聞分館君 Ask BunKanKun

對床夜語

8 min read

Text ID
KR4i0044
Date
1260–1264
Dynasty
宋

Duìchuáng yè yǔ 對床夜語

Conversation Across the Beds at Night by 范晞文 (撰)

About the work

The Duìchuáng yè yǔ 對床夜語, in five juǎn, is a Southern Sòng shīhuà by Fàn Xīwén 范晞文 (zì Jǐngwén 景文, hào Yàozhuāng 葯莊), of Qiántáng 錢塘. The title — “conversation across the beds at night” — comes from a Wéi Yìngwù 韋應物 line and evokes the kind of intimate after-dark shīhuà exchange between friends that constitutes the work’s rhetorical setting. The book was completed in the Jǐngdìng 景定 era (1260–1264), shortly before Fàn was banished to Hǎinán for impeaching Jiǎ Sìdào 賈似道 (1266). It is the principal critical voice of resistance to the dominant Sìlíng 四靈 (the “Four Lings” — Xú Jǐ 徐璣, Xú Zhào 徐照, Wēng Juǎn 翁卷, Zhào Shīxiù 趙師秀, all from Yǒngjiā 永嘉) and “WǎnTáng” 晚唐 styles of Southern Sòng poetry — manners that, in Fàn’s view, narrowed the canon to the late-Táng qíngjǐng lyric and reduced poetry to mannerism. Fàn argues instead for a wide-spectrum return to HànWèi and Six-Dynasties precedent and to High Táng polyphony, defends Dù Fǔ’s 杜甫 regulated-verse practice (including his deliberate “wrenched-tone” àozì 拗字 lines, which Fàn shows obey a covert symmetry rather than indicating sloppiness), and re-elevates Xǔ Hún 許渾 above Lǐ Shāngyǐn 李商隱 — a placement the Sìkù editors single out as the work’s most defensible-yet-most-contestable claim.

Tiyao

Duìchuáng yè yǔ, five juǎn. By Fàn Xīwén of the Sòng. Xīwén’s zì was Jǐngwén, hào Yàozhuāng; he was of Qiántáng. A Tàixué student. In Xiánchún bǐngyín (1266) he joined Yè Lǐ, Xiāo Guī, and others in a memorial impeaching Jiǎ Sìdào. Sìdào trumped up the “gold-leaf inlay for studio-plaque” affair against him and had him banished to Qióngzhōu. Under Yuán Shìzǔ, Chéng Jùfū recommended Xīwén and Zhào Mèngfǔ together for office; Mèngfǔ accepted the summons and went out, Xīwén never accepted any post, and lived out his days as a refugee at Wúxī.

The book was completed in the Jǐngdìng era and consists entirely of remarks on poetry. Some of its observations — e.g. on Cáo Zhí’s 曹植 Qī āi shī 七哀詩, where Fàn knows that the ancients did not bind themselves to phonic rule but does not understand the underlying logic of ancient rime, so he raises as a difficulty the rhyming of héng 横 with the yáng department in Wèi Wéndì’s 曹丕 poetry and of jiē 嗟 with the gē department in Ruǎn Jí’s poetry — show him uneven. On Dù Fǔ’s regulated-verse àozì lines, he says that any rule derived from them would turn into a dead law — not knowing that Táng regulated verse has a definite system of shuāngào (double-wrenched) and dānào (single-wrenched) lines balancing one another in píngzè, and is not arbitrary. When he traces an early line behind a later line — but for Liú Wān’s 劉灣 Yúnnán xíng 雲南行 lines “wife seeks death-of-husband / father seeks death-of-son”, he does not know they derive from a Hàn song of Lady Huáróng 華容夫人 — he is not always able to trace the source. As for his showing that Wáng Ānshí 王安石 misattributed a Huángfǔ Rǎn 皇甫冉 poem to Dù Fǔ, he is right; but on Lǐ Duān’s 李端 Wúchéng huái gǔ poem, he is misled by the abridged Cáitiáo jí 才調集 version into calling it a juéjù; and Wáng Wéi’s 王維 Sòng Qiū Wéi xià dì poem he wrongly assigns to Shěn Quánqī 沈佺期 — so he is not free of slips. His preference for Xǔ Hún 許渾 above Lǐ Shāngyǐn 李商隱 is not balanced criticism.

Nonetheless, at this late-Southern-Sòng moment when the dào of poetry was in decline, he alone was able to set himself against the prevailing fashion. He writes: “The Sìlíng are the people who set out to revive Táng poetry. Among them the one who really achieved skill is Zhào Zǐzhī 趙子芝 (i.e. Zhào Shīxiù 趙師秀). Yet the discerning eye still finds them unfulfilled — because their ambition was set too low: they stopped at Yáo Hé 姚合 and Jiǎ Dǎo 賈島. Students who really penetrate that tradition, opening it out and broadening it, even then risk losing themselves; while the trivially-sharp, the shallow-and-easy, all one note from one mouth — calling this ‘the Sìlíng manner’, deep-rooted and unbreakable, its propagation diffuse, daily failing further and never to be revived — the imitator only piles greater ruin upon them.” He says further: “Today’s would-be poets are either ‘Sìlíng’ or ‘Late-Táng’. But literature rises and falls with its age; what age, exactly, is ‘Late-Táng’?” His insight stands above the Jiānghú 江湖 poets generally — that is why, in working back from the surface to the source, he is able to recover something of the old methods of the Hàn, Wèi, Six Dynasties, and Táng, and contributes much to the study of poetry.

Abstract

The Duìchuáng yè yǔ belongs to the great Southern Sòng debate on poetic models that began with Yán Yǔ’s 嚴羽 Cānglàng shī huà KR4i0035 (early thirteenth century) and continued through the rest of the dynasty. Where Yán’s intervention was theoretical (a miàowù 妙悟 / Chán-poetic vocabulary; the canonical claim that ShèngTáng 盛唐 must be the model), Fàn’s is critical-historical: a poem-by-poem demolition of the Sìlíng and WǎnTáng tastes that had displaced Yán’s recommendations during the Lǐzōng and Dùzōng reigns. The book is in five juǎn, arranged neither chronologically nor by author but as a discursive sequence of paired observations — short on each poem or on each technical point, often coming back to the same author from different angles. Several of Fàn’s positions had a long afterlife. (i) His vindication of Dù Fǔ’s àotǐ 拗體 (wrenched-tone regulated verse) as a covertly regular form — what Qīng critics would later systematise as dānào / shuāngào / jùzhōng ào jiù 句中拗救 — established the basic Sòng-loyalist reading of Dù. (ii) His re-elevation of Xǔ Hún above Lǐ Shāngyǐn anticipates the Míng QiánHòu Qī zǐ 前後七子 distaste for Lǐ Shāngyǐn’s “obscurity” and the consequent Xǔ Hún cult of the sixteenth century. (iii) Above all, his attack on the Sìlíng / WǎnTáng fashions reads as the principal contemporary critical resistance to the dominant taste of the late Southern Sòng.

Fàn’s lifedates are not fixed. CBDB id 30193 gives a flourit date of 1265 and no birth/death years. The 1266 impeachment of Jiǎ Sìdào, his banishment to Hǎinán, and his recommendation under the early Yuán (alongside Zhào Mèngfǔ, which Zhào accepted) anchor his career to ca. 1240–1290. The book itself was completed in the Jǐngdìng era (1260–1264), per the Sìkù preface and internal references — the bracket adopted here.

The Sìkù edition derives from a manuscript held by Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊 (Tàilǐsìqīng 大理寺卿), and is the basis of all subsequent editions. The work has been issued in the Lìdài shīhuà xù biān 歷代詩話續編 (Dīng Fúbǎo 丁福保, 1916), in Sòng shīhuà quán biān 宋詩話全編 (Wú Wénzhì 吳文治, Jiāngsū gǔjí, 1998), and in the standard Sòng shīhuà jí yì 宋詩話輯佚 corpus.

Translations and research

  • Guō Shào-yú 郭紹虞, Sòng shī-huà kǎo 宋詩話考 (Zhōnghuá, 1979), entry on Duì-chuáng yè yǔ.
  • Zhōu Yù-mín 周裕民 (also writing as Zhōu Yù-kǎi 周裕鍇), Sòng-dài shī-xué tōng lùn 宋代詩學通論 (Bā-Shǔ shū-shè, 1997) — extensive treatment of Fàn Xī-wén as the principal late-Sòng critic of the Sì-líng and Wǎn-Táng taste.
  • Cài Zhèn-chǔ 蔡鎮楚, Zhōng-guó shī-huà shǐ 中國詩話史 (Húnán wén-yì, 1988; rev. 2001).
  • Stuart Sargent, “Fan Hsi-wen”, in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Indiana UP, 1986).
  • Modern punctuated edition in Dīng Fú-bǎo, ed., Lì-dài shī-huà xù biān 歷代詩話續編 (Zhōnghuá, 1983 reprint), vol. 2.

Other points of interest

The book’s most famous individual claim — Xǔ Hún above Lǐ Shāngyǐn — became a touchstone of MíngQīng critical disagreement. Wáng Shìzhēn 王士禎 (the Qīng “Yúyáng” 漁洋) approved; the Sìkù editors (Jì Yún 紀昀 and colleagues) disagreed and judged Fàn unfair. The dispute reflects a broader question about whether the Sòng critical tradition was finally entitled to prefer the smooth-line “qīngyǎ” 清雅 manner of Xǔ Hún over the dense allusive surface of Lǐ Shāngyǐn — which in turn determined what kind of late-Táng poetry SòngYuánMíng critics could place on a pedestal.

Graph View

Backlinks