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後村詩話

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Text ID
KR4i0037
Date
1247–1269
Dynasty
宋

Hòucūn shīhuà 後村詩話

Hòucūn’s Remarks on Poetry by 劉克莊 (撰)

About the work

The Hòucūn shīhuà 後村詩話, in fourteen juǎn arranged across four discrete collections (Qián jí 前集 2 juǎn, Hòu jí 後集 2 juǎn, Xù jí 續集 4 juǎn, Xīn jí 新集 6 juǎn), is the late-life critical magnum opus of Liú Kèzhuāng 劉克莊 (1187–1269), the towering late-Sòng poet-critic and the principal continuator of the Jiāngxī school. The four collections correspond to four distinct phases of Liú’s writing life, as his own self-colophon explains: the Qián jí and Hòu jí were written when he was between sixty and seventy (i.e., c. 1247–1257), the Xù jí at eighty (c. 1267), the Xīn jí at eighty-two (c. 1269 — that is, in the final year of his life). The Hòucūn shīhuà is the longest sustained work of literary criticism in the Southern Sòng aside from the great compendia (Hú Zǐ’s Tiáoxī yúyǐn cónghuà KR4i0024 and Wèi Qìngzhī’s Shīrén yùxiè KR4i0036); the Sìkù editors place it “far above all the other Southern-Sòng shīhuà”. It is also, as Liú’s first-person reflections make explicit, a personal canon-making project — Liú’s last word on what should be kept and what discarded from the Chinese poetic tradition.

Tiyao

Hòucūn shīhuà, in fourteen juǎn: Qián jí in two, Hòu jí in two, Xù jí in four, Xīn jí in six. By Liú Kèzhuāng of the Sòng. Kèzhuāng’s Hòucūn jí is already entered in the catalogue. Of these shīhuà, only the Qián jí circulates as a separate book; the rest are embedded in the parent wénjí, fourteen juǎn in all. The work concludes with a self-colophon: “The Qián and Hòu collections were composed between my sixtieth and seventieth years. The Xù jí’s four juǎn were written at eighty. The Xīn jí’s six were written at eighty-two.” Kèzhuāng in his late years grew slack, and his poems too became hazy: his “Hair Loss” poem (“being a chéngdàn convict isn’t really lenient enough; being a shāmí novice is actually quite nice” — 為城旦寧非恕，度作沙彌亦自佳) and his “Aged Clerk” poem (“I only fear that even Yánluó cannot quite blot it out; that one day the iron whip will still bring red to a ghost’s haunches” — 只恐閻羅難抹過，鐵鞭他日鬼臀紅) are pieces fit only to provoke laughter. Yet in his theoretical treatment of poetry he is orderly. Zhēn Déxiù 真德秀 entrusted the poetry section of the Wénzhāng zhèngzōng 文章正宗 to Kèzhuāng; the pieces Kèzhuāng picked — including Hàn Wǔdì’s Qiūfēng cí 秋風辭 and the verse of the Three Xiè — Zhēn struck out in many cases. Kèzhuāng disagreed, and his account is preserved in juǎn one of the Qián jí. Kèzhuāng was a specialist on poetry; Zhēn was not deep on the subject. Their disagreement is the meeting of a square peg and a round hole. The Qián jí, Hòu jí, and Xù jí together discuss HànWèi onward, with the bulk on Táng and Sòng. The Xīn jí’s six juǎn are devoted to detailed analysis of Táng poetry: he gathers cream, judges good and bad, and frequently transcribes whole poems — distinct from the other shīhuà with their textual investigations. He uses the format of the Tángshī jìshì 唐詩紀事. The Sòng poems he records, of which half or so are now lost in their original collections, are preserved only because of this book — it is in this sense a definitive recension. He does, however, copy out whole sequences from the Hán shī wàizhuàn, the Xījīng zájì, and the Cháoyě qiānzǎi — up to ten or twenty items at a time — and at one point he diverts onto Shěn Jìjì’s 沈既濟 refutation of the Wǔhòu běnjì, which has nothing to do with poetry: an example of mixed standards. Again, he writes that the brothers Dù Mù 杜牧 splitting between the Niú and Lǐ factions was a high principle, not realizing that it was a private factionalism; and he writes that Wú Róng 吳融 and Hán Wò 韓偓, in their state of crisis and humiliation, wrote “absolutely no poems mourning the age”, which seems to be based on the Tángyīng gēshī 唐英歌詩 and the Xiānglián jí 香奩集 alone — he has plainly not read Hán’s Hán nèihàn jí 韓內翰集 closely. His judgement is occasionally careless. Again, he denounces the Yùtái xīnyǒng 玉臺新詠 as yínwā 淫哇 (lewd corruption) but records its Xù jí in detail; he says Ōuyáng Xiū 歐陽修 was wearied by Yáng Yì 楊億 and Liú Yún 劉筠 but also says Ōuyáng respected them — these are self-contradictions. Yet in the main the careful and precise items predominate. The book stands far above the other Southern-Sòng shīhuà. (Imperial editorial colophon, Qiánlóng 46 / 1781.)

Abstract

The four collections of the Hòucūn shīhuà span the last two decades of Liú Kèzhuāng’s life. The Qián jí (c. 1247) was already circulating as a separate book by the end of the Sòng; the Hòu, Xù, and Xīn collections were absorbed into his great Hòucūn xiānshēng dàquánjí 後村先生大全集 KR4d0340 (in SBCK; the WYG version is the 50-juàn Hòucūn jí) and recovered by the Sìkù editors. Liú’s working method is distinctive: where the typical Sòng shīhuà item is a paragraph noting an anecdote or correcting a textual reading, Liú frequently transcribes whole poems and then comments at length — adopting (as the Sìkù tíyào notes) the format of Jì Yùxī’s 計有功 Tángshī jìshì 唐詩紀事 (KR4i0027). This method makes the Hòucūn shīhuà the single best surviving anthology of late-Sòng poems otherwise lost to the textual tradition: as the Sìkù tíyào remarks, of the Sòng poems Liú records, fully half no longer survive in their original collections.

The book has a strong polemical position. Liú is the late-Sòng heir of the Jiāngxī school via Lǚ Běnzhōng 呂本中, Hán Jū 韓駒, and the jiānghú poets; his canon — HànWèiJìnTángSòng as a continuous line of authorship descending through LǐDùSūHuáng — is sharply at odds with Yán Yǔ’s 嚴羽 periodization (Cānglàng shīhuà KR4i0035) which downgrades Sòng poetry as poetry-as-argument. The Hòucūn shīhuà engages Yán’s positions without naming him, defending the Sòng poets against the High-Táng absolutism. Liú’s disagreement with his teacher Zhēn Déxiù 真德秀 over the selection of poems for the Wénzhāng zhèngzōng 文章正宗 (1228), preserved in juǎn 1 of the Qián jí, is the locus classicus for the late-Sòng debate about what counts as orthodox poetry. The Xīn jí’s six juǎn on Táng poetry — written at eighty-two, the year of his death — are the densest sustained survey of the Táng canon in the entire Sòng critical corpus.

The standard modern critical edition is Wáng Xiùméi 王秀梅, Hòucūn shīhuà 後村詩話 (Zhōnghuá, 1983; rev. 2008), with full collation against the Sìkù, SBCK, and surviving Sòng impressions. The Sòng shīhuà quánbiān (1998) follows Wáng’s text. Liú’s broader critical thought is studied in Patricia Ebrey, Women and the Family in Chinese History (Routledge, 2003), and in Pauline C. Lee, “The Late Sòng Critic Liú Kèzhuāng on Tang Poetry” (in various studies).

Translations and research

  • Wáng Xiùméi 王秀梅, Hòucūn shīhuà 後村詩話 (Zhōnghuá, 1983; rev. 2008) — the standard modern critical edition.
  • Wú Wén-zhì 吳文治, ed., Sòng shīhuà quán-biān 宋詩話全編, vol. 8 (Jiāngsū gǔjí, 1998) — collation following Wáng.
  • Patricia Ebrey, “Liu Kezhuang’s Family Tombstone Inscriptions,” in Women and the Family in Chinese History (Routledge, 2003) — context for Liú’s late-life writing.
  • Guō Shàoyú 郭紹虞, Sòng shīhuà jí-yì 宋詩話輯佚 (Zhōnghuá, 1980) — bibliographic context.
  • Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827–860) (Harvard, 2006) — uses the Hòucūn shīhuà’s Xīn jí as principal source for the otherwise-lost Late Táng jiānghú-school anthologies.
  • Charles Hartman, “Poetry”, in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, vol. 1 (CUP, 2010) — situates Liú in the late-Sòng critical economy.

Other points of interest

The Hòucūn shīhuà preserves the only surviving record of Liú Kèzhuāng’s disagreement with his teacher Zhēn Déxiù over the canon of Chinese poetry to be transmitted in the Wénzhāng zhèngzōng — one of the most consequential canon-formation debates of the Southern Sòng. Liú’s preservation of late-Sòng jiānghú-school poetry that would otherwise have been completely lost (e.g., the verses of Liú Yīngshí 劉應時 cited by Yáng Wànlǐ, the Bāyuè shísì yè poem of Liú Yǒng 劉詠, the qǐngshuāngbǎi verses of Liú Chǎng 劉敞, and a great many short-form Late Jiāngxī poems unrecoverable elsewhere) makes the Xīn jí in particular a primary source for the late-Sòng poetic field.

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