韻語陽秋

Yùnyǔ yángqiū 韻語陽秋

Spring-and-Autumn Judgments on Rhymed Speech by 葛立方 (撰)

About the work

The Yùnyǔ yángqiū 韻語陽秋, in twenty juǎn, is the longest single-author shīhuà of the Southern Sòng outside of Hú Zǐ’s 胡仔 Tiáoxī yúyǐn cónghuà KR4i0029. Its author, Gě Lìfāng 葛立方 (zì Chángzhī 常之, hào Guīyú 歸愚; d. 1164), was a jìnshì of Shàoxīng 8 (1138), the son of the late-Northern-Sòng critic Gě Shèngzhòng 葛勝仲, and a casualty of the post-Qín Huì political reshuffle of 1156, after which he spent his last eight years in retirement at Wúxìng writing this book. The title is a learned displacement: “yángqiū” 陽秋 (literally “yang-autumn”) is a Jìn-era circumlocution for chūnqiū 春秋 (“spring-and-autumn”, with the same connotation of magisterial judgment), used to taboo the personal name Chūn of Empress Jiǎnwén of Jìn 簡文太后. The Sìkù editors note that, since the Sòng did not need to taboo “Chūn”, Gě’s reuse of the displacement is precious without reason — but the title declares the book’s project: not technical evaluations of versification, but judgments on the meaning and moral substance (yìzhǐ 意旨) of poems. It is the principal shīhuà of the moralist-Buddhist wing of Southern-Sòng criticism.

Tiyao

Yùnyǔ yángqiū, by Gě Lìfāng of the Sòng. Gě Lìfāng has the Guīyú jí, already entered in the bibliography. This compilation is a miscellaneous critical commentary on poetry of the several houses. It does not concern itself much with the relative artistry of phrasing, but rather with the rightness or wrongness of meaning — hence the title yángqiū, in Jìn-era usage. Yet the Jìn period had to substitute yáng for chūn because of a taboo; the Sòng was not subject to that taboo, and Gě here merely takes over the old form — fondness for the exotic without reason. Among its judgments, his strong tilt towards the Buddhist persuasion — e.g., his claim that Ōuyáng Xiū dreamed of the Ten Kings of the underworld, came thus to know that sin and merit are real, and so afterwards came to believe in the Buddha — these are not free from baseless slander. His argument that Qū Yuán’s self-drowning was a failure to comprehend his fate is on the partial-and-distorted side. His charge that Lǐ, Dù, Sū, and Huáng made a habit of mutual disparagement is forced. Zhào Yǔshí’s Bīntuì lù has already faulted him for mistakenly attributing a poem of Zhèng Héjìng 鄭合敬 to Zhèng Gǔ 鄭谷, and for failing to know the source of Ruǎn Xián 阮咸. Examining the present text, similar slips remain: thus the line “the red jade conceals the jade stream” 赤玉隱瑤溪 from Jiāng Yān’s 江淹 zá nǐ 雜擬 is given as a poem of Xiè Língyùn; Sū Shì’s couplet “my old body wearies of the river-dike horse; / I have trodden out the green-elm and the green-locust shadows” 老身倦馬河堤永，踏盡黃楡綠槐影 is given as Dù Fǔ’s; and Lǐ Bái’s “I have just understood the words ‘the clear river is pure as a sash; / one can long remember Xiè Xuánhuī’” 解道澄江淨如練，令人長憶謝元暉 is presented as borrowed from Zhèng Gǔ. All of these are slips, and there are more than what Yǔshí caught. Still, the main thrust holds positions that are stern and orthodox; the precise observations are also not to be dismissed wholesale.

Abstract

The Yùnyǔ yángqiū was completed during Gě’s final retirement at Wúxìng between 1156 (the year of his dismissal under the post-Qín Huì reshuffle) and 1164 (the year of his death). The catalog meta date “fl. 1164” indicates the final year of activity; composition spans roughly the preceding decade. Across twenty juǎn the book gathers some 600 critical entries arranged not by author or chronology but loosely by theme: opening juǎn on imperial verse, the Shījīng and Chǔcí tradition, then proceeding through the major HànWèi, Liùcháo, Táng, and Sòng poets, with the densest material on Sū Shì, Huáng Tíngjiān, and the Yuányòu circle. The book’s three signal features, identifiable from the Sìkù tíyào and confirmed by modern editions, are (i) a strong Buddhist inflection — Gě explicitly reads Ōuyáng Xiū’s late-life dream of the Ten Kings as evidence of Ōuyáng’s secret conversion to Buddhism, a reading later universally rejected; (ii) a moralist filter — Qū Yuán’s suicide is judged a failure of zhī mìng (knowing fate); and (iii) an attempt to read LǐDùSūHuáng as principals in a long pattern of mutual professional disparagement, a thesis the Sìkù editors deem forced.

The book contains a recurring pattern of factual misattributions of couplets — many of them caught already by the Sòng critic Zhào Yǔshí 趙與峕 in his Bīntuì lù 賓退錄, others by the Sìkù editors themselves. These slips are concentrated in Gě’s citations of pre-Sòng material and reflect his working from a substantial but not always reliable private library. Despite them, the book has held its place in the standard shīhuà repertory: as the Sìkù editors put it, its “main drift in positions of judgment is stern and orthodox; the precise observations are also not to be dismissed wholesale” (大旨持論嚴正，其精確之處亦未可盡沒). The book is a major source — together with Hú Zǐ’s Cónghuà — for the late-Northern-Sòng shīhuà tradition Gě grew up in via his father Gě Shèngzhòng, and preserves many anecdotes about the Yuányòu poets not transmitted in their own collections.

Textual transmission has been continuous from the Sòng (it was already cited by Zhào Yǔshí in the Bīntuì lù and by Wèi Qìngzhī in the Shīrén yùxiè KR4i0036), via the Míng Bǎichuān xuéhǎi and a number of separate Míng impressions, to the Sìkù recension drawn from the submitted copy of the governor-general of Liǎngjiāng. The modern Lìdài shīhuà recension of He Wénhuàn 何文煥 (1770) is the most accessible older edition; modern scholarship works from the Sòng shīhuà quán biān 宋詩話全編 (1998) text.

Translations and research

• Guō Shào-yǔ 郭紹虞, Sòng shīhuà kǎo 宋詩話考 (Zhōnghuá, 1979), 96–101 — the standard bibliographical study and the principal modern listing of Gě’s misattributions.
• 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.
• Zhāng Bó-wěi 張伯偉, Quán Sòng shīhuà jiào kǎo 全宋詩話校考 (Zhōnghuá, 2009).
• He Wén-huàn 何文煥, Lì-dài shīhuà 歷代詩話 (1770; rpt. Zhōnghuá, 1981), the principal pre-modern collected edition, with the Yùn-yǔ yáng-qiū in vol. 2.

Other points of interest

The book is exceptional among Sòng shīhuà for its sheer length (twenty juǎn) — only Hú Zǐ’s Cónghuà and Ruǎn Yuè’s Shīhuà zǒngguī exceed it. Its Buddhist inflection is the most pronounced of any major Sòng shīhuà; this aligns Gě with his contemporary religious milieu but earned him the Sìkù editors’ suspicion. The book also preserves several otherwise-unattested anecdotes about Sū Shì and Huáng Tíngjiān, which become standard repertory in later compilations.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §30.5.
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
• Wikipedia 韻語陽秋