庚溪詩話

Gēngxī shīhuà 庚溪詩話

Poetry-Talks from Gēng Creek by 陳巖肖 (撰)

About the work

The Gēngxī shīhuà 庚溪詩話, in two juǎn, is the shīhuà of Chén Yánxiào 陳巖肖 (zì Zǐxiàng 子象, fl. 1138–1166+), a native of Jīnhuá 金華 who rose to Bīngbù shìláng under Gāozōng and Xiàozōng. The book is a late work: internal references to Gāozōng as the retired emperor (Tàishàng huángdì), Xiàozōng as the reigning emperor, and Guāngzōng as the heir-apparent place its composition in the Chúnxī 淳熙 era (1174–1189), six decades after the Jìngkāng catastrophe whose Bǐanjīng capital Chén had visited in his youth. The book opens with a survey of imperial verse — the yùzhì poems of the successive Sòng emperors, supplemented by three entries on Hàn Gāozǔ, Táng Tàizōng (Wénhuáng 文皇), and Táng Xuānzōng — and then proceeds to the Táng and Sòng poets, with particular density of citation in the Yuányòu 元祐 circle (the late-Northern-Sòng SūHuáng poets), to whom Chén was chronologically close enough to retain “the dregs of their tradition” (頗能得其緒餘). It was first transmitted in Zuǒ Guī’s 左圭 Bǎichuān xuéhǎi 百川學海 under the pseudonym “Xījiāo yěsǒu” 西郊野叟, the author’s name lost; Hú Yìnglín 胡應麟 and Wú Shīdào 吳師道 restored the authorship.

Tiyao

Gēngxī shīhuà, by Chén Yánxiào of the Sòng. Yánxiào’s zì was Zǐxiàng; he was a native of Jīnhuá. His father Dégù 德固 died in the catastrophe of Jìngkāng. In Shàoxīng 8 (1138), as a rènzǐ (hereditary candidate), he passed the Cíkē and rose in office to Bīngbù shìláng. This collection records his youthful travel in the capital during the Jìngkāng years, when he visited the Tiānqīng monastery — so the book is anchored just at the end of Northern Sòng. But the work calls Gāozōng “the retired emperor”, Xiàozōng “the present emperor”, and Guāngzōng “the present heir-apparent”, so it must have been completed in the Chúnxī era, sixty years on from Jìngkāng — clearly a work of his old age. The opening juǎn presents the imperial poems of the several Sòng reigns, appended with three entries on Hàn Gāozǔ, Táng Wénhuáng [Tàizōng], and Xuānzōng. Thereafter it works through the Táng and Sòng poetic houses one after another, offering verdicts on each — and on the Yuányòu circle especially he draws abundant citations, so that the period being close in time, he was well able to inherit the dregs of its tradition. For this reason the verdicts pronounced have grounds and rule throughout. There are, however, scattered slips: Zhào Yǔshí 趙與峕 in his Bīntuì lù 賓退錄 cites the “Yú Zhōnglín 虞中琳 sends Lín Jìzhòng 林季仲” poem as suspect for staleness, and Lì È 厲鶚 in his Sòng shī jìshì 宋詩紀事 picks out a couplet of Cài Zhào 蔡肇 on Mùzhōu 睦州 (“Layered hills cleverly meet the dīng-character water; / The wax-plum slow to see two-year flowers”) which is in fact Dù Mùzhī 杜牧之 — these are local errors. Nonetheless the main drift is not erratic; and the entry on the Shāngǔ poetry school, which sharply rebukes “students who have not got the marrow but only twist the sound, contort the diction, and call it the jiāngxī style”, is sharply on the mark for the malady of the next generation. As for surviving lines and lost couplets recorded from hearsay, there are also items not in any Sòng poet’s printed jí. At the end of the Sòng, Zuǒ Guī first included it in his Bǎichuān xuéhǎi 百川學海, but with only the rubric “told by the old man of the western suburb” 西郊野叟述 and the personal name lost. Míng Hú Yìnglín’s Bǐcóng 筆叢, going by an entry where Chén refers to his own son’s poem, was the first to fix the authorship; but Wú Shīdào’s Jìngxiāng lù had already said clearly that “Yánxiào composed the Gēngxī shīhuà”, with explicit text — so we did not have to wait for Yìnglín to know it.

Abstract

The Gēngxī shīhuà belongs to the dense second wave of Southern-Sòng shīhuà of the Chúnxī era (1174–1189). Chén Yánxiào, who had passed the Cíkē examination at Línān in 1138 and risen as a moderate to Bīngbù shìláng, used the book as a retrospective on a long career that began under the immediate shadow of the Jìngkāng catastrophe; the opening citations from the imperial poems of Sòng Tàizǔ, Tàizōng, Zhēnzōng, Rénzōng, and so on, form a deliberate dynastic prologue. After this imperial prelude the book moves chronologically through the Táng — Chén is particularly attentive to Hán Yù 韓愈 and Bái Jūyì 白居易 — and arrives at his own century with the strongest concentration around the Yuányòu circle (Sū Shì, Huáng Tíngjiān, Wáng Ānshí). His most celebrated single entry is the rebuke of slack imitators of the Jiāngxī shīpài (the “shēngyùn ǎoliè, cíyǔ jiānsè” entry), which Sòng and Yuán readers — including the Sìkù editors — recognized as prescient of the actual decline of that school. The book also preserves anecdotes and lines not transmitted in the surviving collections of the poets in question; this antiquarian aspect (the yí piān yì jù 遺篇佚句 dimension) is the second principal reason later compilers (Lì È, Wèi Qìngzhī KR4i0036) draw on it.

The book’s transmission history is unusual. It was first printed at the end of the Sòng in Zuǒ Guī’s Bǎichuān xuéhǎi under the pseudonym “Xījiāo yěsǒu” 西郊野叟 (“Old man of the western suburb”), the actual author’s name having been lost between composition and printing. Wú Shīdào in his Jìngxiāng lù recovered Chén’s authorship in the Yuán; Hú Yìnglín in the late Míng, working independently from an internal cross-reference in the text itself (an entry where Chén refers to a poem by his own son), reached the same conclusion. The Sìkù recension, drawn from a copy submitted by the governor-general of Jiāngsū, is the basis of the WYG edition.

A second-tier feature worth flagging: the book contains a small dossier of factual slips — Zhào Yǔshí already in the Bīntuì lù and Lì È later in the Sòng shī jìshì identified misattributed couplets — but these are clustered in the antiquarian sections and do not affect the value of the central critical material. The Sìkù editors note them but conclude that the book remains “not erratic in its main drift.”

Translations and research

• Guō Shào-yǔ 郭紹虞, Sòng shīhuà kǎo 宋詩話考 (Zhōnghuá, 1979), 92–95 — the standard bibliographical study, including the transmission as the Bǎi-chuān xué-hǎi anonymous text and its recovery.
• Zhāng Bó-wěi 張伯偉, Quán Sòng shīhuà jiào kǎo 全宋詩話校考 (Zhōnghuá, 2009), with apparatus.
• Wú Wén-zhì 吳文治 et al., comp., Sòng shīhuà quán biān 宋詩話全編 (Jiāng-sū guǎn-líng, 1998), vol. 4 — the standard modern edition of the text, with cross-references to other shīhuà.

Other points of interest

The book’s main scholarly interest beyond its critical entries is the small ratio of imperial verse it preserves: the opening juǎn citations from the yùzhì of the early Sòng emperors include lines not transmitted in other reliable sources, which makes the Gēngxī shīhuà a minor but indispensable source for the imperial xíngzài corpus. The book’s anonymous Bǎichuān xuéhǎi transmission and Hú Yìnglín’s recovery of the author are a small textual-bibliographical crux discussed by Yú Jiāxí 余嘉錫 in his Sìkù tíyào biànzhèng 四庫提要辨證.

Links

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