Sòng bùyī jí 宋布衣集
Collected Works of the Plebeian Sòng by 宋登春 (撰)
About the work
The Sòng bùyī jí 宋布衣集 in three juǎn is the unified poetry-and-prose collection of Sòng Dēngchūn 宋登春 (c. 1515 – c. 1586; zì Yìngyuán 應元, hào Échíshēng 鵝池生), the bùyī (commoner) wandering poet-painter of Xīnhé 新河 in Héběi. The title bùyī — ‘in cloth garb’, i.e. never an official — was Sòng’s own self-description. The original separate prints were the Échí jí 鵝池集 (poetry) and Yānshí jí 燕石集 (prose), engraved at Jīngzhōu by his patron Xú Xuémó 徐學謨 in the latter’s prefectural tenure; in Kāngxī yǐchǒu / 1685 these were merged by 王培益 Wáng Péiyì into the present three-juǎn arrangement. The dating window assigned here (c. 1545–1586) brackets Sòng’s mature productive life from his post-thirties departure-from-home through to his suicide in the Qiántáng.
Tiyao
Your servants etc. respectfully memorialise. The Sòng bùyī jí in three juǎn was composed by Sòng Dēngchūn 宋登春 of the Míng dynasty. Dēngchūn, zì Yìngyuán 應元, a man of Xīnhé 新河, could write verse and paint as a youth. In his thirties he abandoned his family and travelled afar; his footprints reached almost every corner of the land. Late in life he attached himself to his elder brother’s son and lived at Tiānéchí 天鵞池 (‘Heavenly Goose Pool’) in Jiānglíng, taking from it his hào Échíshēng. Xú Xuémó 徐學謨, then prefect of Jīngzhōu, treated him with great respect. Later, after Xuémó had retired from the office of Minister (Shàngshū) and returned home, Dēngchūn went to visit him in Wúzhōng. There he engaged a boat and floated on the Qiántáng, then leapt directly into the river and so died. Xíng Tóng 邢侗 has a poem Diào Sòngsǒu (‘Mourning Old Sòng’) whose preface says: ‘Dēngchūn once said to me, Look at Sòng Dēngchūn — does he seem to you to be a man whose four walls are timbered with pine and cypress?’ His whole stance in life ran on like this — he was, all in all, a wild and unconventional fellow. His poetry-collection was originally called Échí jí and his prose-collection Yānshí jí; Xuémó had once engraved them at Jīngzhōu. The present compilation is what was printed by Wáng Péiyì in Kāngxī yǐchǒu (= 1685), now combining the verse and the prose into one collection. Dēngchūn’s prose is simple and substantial, fit to pair with Lú Nán’s 盧柟 Mièméng jí 蠛蠓集, though falling short of the latter’s strange-and-archaic flavour. He held that in poetry true feeling came first and verbal artifice after; for that reason his work is plain and natural, but somewhat lacking in deep significance. Even so, his five-character verse is much of it of a far-fetched and savoured quality, fit to recite — enough indeed to establish his own school. Zhū Yízūn 朱彝尊 has compared him to Jiǎ Dǎo 賈島 and Lǐ Dòng 李洞, which may fairly be said to be a comparison among his peers. Respectfully collated in the third month of Qiánlóng 46 (= 1781).
Chief compilation officers: your servants Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. Chief collation officer: your servant Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.
Abstract
The Sòng bùyī jí is the principal monument of the late-Míng bùyī — itinerant, non-degree, professional — literary life. Sòng Dēngchūn was orphaned of wife and family in his thirtieth year (as the modern biographical summary preserves), abandoned his Xīnhé household, and spent the rest of his life on the road. He moved within the orbit of two prominent late-Wàn-lì literati patrons: Xú Xuémó 徐學謨 (1521–1593), prefect of Jīngzhōu c. 1565–1567 and later Minister of Rites, who hosted him at Jīngzhōu and printed his works; and 邢侗 Xíng Tóng (1551–1612), the Línyì calligrapher of the Wànlì sì jiā, whose Diào Sòngsǒu shī xù preserves Sòng’s own bleak self-account (‘do you take me for one whose four walls are timbered with pine and cypress?’). His death was a deliberate self-drowning at the Qiántáng, dated by the tiyao’s logic to some moment between Xú Xuémó’s retirement (c. 1583) and Xú’s own death in 1593; modern reference works converge on c. 1586.
The Sìkù editors place Sòng aesthetically between two reference points: his prose recalls Lú Nán 盧柟 (Jiā-jìng-era bùyī poet, Mièméng jí) in plain substance though without Lú’s archaic strangeness; his verse, in Zhū Yízūn’s reading, follows the laconic five-character manner of the late-Táng masters Jiǎ Dǎo 賈島 and Lǐ Dòng 李洞. The aesthetic platform — ‘feeling first, words after’ (xiān xìngqíng ér hòu wéncí 先性情而後文詞) — anticipates the slogans of the Gōngān 公安 school of the brothers Yuán in the 1590s, although Sòng pre-dates the Gōngān movement proper.
The three-juǎn WYG arrangement is the 1685 Wáng Péiyì redaction. Other extant printings — Jīfǔ cóngshū 畿輔叢書, Cóngshū jíchéng chūbiān 叢書集成初編 — descend from the same edition. The Sìkùquánshū tiyao is the primary scholarly notice; no early biography survives apart from Xíng Tóng’s preface, the prefaces to Xú Xuémó’s Jīngzhōu print (now lost in their early form), and brief notices in the Héběi local gazetteers.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language secondary literature located. In Chinese, Sòng Dēng-chūn appears as a minor figure in modern surveys of late-Míng bùyī poetry (e.g. Liào Kě-bīn 廖可斌, Míng dài wén-xué fù-gǔ yùn-dòng yán-jiū 明代文學復古運動研究, Shànghǎi gǔjí, 1994; Chén Bó-hǎi 陳伯海 et al., eds., Tángshī huì-píng / Míng dài juǎn). The Bǎi-bù páng-jiā píng-jiàn 百部旁家評鑑 series of Héběi local-literary surveys treats him as a representative Xīn-hé poet.
Other points of interest
The collection title Sòng bùyī jí is itself an editorial decision of Wáng Péiyì in 1685: it foregrounds the social-status descriptor (bùyī ‘in cloth’ = commoner) rather than either of the studio-names (Échíshēng or Hǎiwēng 海翁) that Sòng himself preferred. The post-Míng valorisation of the bùyī author as authentic outsider belongs to early-Qīng literary politics; in retitling, Wáng locates Sòng within that genealogy.