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滄浪集

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Text ID
KR4d0337
Date
1220–1245
Dynasty
宋

Cānglàng jí 滄浪集

Collection of [the Recluse of] the Blue-Green Wave by 嚴羽 (撰)

About the work

The literary collection of Yán Yǔ 嚴羽, the Sòng poet of Shàowǔ whose Cānglàng shīhuà 滄浪詩話 became one of the most influential works of pre-modern Chinese poetics. The WYG recension contains both the shīhuà (juàn 1) and Yán Yǔ’s own poetry (juàn 2 and 3, including a final section of yìshī 逸詩 — recovered fragments). The Sìkù editors note that they have moved the shīhuà out of the biéjí class into the Shīwénpíng 詩文評 (“Poetry-and-prose criticism”) class, restoring the classical bibliographic order disturbed by the Míng Zhèngdé editor Hú Zhòngqì 胡仲器, who had placed it as juàn 1 of the biéjí.

Tiyao

We respectfully submit: Cānglàng jí, two juàn (after the editorial removal of the shīhuà), was composed by Yán Yǔ of the Sòng. Yǔ, zì Yíqīng 儀卿, alternative zì Dānqiū 丹邱, was a man of Shàowǔ 邵武 and styled himself “Cānglàng-bū-kè” 滄浪逋客 (Lay-Recluse of the Blue-Green Wave). With Yán Rén 嚴仁 and Yán Cān 嚴參 he was known as the “Three Yáns”; only his collection survives. His Cānglàng shīhuà says: “to discuss poetry is like discussing Chán: the Hàn–Wèi–Jìn poetry, together with the Sheng-Táng poetry, is the first vehicle (dì-yī-yì 第一義); the poetry from the Dà-lì 大歷 era onward is the lesser vehicle of Chán; the Late-Táng is the śrāvaka–pratyekabuddha fruit (聲聞辟支果). The Sheng-Táng poets dwelt only in xìng-qù 興趣 — like the antelope hanging by its horns, with no track to follow; thus their marvellous quality is transparent and luminous, no joint to be reached, like the sound in the air, the colour in the form, the moon in the water, the image in the mirror — words have a limit, but meaning is without exhaustion. The men of recent times then make ornate special interpretations, taking talent-and-learning for poetry, taking argument for poetry — not, indeed, that they are unskilled, but it is in the end no longer the poetry of the ancients.”

His lifelong intent rests entirely upon this. We examine the Kùnxué jìwén 困學紀聞: it cites the line of Dài Shūlún 戴叔倫 of the Táng — the scene of the poet’s craft is like the warm sun on Lántián, the fine jade producing mist: visible but not graspable — and Sīkōng Tú’s 司空圖 Èrshísì shīpǐn contains the formula “with not a word set down, fully attaining the windswept current”. Sīkōng Tú’s letter to scholar Lǐ also says: “plums are limited to sourness, salt is limited to saltiness — but the savour lies beyond sour and salt.” This is in fact the unfolding of Dài Shūlún’s idea, and Yán’s position has its source in Sīkōng Tú. But Tú lists twenty-four pǐn without privileging any one; Yán then concentrates on the marvellous-and-distant alone, and so his own poetry independently inclines toward inner inspiration, sweeping aside praise-and-blame, with pure tones at a distance, of which sharp echoes are then few. His five-character lines like “one path enters the pine-snow, several peaks engender evening cold” 一徑入松雪,數峯生暮寒, his seven-character lines like “the empty forest’s leaf-fall: long suspect it is rain; the parting bank’s rife wind: it would lift up the tide” 空林木落長疑雨,别浦風多欲上潮, “Dòngtíng’s traveller geese: spring-return is full; Guābù’s chill tide: night-fall is slow” 洞庭旅雁春歸盡,𤓰步寒潮夜落遲 — all aim before the Tiānbǎo era, but the format does not in fact rise above the Dàlì. From his doctrine that “poetry has another talent, having nothing to do with learning; poetry has another flavour, having nothing to do with reasoning”, he can only echo the residual sound of [Wáng] Wéi and [Mèng] Hàorán, and cannot keep up with the great spectacle of [Lǐ] Bái and [Dù] Fǔ.

Lǐ Dōngyáng’s 李東陽 Huáilùtáng shīhuà 懷麓堂詩話 says: “What Yán Cānglàng discusses is supremely above the crowd, truly possessing his own grasp; he turns and explicates the matter without ever erring. But what he himself composes obtains only the surface of the Tángren, and is short of striking, alarming brilliancies. I have always said: he understands ten parts and works only eight or nine; the missing one or two are constrained by his powers — that is what we mean by Cānglàng.” This still only apprehends the symptoms and does not strike the cause.

The shīhuà in one juàn, in the old recension circulated separately. The present recension was edited by Hú Zhòngqì 胡仲器 of Huáiyáng during the Zhèngdé era of the Míng, who placed it before the poetry-collection as juàn 1, intending to declare its central doctrine — but this is a violation of bibliographic form. We here keep only the two juàn of poetry under the biéjí class, and place the shīhuà separately under the Shīwénpíng category, restoring its original order.

Respectfully collated, tenth month of Qiánlóng 42 (1777).

[Front-matter also contains a substantial Qiánlóng-emperor’s Yùzhì shī attacking Yán Yǔ’s Chán-and-poetry analogy as ahistorical: Buddhism arrived in China only in the Míngdì era of the Eastern Hàn, and Chán proper only with Bodhidharma in the Liáng — so the Shūjīng’s “shī yán zhì” 詩言志 cannot possibly be subsumed under Chán categories. The emperor closes by remarking that Yán himself “fell into the trap of reasoning and got caught in the snare of words” (涉理路而落言筌) — Chán’s so-called “carry-the-board fellows” — and that he composes this preface to ward off later students of poetry from following Yán.]

Abstract

The collection’s enduring importance is not its poetry — judged thin even by the Sìkù editors, who concur in Lǐ Dōngyáng’s verdict — but the Cānglàng shīhuà, here removed by the Sìkù editors to the Shīwénpíng class. The poetry shows the influence of mid-Táng plain style (Wáng Wéi, Mèng Hàorán) and prefigures the Míng QiánHòu Qīzǐ 前後七子 archaist preference for the Sheng-Táng. Yán’s lifedates are not securely known: floruit conventionally placed c. 1195–c. 1245, with the shīhuà probably composed in the 1230s–1240s on the basis of internal references to the early Sòng Jiāngxīshīpài polemics he opposes. The catalog meta marks him as “13th century”, which is followed here. The Cānglàng shīhuà exerted a foundational influence on Míng poetics (Lǐ Dōngyáng, the QiánHòu Qīzǐ, Wáng Shìzhēng) and on Edo Japanese poetics (especially via Itō Jinsai’s milieu and the Shōnen no koto); it is one of the most-translated works of Chinese literary criticism. The Sìkù yùzhì shī against Yán is one of the most explicit imperial-ideological dismissals of a literary thesis preserved in Sìkù paratext.

Translations and research

  • Richard John Lynn, “The Talent Learning Polarity in Chinese Poetics: Yán Yǔ and the Cānglàng shīhuà,” in S. Bush and C. Murck, eds., Theories of the Arts in China (Princeton, 1983) — the classic English-language analysis.
  • Günther Debon, Ts’ang-lang’s Gespräche über die Dichtung: Ein Beitrag zur chinesischen Poetik (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1962) — full German translation and study.
  • Yán Yǔ 嚴羽 (Guō Shàoyú 郭紹虞 ed.), Cānglàng shīhuà jiào-shì 滄浪詩話校釋 (Běijīng: Rénmín wén-xué, 1961; repr. 1983) — the standard critical Chinese edition.
  • Awaya Toshie 粟谷俊江 et al., Japanese translations and commentaries in Chūgoku shiwa shū series.
  • James Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago, 1975), discusses Yán Yǔ’s “metaphysical” theory.
  • Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Harvard, 1992), translates extensive selections.

Other points of interest

The Sìkù editors’ transfer of the shīhuà to the Shīwénpíng class — undoing the Zhèngdé Míng editor’s reorganization — is a textbook example of Qīng-era bibliographic restoration and a useful caution that what one finds in the modern reprint (which often follows the WYG sequence) reflects an editorial choice, not the original intention. The Qiánlóng yùzhì shī against Yán is also remarkable as one of the few cases where the emperor’s own preface explicitly attempts to refute a canonized critical position.

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