Zhāng Sīyè jí 張司業集
The Collection of Zhāng [Jí], [Director of] the Directorate of Education by 張籍 (撰)
About the work
Verse collection in 8 juǎn of the mid-Táng yuèfǔ poet Zhāng Jí 張籍 張籍 (766–830, zì Wénchāng 文昌), a Hézhōu 和州 native, jìnshì of 799, who rose to Guózǐ sīyè (Director of the Directorate of Education) — hence the title. Zhāng was the leading practitioner of the new yuèfǔ style alongside Wáng Jiàn 王建 王建 (= KR4c0064) — the ZhāngWáng 張王 pairing — and was patronized and promoted by Hán Yù 韓愈, who placed him among his own gǔwén circle. The tíyào objects to lumping him with Wáng Jiàn (“his bone-frame is in fact above Wáng Jiàn’s”). The collection’s transmission begins with the late 五代 / Northern Sòng compiler Zhāng Jì 張洎 (presumably the Nán Táng statesman 933–996), who searched for two decades from bǐngwǔ (946) to yǐchǒu (964) to recover 400-odd pieces, calling his edition Mùduó jí 木鐸集 in 12 juǎn. The Sòng Tāng Zhōng 湯中 (Jìyōng 季庸) re-edited it as Zhāng Sīyè jí in 8 juǎn; the present WYG copy descends from a Míng Wànlì (1573–1620) re-print by Zhāng Shàngrú 張尚儒 of Hézhōu, which combined Liúshìyùshǐ’s Hézhōng edition with Zhū Lányú’s Jīnlíng edition for 449 poems plus two letters to Hán Yù.
Tiyao
Zhāng Sīyè jí in 8 juǎn — by Zhāng Jí of the Táng. Jí zì Wénchāng, of Hézhōu; jìnshì of Zhēnyuán 15 (799); rose to Guózǐ sīyè; biography appended to the Hán Yù zhuàn in Xīn Tángshū. Jí made his name in yuèfǔ; his bone-frame stands above Wáng Jiàn’s, and the standard pairing ZhāngWáng is not balanced. Hán Yù praised him as “studying the ancients with austere unadornment, a crane shunning the chicken-flock” — an apt remark. Of Jí’s prose only the two letters to Hán Yù in the Wényuàn yīnghuá survive widely; their force places him between Lǐ Áo (= KR4c0055) and Huángfǔ Shí (= KR4c0054), and well above Lǐ Guān (= KR4c0057) and Ōuyáng Zhān (= KR4c0056) with their forced affectations. The Chānglí jí contains a letter on Jí’s behalf to Lǐ Zhèdōng (Lǐ Sūn) saying he was crippled by blindness — yet a poem in the present collection memorializing Hán Yù records Hán giving him a stylus to write the closing colophon, which means his eyes had recovered: the tradition that he died blind is mistaken. Zhāng Jì, who edited the original collection, says in his preface that from bǐngwǔ (Nán Táng Shēngyuán 1, = Jìn Kāiyùn 3 = 946) to yǐchǒu (Sòng Qiándé 2 = 964) he gathered the surviving 400-odd pieces. Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí says Zhāng Jì’s compilation, the Mùduó jí in 12 juǎn, was re-collated by Tāng Zhōng (Jìyōng) into the present 8-juǎn form, printed at Píngjiāng. The present WYG copy is the Míng Wànlì edition of Zhāng Shàngrú of Hézhōu, jointly issued with Zhāng Xiàoxiáng’s Yúhú jí; the editor obtained the Lǐu shìyù copy from Hézhōng and collated with Zhū Lányú (Tàishǐ)‘s Jīnlíng edition, getting 449 poems plus two letters to Hán Yù, in 8 juǎn — already not the Zhāng Jì or Tāng Zhōng original. The numbers, however, are not far apart, suggesting little real loss.
Abstract
Zhāng Jí (766–830) was an early yuèfǔ-revival poet whose ‘new yuèfǔ’ style focused on social-realist content and direct diction; the ZhāngWáng pairing with Wáng Jiàn became canonical. Bái Jūyì cited Zhāng’s verse explicitly as a model in his theoretical essays on the yuèfǔ form, and Zhāng appears repeatedly in Hán Yù’s correspondence and in the Yùnzhōu 鄆州 / Chángān circuit of literary friendships. Catalog gives “ca. 765 – ca. 830”; CBDB (id 13575) gives 766–830, used here. The transmission is unusually thin for a major Yuánhé figure: an early-Sòng (Nán Táng / Sòng-initial) reconstruction by Zhāng Jì in 12 juǎn (now lost as such), re-edited by Tāng Zhōng in the Sòng to 8 juǎn, and surviving via the Míng Wànlì recension. The tíyào explicitly de-mythologizes the tradition that Zhāng died blind, citing internal evidence from the collection’s elegies.
Translations and research
- See KR4c0064 for parallel Wáng Jiàn collection.
- Hartman, Charles. 1986. Han Yü and the T’ang Search for Unity. Princeton UP. Treats the Zhāng-Hán literary friendship.
- Yú Xián-hào 郁賢皓 et al., eds. 1989. Zhāng Jí jí xì-nián jiào-zhù 張籍集系年校注. Ān-huī Education Press.
- 周相录 Zhōu Xiàng-lù. 2008. Zhāng Jí Wáng Jiàn yánjiū 張籍王建研究. Beijing.
- Stephen Owen. 1996. The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’. Stanford UP. Includes discussion of Zhāng Jí’s yuè-fǔ.
Other points of interest
Zhāng Jì’s two-decade reconstruction (946–964) is one of the earliest documented post-Táng compilation projects for a Táng poet — and a Northern-Sòng landmark in the formation of the Tángshī biéjí tradition. The 18-year gap between recovering the first five and last three juǎn (a parallel to the Féng Shū work on Lǚ Wēn = KR4c0052) is the kind of detail the Sìkù editors preserved precisely because it document the textual archaeology of Táng verse at Wǔdài / Northern Sòng remove.