Yúshī lù 餘師錄
Record of Remaining Teachers by 王正德 (撰)
About the work
The Yúshī lù 餘師錄, in four juǎn, is a Southern-Sòng anthology of earlier critical writing on literary composition (lùn wén 論文), compiled by Wáng Zhèngdé 王正德 (otherwise unknown — no Sòngshǐ biography; his title and native place are nowhere preserved) and dated by its own preface to Shàoxī 紹熙 4 (1193). The title — literally “record of the leftover teachers” — derives from a remark traditionally attributed to Yáng Xióng 揚雄: fú shī wú gōng dìyú, gōng zì shī ěr; chá fū lùn wén zhě, gài jiē fù wǒ yúshī “There is no public zī to literary teaching, and no public dī to its inheritance; the Other Teachers [i.e. the writers of the past] are the ones who teach me what is left.” The work is unique among Southern-Sòng critical compilations in two respects: it ranges back through the Northern Qí (i.e. as far as Yán Zhītuī 顏之推) rather than confining itself to Sòng material, and it does not editorialize — Wáng prints excerpts of earlier writers verbatim, side by side, without partisan commentary. The book vanished from circulation in the late Sòng or Yuán: it was not catalogued in either Sòngshǐ Yìwénzhì or the early Míng booklists in unitary form, surviving only in scattered citation until the Sìkù editors reconstructed it from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典.
Tiyao
Yúshī lù, by Wáng Zhèngdé of the Sòng. Zhèngdé has no biography in the Sòngshǐ; his enfeoffment and native place are alike unrecorded. The book is prefaced by a self-preface dated Shàoxī 4 (1193), so the man lived under Sòng Guāngzōng. The book collects pronouncements on writing from prior ages, beginning with the Northern Qí and continuing down to the Sòng. While most of the material gathered is from already-familiar sources, there are also items now lost from their parent works which are preserved only here. Sòng-period discussions of literature tend to divide into rival schools and run to extremes of praise and blame; this record collects the various opinions without inserting a verdict, and is unusually scrupulous in what it includes and what it leaves out — a real merit. There are occasional small errors in citation, presumably scribal. The preface remarks “wearied by replies to inquiry, I record this to substitute for oral instruction”; consequently the chronological ordering is loose and not strictly sequential. The book is not in the Sòng Yìwénzhì; the Wényuángé shūmù records “Wáng Zhèngdé, Yúshī lù, one bù, one cè”, but this has long been without a transmitted printing. It survives only in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn: although the beginning and the end are complete, the juǎn divisions are not. The present edition apportions it roughly into four juǎn; we have noted its errors and lacunae beneath the lines where they occur, and have left the original sequence undisturbed. (Imperial editorial colophon, Qiánlóng reign.)
Abstract
The Yúshī lù was completed in Shàoxī 4 (1193); its survival is owed to the great Míng compendium Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典 (1408), in which the Sìkù editors found it intact (head and tail) but without the original juǎn breaks. They reconstituted a four-juǎn division and entered the work — together with their philological notes on lacunae and scribal errors — into the imperial collectaneum. The work’s Vorlage is otherwise lost; aside from a few short citations preserved in the Shīhuà zǒngguī 詩話總龜 (KR4i0012) and the Yùhǎi 玉海 of Wáng Yīnglín 王應麟, no Sòng or Yuán impression survives. The work draws heavily on earlier rhetorical and literary-theoretical authorities — including Yán Zhītuī’s Yánshì jiāxùn 顏氏家訓 (Northern Qí), the Wénxīn diāolóng of Liú Xié 劉勰 (KR4i0001), the Shīpǐn of Zhōng Róng 鍾嶸 (KR4i0003), the Liùyī shīhuà of Ōuyáng Xiū 歐陽修 (KR4i0006), the Yúnyǔ yángqiū of Gě Lìfāng 葛立方 (KR4i0028), and Lǚ Běnzhōng’s 呂本中 Zǐwēi shīhuà (KR4i0015). Wáng’s editorial method is to set passages in dialogic juxtaposition: a Liú Xié passage on shén sī 神思 next to a Yáng Yì 楊億 dictum on gǔ qí 古奇, a Zhōng Róng comment on zī wèi 滋味 next to a Sū Shì 蘇軾 aphorism on xíngyún liúshuǐ 行雲流水. The reader is left to draw the conclusions. This is the editorial mode that Wèi Qìngzhī 魏慶之 would adopt and expand half a century later in the Shīrén yùxiè (KR4i0036).
The textual reception is sparse before the modern period. After the Sìkù editors recovered it from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn, the work was reprinted in the late Qīng Cóngshū jíchéng 叢書集成 and in the modern Sòng shīhuà quánbiān 宋詩話全編. Modern study of Wáng Zhèngdé as a Southern-Sòng critical voice has been limited; the book is more often mined for the Vorlage of its citations (especially of Northern-Sòng rhetorical material since lost) than studied in its own right.
Translations and research
- Wú Wén-zhì 吳文治, ed., Sòng shīhuà quán-biān 宋詩話全編, vol. 6 (Jiāngsū gǔjí, 1998) — modern collation.
- Guō Shàoyú 郭紹虞, Zhōngguó wén-xué pī-píng shǐ 中國文學批評史 (Shànghǎi gǔjí, 1979) — discusses the Yúshī lù in its account of Southern-Sòng critical anthologies.
- Cài Jìnxiáng 蔡鎮楚, Zhōngguó shīhuà shǐ 中國詩話史 (Húnán wén-yì, 1988) — bibliographic context.
- No substantial monograph dedicated to the Yúshī lù located.
Other points of interest
The work’s transmission is the chief reason for its current importance: a number of Northern-Sòng critical fragments survive in no other source. Modern critical editions of the Liùyī shīhuà of Ōuyáng Xiū and the Zhōngshān shīhuà of Liú Bān (KR4i0008) draw on the Yúshī lù to fill lacunae in those parent works. The book is the principal early-Southern-Sòng witness to a non-partisan, anthological critical style at a moment when the shīhuà genre was dominated by Jiāngxī-school polemic.
Links
- Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
- Wikidata: no entry.