This is an engrossing series. Pray explain why you feel 出入无完裙 is out of place though? In a poem about the miseries war inflicts on those miles away from the front lines, a young mother whose brothers were all conscripted not even having the clothes with which to decently leave the house seems like the sort of thing I could see a modern war correspondent talking about when reporting from a refugee camp.
And I may be imagining it, but is 'clueless about sex' an entirely fair reading of that line? Could Du perhaps be referring as decorously as possible to how the family's supporting itself with its three sons gone?
Huh, maybe! I have to say, that reading of the daughter-in-law hadn't even occurred to me. If the old woman buys the press gang sergeant off with sex from the daughter-in-law and labour from herself, that does cast a whole new sickly layer of horror over it.
The trope caught my eye because it's one that still persists to this day - less so in the last ten years, but when I first got to China 20 years ago, the uncomfortable leering image of a family so poor that they only have one pair of trousers between them was bizarrely common on the internet. Of course, applying my modern experience back 1000 years isn't exactly rigorous historical scholarship!
The other connection is to A Fine Lady (https://tangpoetry.substack.com/p/collateral-damage), which ends with a surprisingly sexual/sexy image of the impoverished aristo... that I similarly dismissed. I've never read anything about Du Fu and sex, perhaps as it's kind of a minor topic for him, so I've been taking these references to be... flotsam.
But yeah, perhaps that's wrong. I'm going to have to go and read lots more and start developing a more rounded way of understanding his view of sex.
The translation you linked to describes the old man as an innkeper, I think because all the action seems to take place where Du is staying; perhaps you do what you have to to wring a few more coppers out of guests when the family's labour force is gone (and I can't imagine they're getting too many travellers other than soldiers and refugees)? One thing potentially mitigating against the interpretation is that if you read it in that sense, 出入 seems an incredibly coarse way to put it compared to the images in 佳人 and 月夜. But perhaps Foreman captures the ambiguity well, referring to "a shredded skirt" - it could be a straightforward statement of poverty, or it could be quite a bit darker.
I remembered the image being a trope when you mentioned it, it appears in The Good Women Of China (2002) when the writer encounters a family of literally dirt-poor peasants in a recently famine-stricken area of Henan. They had about 6 young children only a few of whom could go outside at once. Maybe that and other books boosted the image's popularity around the time? Of course, much like stereotypes, tropes become tropes for a reason.
This is an engrossing series. Pray explain why you feel 出入无完裙 is out of place though? In a poem about the miseries war inflicts on those miles away from the front lines, a young mother whose brothers were all conscripted not even having the clothes with which to decently leave the house seems like the sort of thing I could see a modern war correspondent talking about when reporting from a refugee camp.
And I may be imagining it, but is 'clueless about sex' an entirely fair reading of that line? Could Du perhaps be referring as decorously as possible to how the family's supporting itself with its three sons gone?
Huh, maybe! I have to say, that reading of the daughter-in-law hadn't even occurred to me. If the old woman buys the press gang sergeant off with sex from the daughter-in-law and labour from herself, that does cast a whole new sickly layer of horror over it.
The trope caught my eye because it's one that still persists to this day - less so in the last ten years, but when I first got to China 20 years ago, the uncomfortable leering image of a family so poor that they only have one pair of trousers between them was bizarrely common on the internet. Of course, applying my modern experience back 1000 years isn't exactly rigorous historical scholarship!
The other connection is to A Fine Lady (https://tangpoetry.substack.com/p/collateral-damage), which ends with a surprisingly sexual/sexy image of the impoverished aristo... that I similarly dismissed. I've never read anything about Du Fu and sex, perhaps as it's kind of a minor topic for him, so I've been taking these references to be... flotsam.
But yeah, perhaps that's wrong. I'm going to have to go and read lots more and start developing a more rounded way of understanding his view of sex.
The translation you linked to describes the old man as an innkeper, I think because all the action seems to take place where Du is staying; perhaps you do what you have to to wring a few more coppers out of guests when the family's labour force is gone (and I can't imagine they're getting too many travellers other than soldiers and refugees)? One thing potentially mitigating against the interpretation is that if you read it in that sense, 出入 seems an incredibly coarse way to put it compared to the images in 佳人 and 月夜. But perhaps Foreman captures the ambiguity well, referring to "a shredded skirt" - it could be a straightforward statement of poverty, or it could be quite a bit darker.
I remembered the image being a trope when you mentioned it, it appears in The Good Women Of China (2002) when the writer encounters a family of literally dirt-poor peasants in a recently famine-stricken area of Henan. They had about 6 young children only a few of whom could go outside at once. Maybe that and other books boosted the image's popularity around the time? Of course, much like stereotypes, tropes become tropes for a reason.