觀林詩話

Guānlín shīhuà 觀林詩話

Guān-lín’s Poetry-Talks by 吳聿 (撰)

About the work

The Guānlín shīhuà 觀林詩話, in one juǎn, is a short Southern-Sòng shīhuà (somewhat over fifty entries) by Wú Yù 吳聿 (zì Zǐshū 子書, fl. mid-twelfth century), a man whose identity is otherwise unrecoverable — Chén Zhènsūn already in the Shūlù jiětí recorded that he was “an unknown party”. The book is distinguished by two features: (i) close attention to Yuányòu-period anecdotes about Sū Shì, Huáng Tíngjiān, Hè Zhù, and Chén Shīdào, often preserving variants and běnshì unattested elsewhere; (ii) a remarkable density of kǎozhèng citations from authoritative pre-Sòng works — Lǐ Shàn’s Wénxuǎn commentary, the Suí shū, the Sòng shū, the Shìshuō xīnyǔ, Guō Yìgōng’s Guǎngzhì, Yú Chíshū’s NánChǔ xīnwén, Xǔ Shèn’s Shuō wén — used to verify or refute the diction of specific lines. The Sìkù editors call the book “a fine specimen among Sòng shīhuà.”

Tiyao

Guānlín shīhuà, by Wú Yù of the Sòng. Yù’s zì was Zǐshū; he calls himself “a man of Chǔdōng” — but Chǔdōng is a large area, and no one could fix his county. Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí records the book and says simply “no one knows the author.” The book itself contains a passage saying that, among the gentry, there was once a man of humble origin who as a small clerk wrote a Three-Cornered Pavilion poem with the line “the night lacks an eave of rain, / the spring lacks four sides of flower”; he presented it to his patron, who took notice of him, sent him to study, and he in due course passed the exam — at present he is a court official. Examining this against Zēng Sānyì’s Tónghuà lù, which records the same event and names the man as Yú Zǐqīng’s ancestor Rénkuò, Zǐshū must thus have been an early-Southern-Sòng man — the latest poets he cites run only from Sū Shì, Huáng Tíngjiān, and Hè Zhù down to Wāng Zǎo and Wáng Xuān. Among his entries: the one rebutting the use of “Prince Ānlíng” in Lù Jué’s 陸厥 “Zhōngshānwáng rúzǐqiè gē” — Lǐ Shàn’s commentary to the Wénxuǎn had already made this point; Yù records it as his own discovery, evidently not having consulted Lǐ. He also cites Zhāo Mù 趙牧’s imitations of Lǐ Chángjí 李長吉 (Lǐ Hè) on the Zhāiyán — Zhāiyán has no such passage; this was in fact a remark of Dù Mùzhī, and Yù has mistakenly added the words “imitating Lǐ Chángjí’s poetry” — another lapse. At the end of the book are three short entries on Xiè Tiǎo 謝朓, with no commentary appended, which contribute little — but reading the context, these may have been intended as a gloss on the line “the Lǐbù’s essay, two hundred years” in the Wáng Ānshí / Ōuyáng Xiū exchange, and the prose was cut off in transmission, or one entry was wrongly broken into three.

Yù’s poetic affiliation lies in the Yuányòu circle, and on its lost lore he has done particular research. He records that Huáng Tíngjiān, discussing huángdú 黃獨 as a kind of taro, said “some take it for huángjīng” — this is in fact a reference to Sū Shì’s poem “the poet, empty-bellied, waits for the huángjīng” 詩人空腹待黃精, which Huáng had refused to name openly. Chén Shīdào’s couplet “they only know to open the door and ask me to stay; / The host does not enquire ‘whose house is this?‘” 但解開門畱我住, 主人不問是誰家 — Yù shows is in fact one of two Sū Shì Cángchūn 藏春 quatrains, falsely fathered on antiquity. Sū Shì’s line “I do not go to Rúgāo to relax and shoot pheasants, / In ordinary life how should one acquire one’s gentleman?” 不向如皐閒射雉, 人閒何以得卿卿, by which the world mocked Sū for misconstruing Rúgāo as a place name — Yù declares he saw Sū’s own manuscript of the Huìliè poem, where 不向 was written 向不. Sū had once given the name “Twin Lotus-Leaves” 雙荷葉 to the concubine of Jiǎ Yúnlǎo 賈耘老; the world did not understand the allusion — Yù says the case is in the Quánnán lǎorén jí 泉南老人集, the sense being “twin chignons gathered to the front”, with the name borrowed from a Wēn Tíngyún cí. The Miǎnshuǐ yàntán 澠水燕談 had it that Zhāng Shùnmín 張舜民 inscribed a Sū Shì Lǎorén xíngyì poem — in fact a piece by Sū Zhé, by Wáng Bìzhī 王闢之 misremembered. Sū’s plum-blossom poem uses the fǎnhún 返魂 character — which is taken from Hán Wò’s 韓偓 Jīnluán mìjì 金鑾祕記, but commentators wrongly cite the Sū Dégē 蘇德哥 and the Jùkūzhōu fǎnhún xiāng 聚窟州返魂香 episodes. All of these are matter not in Chá Shènxíng’s 查愼行 supplementary annotation to Sū’s poetry. Likewise Huáng Tíngjiān’s poem to Huìhóng 惠洪 actually uses, jokingly, the Chén Píng zhuàn line about “unrobing and rowing”, on which Huìhóng’s Lěngzhāi yèhuà later put a “putting on the bonnet” gloss to clear himself; Huáng Tíngjiān’s claim that he learned his old-style verse craft from Wáng Ānshí, and Ānshí’s line “rubbing-blue, a sheet of water encircling the flower-meadow” 揉藍一水縈花艸 having been borrowed by Ānshí himself from a quatrain on a riverside house wall — these too are noticed in no other source.

As for citing Guō Yìgōng’s Guǎngzhì to verify Lù Guīméng’s “huì-wick” character (蕙炷), citing Yú Chíshū’s NánChǔ xīnwén to verify the “felt-root” (氈根) of a monk’s verse, citing the Suí shū lǐzhì to verify the line “kneeling, I ask the former husband” 長跪問故夫, citing Xǔ Shèn’s Shuō wén to verify that the word “bùjiè” 不借 is not restricted to grass sandals, citing the Nán shǐ Qiū Zhòngyǔ zhuàn to verify the Táng line “the bell at midnight”, citing the Sòng shū to verify Wú Róng’s mistaken use of “Yú Xiào” 虞嘯, citing the Yú Liàng 庾亮 passage of the Shìshuō xīnyǔ to verify “donning sandals and climbing the tower”, citing Yuán Jié’s self-preface to verify Ōuyáng Xiū and Huáng Tíngjiān’s misreading of “língxīng” 笭箵”, citing Pān Yuè’s Xīzhēng fù to verify that Cháo Cuò’s 錯 may be pronounced qīgè qiè 七各切, citing Jiāng Yān’s zá nǐ to verify the Dōngguān zòu jì’s misnaming of Shěn Yuē, citing Gù Yīn’s Xīnluó tú jì 顧愔新羅圖記 to verify that pine seeds are wǔlì 五粒 not wǔliè 五鬣, citing the Gē lù to verify Yīn Yún’s misreading of qīngliè 蜻蛚 in the Xiǎoshuō, citing the Xījīng zájì to refute Hè Zhù’s misuse of “the jade inkstone that breeds ice” — together with refutations of Sū Shì’s misnaming of Bái Jūyì’s New Year’s Eve poem as a Cold Food poem, of Cānggōng [Chúnyú Yì] as the Old Long Mulberry Master 倉公, and of the Zuǒzhuàn’s “small-man’s food” as “small-man’s soup” — all are useful for textual research. Among Sòng shīhuà, this may indeed be called a fine specimen.

Abstract

The Guānlín shīhuà belongs to the dense crop of mid-twelfth-century shīhuà that radiate out from the Yuányòu lineage. Its composition window is set internally by its citation pool: the latest poet cited is Wāng Zǎo (d. 1154), and Wú must therefore be writing in the third quarter of the twelfth century — broadly, between Shàoxīng 5 and Qiándào (roughly 1135–1170). The book’s most distinctive feature, beyond its rich anecdotal harvest from the SūHuáng circle, is its sustained citation of older authoritative sources to anchor specific philological points: Lǐ Shàn’s commentary to the Wénxuǎn, Guō Yìgōng’s Guǎngzhì, the Suí shū lǐzhì, Xǔ Shèn’s Shuō wén, the Shìshuō xīnyǔ, the Xījīng zájì, and Gù Yīn’s Xīnluó tú jì. This makes the Guānlín shīhuà unusually useful for kǎozhèng purposes, and it is cited heavily in Chá Shènxíng’s 查愼行 (1650–1727) supplementary annotation to Sū Shì’s poetry, where many of Wú’s identifications underlie the standard glosses.

The book’s most-cited entries concern Sū Shì: Wú claims to have personally seen Sū’s autograph of the Huìliè 會獵 poem with 向不 rather than 不向, settling a celebrated textual crux; he identifies the Twin Lotus-Leaves anecdote and its Wēn Tíngyún cí source; he corrects misattributions involving Hán Wò’s Jīnluán mìjì and the Cángchūn quatrains. On Huáng Tíngjiān he records the huángdú / huángjīng sub-anecdote (which casts the bitter retort to a Daoist as covert reference to Sū Shì’s verse) and the Chén Píng zhuàn joke with Huìhóng. None of this material — as the Sìkù editors note — is in Chá Shènxíng’s supplementary commentary on Sū, which in itself suggests how thoroughly the Guānlín shīhuà was used by the Qīng compilers.

The book’s transmission was through the Fàn family’s Tiānyī gé 天一閣 manuscript (the great Míng private library at Níngbō), from which the Sìkù editors took it. The text was already partly corrupt — the closing three entries on Xiè Tiǎo (lacking critical commentary) appear to be the broken remainder of a longer entry on the Wáng Ānshí / Ōuyáng Xiū “Lǐbù wénzhāng” exchange — but the bulk of the book is well preserved.

Translations and research

• Guō Shào-yǔ 郭紹虞, Sòng shīhuà kǎo 宋詩話考 (Zhōnghuá, 1979), 113–115 — bibliographical study and the principal modern source on Wú Yù’s identity.
• 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 — standard modern edition.
• Dīng Fú-bǎo 丁福保, ed., Lì-dài shīhuà xù-biān 歷代詩話續編 (1916; rpt. Zhōnghuá, 1983), vol. 1.
• Zhāng Bó-wěi 張伯偉, Quán Sòng shīhuà jiào kǎo 全宋詩話校考 (Zhōnghuá, 2009).

Other points of interest

The book is the most kǎozhèng-oriented of the Sòng shīhuà — the model for the Qīng-era philological shīhuà of Wáng Shìzhēn (KR4i0058) and Zhào Zhíxìn (KR4i0060). Wú’s identifications of SūShì texts and běnshì are foundational for the modern critical apparatus on Sū. His preservation of the “I saw Sū’s own manuscript” reading on the Huìliè poem (向不 against 不向) is the single most cited textual claim, and is generally accepted.

Links

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