中山詩話

Zhōngshān shīhuà 中山詩話

The Zhongshan Remarks on Poetry by 劉攽 (撰)

About the work

The Zhōngshān shīhuà 中山詩話 — a single short juǎn of some sixty-odd loose paragraphs — is the shīhuà of Liú Bān 劉攽 (1023–1089, zì Gòngfù 貢父), the leading mid-Northern-Sòng Hànshū specialist and Sīmǎ Guāng’s 司馬光 designated drafter of the Zīzhì tōngjiàn’s entire Hàn and Sānguó portion. The book is the third of the three foundational Northern-Sòng shīhuà (after Ōuyáng Xiū’s 歐陽修 Liùyī shīhuà KR4i0006 and Sīmǎ Guāng’s Xù shīhuà KR4i0007) — the Sìkù editors specifically rank “Ōuyáng, Sīmǎ, and Liú Bān, in three houses” as the “earliest” of the entire genre. The title “Zhōngshān” is not from any internal preface — Liú’s own preface, if any, is not preserved — but is a posthumous editorial label keyed to Liú’s jùnwàng (ancestral-clan home: the Liú family of Péngchéng claimed descent from the Hàn princes of Zhōngshān 中山). Sòng citations of the work mostly call it Liú Gòngfù shīhuà 劉貢父詩話, after Liú’s zì; Zhōngshān is the late-Sòng / Yuán retrospective label that the Sìkù edition prints as the title.

Tiyao

Zhōngshān shīhuà, by Liú Bān of the Sòng. Bān wrote also the Wénxuǎn lèilín 文選類林, already entered [in the Sìkù]. In the Xīníng / Yuányòu years (the late 1060s through the 1080s), the Liú brothers were famous in their age for breadth of learning. They were less known for poetry — only this volume of poetic discussion survives. Sòng citations all call it Liú Gòngfù shīhuà. The present recension is titled Zhōngshān — there was probably no original title, and the jùnwàng tag was added by later hands to distinguish it from other shīhuà.

Bān reports of the Huā ruǐ fūrén gōng cí 花蕊夫人宮詞 (the famous Five-Dynasties palace lyrics of Mèng Chǎng’s 孟昶 favorite consort): “I have seen only thirty-odd pieces, though the original was a hundred.” Probably when Wáng Ānguó 王安國 first transmitted the cycle, some collector or other had excerpted only a selection, and Bān had not seen the full set.

On Lǐ Shāngyǐn’s 李商隱 Jǐn sè 錦瑟 (“Patterned Zither”) poem, Bān asserts that Jǐnsè was the name of a green-clothed concubine of Línghú Chǔ 令狐楚 — a wholly fabricated reading. The note on Hèlián Bóbó 赫連勃勃’s “zhēng tǔ” (steamed-earth) construction is also inexact. Beyond his solution to Dù Fǔ’s “Gōng cáo fēi fù Hàn Xiāo Hé” 功曹非復漢蕭何 — censured by Cháo Gōngwǔ as not properly examined — at the very second entry of the book he quotes Liú Zǐyí 劉子儀’s poem misreading the Lùn yǔ phrase “shī yě bì” 師也辟 as “shī yě dá” 師也達, with no correction, also unaccountable.

Some of the recorded mockeries and jests are excessive. Bān loved comic word-play and was once impeached on that account by Mǎ Mò 馬默 — probably a temperament inclining to over-collection of such material. — Of the Northern-Sòng shīhuà, Ōuyáng, Sīmǎ, and Liú Bān form the three earliest houses. This volume seems less than the other two; yet of all the Yuányòu circle Bān was the deepest-rooted in learning, and his textual and historical arguments are largely worth keeping. He cannot be set on the same plane with the late Jiānghú-style versifiers who chase obscure phrasing as a way of “discussing poetry.”

Abstract

Liú Bān’s Zhōngshān shīhuà is one of the three foundational Northern-Sòng shīhuà (with Ōuyáng’s KR4i0006 and Sīmǎ’s KR4i0007). Liú was a historian of unusual range — designated by Sīmǎ Guāng to draft the entire Hàn and Sānguó portion of the Zīzhì tōngjiàn — and the Zhōngshān shīhuà shows the same scholarly profile. The book is the most philologically careful of the three: where Ōuyáng’s Liùyī is anecdotal and Sīmǎ’s Xù is appreciative, Liú’s Zhōngshān is dense with textual emendations, source-attributions, and quotation-corrections drawn from his deep Hànshū and Sānguó learning. The entry-count varies across recensions; the Sìkù edition prints around sixty paragraphs.

Composition is not firmly dated. Internal references to Xīníng and Yuányòu events (the Huāruǐ palace-lyric cycle that Wáng Ānguó had begun transmitting in the 1070s; the Liú Zǐyí mockery anecdote) suggest a period in the 1080s; Liú died in 1089. The Sòng catalogues all attribute it to him without recension complications. The text survives in two transmission lines: through Zuǒ Guī’s 左圭 late-Sòng Bǎichuān xuéhǎi, and through Cháo Gōngwǔ’s 晁公武 Jùnzhāi dúshū zhì (which quotes Liú on Dù Fǔ’s Gōngcáo line and immediately corrects him — preserved in the Sìkù recension by way of Cháo’s apparatus). The Qing Lìdài shīhuà compilation places the Zhōngshān third, after Ōuyáng and Sīmǎ.

The book contains the much-cited and much-attacked reading of Lǐ Shāngyǐn’s Jǐn sè 錦瑟 as commemorating a concubine of Línghú Chǔ 令狐楚 named “Jǐnsè” — a reading the Sìkù editors call yǐng zhuàn 影撰 (“fabricated”), and which is now treated as one of the canonical exempla of yī shuō (one-among-several) misreadings of that famously polysemic poem. Liú is also the source for several Northern-Sòng anecdotes about Ōuyáng Xiū, Méi Yáochén 梅堯臣, and Sū Shùnqīn 蘇舜欽; for an attestation of the Huāruǐ fūrén palace-lyric cycle as Wáng Ānguó had it in the 1070s (though Liú had seen only thirty of the original hundred poems); and for a long Xiè Tiǎo / Lǐ Bái 李白 李白 discussion. The Sìkù editors single out his historical-philological work as the volume’s strength and his addiction to xiéxuè 諧謔 (“comic jest”) as its weakness.

Translations and research

• Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Harvard, 1992) — passing references to Liú Bān as one of the foundational Sòng shī-huà voices.
• Anthony Sariti and Ji Xiao-bin, on Sī-mǎ Guāng’s circle — context for Liú Bān as Sī-mǎ’s designated Tōng-jiàn draftsman.
• Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China (Harvard, 2006) — discussion of Liú Bān as a shī-huà critic in the immediate post-Ōuyáng generation.
• 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 Zhōng-shān shī-huà placing it as the third foundational shī-huà.
• Guō Shào-yú 郭紹虞, Sòng shī-huà jí-yì 宋詩話輯佚 (Zhōng-huá, 1980) — collation.
• Wáng Xiù-méi 王秀美, Liú Bān yán jiū 劉攽研究 (PhD thesis, Sū-zhōu dà-xué, 2009) — modern monograph on Liú with chapter on the Zhōng-shān shī-huà.

Other points of interest

The Jǐn sè “concubine of Línghú Chǔ” reading is the most-cited Liú error in the entire later shīhuà tradition; later critics from the Sòng (Cháo Gōngwǔ) onward through the Sìkù editors regularly use it as the locus classicus of yǐng zhuàn invention. Conversely the Sìkù editors single out the book for praise: among the Yuányòu circle, they say, Liú had the “deepest-rooted learning” of any shīhuà author, and his historical-philological apparatus distinguishes the Zhōngshān from the later Jiānghú-style “discussing-poetry-as-empty-talk” school.

Links

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