續詩話

Xù shīhuà 續詩話

Continued Remarks on Poetry by 司馬光 (撰)

About the work

The Xù shīhuà 續詩話 — a single short juǎn — is Sīmǎ Guāng’s 司馬光 (1019–1086) continuation of Ōuyáng Xiū’s 歐陽修 Liùyī shīhuà KR4i0006, framed in the author’s brief opening preface as a self-conscious sequel (“Xù Liùyī”). Cast in the same casual paragraph form Ōuyáng had invented, it gathers thirty-odd short entries on Northern-Sòng poets and earlier Táng material — many of them notably acute textual or critical judgments by the great historian of the Zīzhì tōngjiàn. The book is most famous for its supplement to Ōuyáng’s “Nine Monks” 九僧 lacuna (Ōuyáng had recalled only one of the nine; Sīmǎ supplies the other eight by name); for its early and authoritative attestations of the careers of Lín Bū 林逋, Wèi Yě 魏野, Kòu Zhǔn 寇準, Chén Yáozuǒ 陳堯佐, and Chàng Dāng 暢當; for Sīmǎ’s startling reading of Dù Fǔ’s 杜甫 Guó pò shān hé zài 國破山河在; and for its noting (and correcting) of a textual error in a Wèi Yě poem. Composition is dated to the period between the appearance of the Liùyī (1072) and Sīmǎ’s death (1086).

Tiyao

Xù shīhuà, by Sīmǎ Guāng of the Sòng. Guāng wrote also the Yì shuō 易說, already entered [in the Sìkù]. The title is Xù shīhuà “Continued shīhuà” — as Guāng’s own opening preface shows, the work is a continuation of Ōuyáng Xiū’s Liùyī shīhuà. The book is not entered in Guāng’s Chuánjiā jí 傳家集, the comprehensive collection of his miscellaneous writings; only Zuǒ Guī’s 左圭 Bǎichuān xuéhǎi 百川學海 preserves it. The Chuánjiā jí also fails to record his Qièyùn zhǐ zhǎng tú 切韻指掌圖. Possibly both works were composed after the collection had been compiled.

Guāng’s moral and political achievements are without rival in his age; he was no man of mere literary trifles. Yet his evaluation of various poets here is exact and exquisitely fine. So in cases like Lín Bū’s couplet “shū yǐng héng xié shuǐ qīng qiǎn, àn xiāng fú dòng yuè huáng hūn” 疎影横斜水清淺，暗香浮動月黃昏 (“sparse shadows lean over the clear shallow water; faint scent floats through the dusk-of-the-moon”) on the plum-blossom; Wèi Yě’s “shù shēng lí àn lǔ, jǐ diǎn bié zhōu shān” 數聲離岸櫓，幾點別州山 (“a few strokes of oar leaving the shore; a few distant peaks of a parting prefecture”); Hán Qí’s 韓琦 “huā qù xiǎo cóng hú dié luàn, yǔ yú chūn pǔ jiégāo xián” 花去曉叢蝴蝶亂，雨餘春圃桔槹閒 (“flowers gone, the morning thickets are scattered by butterflies; rain over, the spring garden’s well-sweep stands idle”); Gěng Xiānzhī’s 耿仙芝 “cǎo sè yǐn kāi pán mǎ dì, xiāo shēng chuī nuǎn mài táng tiān” 草色引開盤馬地，簫聲吹暖賣餳天 (“the grass tints draw open the horse-circling ground; the flute-sound blows warm the toffee-vendor’s day”); Kòu Zhǔn’s Jiāngnán chūn 江南春 poem; Chén Yáozuǒ’s Wújiāng 吳江 poem; Chàng Dāng’s Guànquè lóu 鸛雀樓 poem and Chàng’s father’s Xíng sè 行色 poem — all of these have come down the centuries to be widely recited because Guāng first picked them out and made them known. His remarks on Wèi Yě’s verse — that the printed text had wrongly emended the character yào 藥 — and his discussion of Dù Fǔ’s Guó pò shān hé zài are particularly penetrating, beyond what other shīhuà reach.

Only the one passage on Méi Yáochén’s 梅堯臣 dying of illness has no connection with poetry — strange that it should be in here. Guāng has another book, the Sùshuǐ jì wén 涑水記聞, which records contemporary events. Perhaps the two works were being compiled simultaneously, and a paragraph meant for the jì wén slipped into this volume by accident.

Abstract

Sīmǎ Guāng’s Xù shīhuà is the earliest of the dozen-odd self-styled “sequels” to Ōuyáng’s foundational text, and probably the most distinguished single-author shīhuà of the early Northern Sòng. The book opens with an explicit preface: “Ōugōng wrote his shīhuà — I have continued it” (translating the gist), framing the book as a deliberate genre exercise. Some thirty short entries follow, each a paragraph or two. They concentrate on Northern-Sòng poets — Lín Bū, Wèi Yě, Kòu Zhǔn, Hán Qí, Chén Yáozuǒ, Gěng Xiānzhī, Méi Yáochén — with a smaller cluster on Táng material (Dù Fǔ, Bái Jūyì 白居易, Wáng Wéi 王維, the Guànquè lóu poem of Chàng Dāng and the divergent Wáng Zhīhuàn 王之渙 ascription). Two of the volume’s entries have become canonical loci classici in later Chinese poetics: the supplement to Ōuyáng’s Nine Monks (jiǔ sēng) list — Sīmǎ supplies eight names where Ōuyáng could remember only one — and the reading of Dù Fǔ’s “Guó pò shān hé zài” couplet against the prevailing optimistic gloss.

The compilation date is not firmly fixed. The Liùyī shīhuà circulated from 1072 and Sīmǎ died in 1086, so 1072–1086 is the outer window; the years of Sīmǎ’s retreat at Luòyáng to complete the Zīzhì tōngjiàn (1071–1084) are the likeliest period, and the entries on Wèi Yě’s Cǎotáng jí 草堂集 — quoted from a particular manuscript witness — would fit Sīmǎ’s Luòyáng library. Sīmǎ’s autograph is the Chuánjiā jí’s lack of the Xù shīhuà (so noted by the Sìkù editors); the work survived independently in Zuǒ Guī’s 左圭 late-Sòng Bǎichuān xuéhǎi compendium, on which all subsequent editions ultimately depend. Hé Wénhuàn’s 何文煥 Qing Lìdài shīhuà (1770) places it second, after the Liùyī, marking it as canonical sequel.

The most-discussed single entry in the work is Sīmǎ’s reading of the second couplet of Dù Fǔ’s Chūn wàng 春望:

國破山河在，城春草木深。 感時花濺淚，恨別鳥驚心。

Sīmǎ’s reading of gǎn shí huā jiàn lèi, hèn bié niǎo jīng xīn — that it is the flowers and the birds, not the speaker, that are weeping and startled, the jiàn and jīng being intransitive — is one of the early arguments for the doctrine of pathetic projection (qíngjǐng jiāoróng 情景交融) and remains the standard reading. The Sìkù editors single it out as “particularly penetrating, beyond what other shīhuà reach.”

Translations and research

• Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Harvard, 1992), 390–397 — annotated translation of selected entries of the Xù shī-huà.
• Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China (Harvard, 2006) — discussion of Sī-mǎ Guāng as a shī-huà critic.
• Anthony Sariti, “Monarchy, Bureaucracy, and Absolutism in the Political Thought of Ssu-ma Kuang”, JAS 32.1 (1972) — biographical and political-intellectual context.
• Ji Xiao-bin, Politics and Conservatism in Northern Song China: The Career and Thought of Sima Guang (Chinese University Press, 2005) — comprehensive monograph on Sī-mǎ; brief discussion of literary writings.
• Cài Zhèn-chǔ 蔡鎮楚, Sòng-dài shī-huà yán-jiū 宋代詩話研究 (Hú-nán shī-fàn dà-xué chū-bǎn-shè, 1990) — chapter on the Xù shī-huà in the early Northern-Sòng shī-huà tradition.
• Guō Shào-yú 郭紹虞, Sòng shī-huà jí-yì 宋詩話輯佚 (Zhōng-huá, 1980) — collation evidence.
• Lǐ Yù-shēng 李裕生, Sī-mǎ Guāng yǔ wén-xué 司馬光與文學 (Bā-shǔ shū-shè, 2003).

Other points of interest

The misplaced paragraph on Méi Yáochén’s death — flagged by the Sìkù editors as “having nothing to do with poetry” and probably an accidental cross-contamination from Sīmǎ’s parallel work Sùshuǐ jì wén — is a charming small-scale example of the Sìkù editors’ attention to textual detail. The Nine Monks supplement is itself a recurring point of interest: the eight names Sīmǎ supplies (Wéifèng 惟鳳, Bǎoxiān 保暹, Wénzhào 文兆, Xíngzhāo 行肇, Jiǎnzhǎng 簡長, Wéiwù 惟悟, Cuìyún 醇悟, Yǔnfù 允父) are now the standard list; Ōuyáng had remembered only Huìchóng 惠崇.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §30.5.
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
• Wikipedia 續詩話