when, a while back, I attempted an English version of Catullus' Quaeris quot mihi… , I elected to omit three whole lines (all that stuff about "between the oracle of sultry Jupiter and the tomb of old Battus" - in Catullus' own time it was considered an elegant literary sport to work in such abstruse nuggets of guidebook information about a locale; but for us today, it is otiose and irrelevant knowledge) ... and the pseudonym of his lover ('Lesbia' carries other connotations today.  Few people now know that Catullus - in thus anonymizing his lover - was paying homage to the female Greek poet Sappho, one of his main artistic influences, and a native of the island of Lesbos.)... and even the key word 'basiationes' (I think we know what he's really talking about; and it's not just kissing!).  Translation - it's hard.   Apologies for the digression there.  We're supposed to be focusing on China today, not Rome.  Here's Frank Bidart's take on the famous Du Fu poem.  (I'll try to add the bridging version between the two by David Hawkes in the comments.)     [I would have liked to include Du Fu's original too, but.... I'm afraid I'm not very good at searching for stuff in Chinese!]         Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake   In 753 Tu Fu, along with a crowd of others, watched the imperial court—the emperor's mistress, her sisters, the first minister—publicly celebrate the advent of spring.   Intricate to celebrate still-delicate raw spring, peacocks in passement of gold thread, unicorns embroidered palely in silver. These are not women but a dream of women:— bandeaux of kingfisher-feather                                                        jewelry, pearl netting that clings to the breathing body veil what is, because touched earth is soiled earth, invisible. As if submission to dream were submission not only to breeding but to one's own nature, what is gorgeous is remote now, pure, true.                 * The Mistress of the Cloud-Pepper Apartments has brought life back to the emperor, who is old. Therefore charges of gross extravagance, of pandering incest between her sister Kuo and her cousin are, in the emperor's grateful eyes, unjust. Her wish made her cousin first minister. Three springs from this spring, the arrogance of the new first minister will arouse such hatred and fury even the frightened emperor must accede to his execution. As bitterly to hers. She will be carried on a palanquin of plain wood to a Buddhist chapel deep in a wood and strangled.                 * Now the Mistress of the Cloud-Pepper Apartments,— whose rooms at her insistence are coated with a pepper-flower paste into which dried pepper- flowers are pounded because the rooms of the Empress always are coated with paste into which dried pepper- flowers are pounded and she is Empress now in all but name,—is encircled by her sisters, Duchesses dignified by imperial favor with the names of states that once had power, Kuo, Ch'in, Han. Now rhinoceros-horn chopsticks, bored, long have not descended. The belled carving knife wastes its labors. Arching camel humps, still perfect, rise like purple hills from green-glazed cauldrons. Wave after wave of imperial eunuchs, balancing fresh delicacies from the imperial kitchens, gallop up without stirring dust.                 * With mournful sound that would move demon gods, flutes and drums now declare to the air he is arrived. Dawdlingly                                              he arrives, as if the cloud of suppliants clinging to him cannot obscure the sun. Power greater than that of all men except one knows nothing worth rushing toward or rushing from. Finally the new first minister ascends the pavilion. He greets the Duchess of Kuo with that slight brutality intimacy induces. Here at last is power that your soul can warm its hands against! Beware: success has made him incurious, not less dangerous.   Frank Bidart