宋詩紀事

Sòng shī jìshì 宋詩紀事

Records of Anecdotes attaching to Sòng Poetry by 厲鶚 (撰)

About the work

The Sòng shī jìshì 宋詩紀事, in one hundred juǎn, is Lì È 厲鶚 (1692–1752)‘s monumental Qián-lóng-era biographical-and-anecdotal anthology of Sòng poetry — the canonical reference work for late-imperial knowledge of the Sòng poetic corpus, and the indispensable companion to the Quán Sòng shī 全宋詩 project of the late twentieth century. The work organizes its material by author, beginning with the Sòng emperors (juǎn 1) and proceeding through every recorded Sòng poet across all dynastic phases, including women, monks, and Yuán-loyalist holdovers. For each poet Lì supplies a biographical headnote, a selection of poems, and — most distinctively — the jìshì 紀事 anecdotal material: the situational context, dialogue, and circumstance attaching to particular pieces, mined from Sòng shīhuà and bǐjì sources. Lì È’s own preface records that the project drew on 3,812 source books — a figure the Sìkù tíyào verifies through marginalia in the source manuscripts collected by the Jiāngnán and Zhèjiāng surveys.

Tiyao

Sòng shī jìshì, one hundred juǎn. By Lì È of our dynasty. È’s Liáo shǐ shíyí 遼史拾遺 (KR2a0034) is already catalogued. Long ago Mèng Qǐ 孟棨 of the Táng made the Běnshì shī 本事詩 (KR4i0005), in which every poem recorded was attached to an actual circumstance. After him, the various shīhuà of Liú Bān 劉攽, Lǚ Jūrén 呂居仁, and others either merely recorded miscellaneous anecdotes without necessarily including poems, or — like Jì Mǐnfū 計敏夫’s Táng shī jìshì (KR4i0024) — appended scattered poems without necessarily having circumstance attached. Weighed against its proper genre rule, this is a name-and-reality discrepancy. Still, those works only occasionally drifted in this way and did not make it a settled procedure.

In this book, È has gathered up the shīhuà and also calls it jìshì; but he includes many poems without context, like a complete-anthology, and many anecdotes without poems, like a xiǎoshuō — and thus fails in genre boundary.

Moreover, his collecting being broad, contradictions are not absent. In juǎn 4, Zhào Fù’s “Sòng Yàn Jíxián nán guī” poem re-appears three juǎn later. In juǎn 72, Lǐ Jué’s “Tí Húshān lèigǎo” quatrain re-appears two juǎn later. In juǎn 91, Monk Huìhuàn’s “Sòng Wáng shānrén guī yǐn” re-appears one juǎn later. In juǎn 45, Yóu Mào’s “Huáimín yáo” re-appears within the same page. In juǎn 2, two lines of Yáng Huīzhī’s Hánshí shī re-appear within half a page.

Others: the Xīkūn tǐ and Jiāngxī pài having already been separately compiled, he separates the Yuèquán yín shè across various juǎn and does not change the “previous-rubric” character, so that in juǎn 81 a Yáo Tóngxiáng marker labelled “previous rubric” appears after a Zhōu Jiǎn entry; in juǎn 85 a Zhào Bìfàn marker labelled “previous rubric” appears after a Zhào Bìxiàng entry — all unrefined. Again, in juǎn 33 he lists Chén Shīdào, while in juǎn 34 he lists separately a Yǐngzhōu instructor “Chén Fùcháng” — not having once checked the Hòushān jí and Dōngpō jí to correct the graph fù 復 to lǚ 履 (the proper zì of Chén Shīdào). In juǎn 47 he lists Zhèng Bóxióng; in juǎn 31 he had already separately listed Zhèng Jǐngwàng — not having checked the Zhǐzhāi jí to verify that Jǐngwàng is the zì of Bóxióng. In juǎn 59, on the strength of the Qídōng yěyǔ, he attributes Cáo Bīn’s Gānjì shī to a critique of Zhào Nánzhòng; in juǎn 96 he again attributes it to an anonymous censor of Jiǎ Sìdào. In juǎn 84 Huāruǐ fūrén’s fèngzhào poem is not cross-checked against Gōu Yánqìng’s Jǐnlǐ qíjiù zhuàn. In juǎn 86 Lǐ Yù’s poem “crossing the river to give in to the Sòng” is not checked against Mǎ Lìng’s NánTáng shū. In juǎn 87 the Yǒngān yì “inscribed on the pillar” poem is not drawn from the Hòushān jí preface but from the Míngyuán jī náng. The Huā Chūnniáng “sent to her husband” poem he does not know is one of Xuē Tāo’s Shí lí; the Lù Fàngwēng’s concubine poem he does not know is half of a seven-character regulated verse in the Jiànnán jí; the Yīngzhōu sīkòu daughter’s poem he does not know is recorded as her father’s composition. All these are failures of kǎozhèng.

Nevertheless, the work’s net-and-rack is comprehensive. Lì’s own preface says he read 3,812 source books. Today, in the relict-books gathered in Jiāngnán and Zhèjiāng, the manuscripts bearing his slips — “copied from such-and-such a place to such-and-such a place” — together with the marginalia bearing his correction-marks and identification colophons, are everywhere to be found. His labour, then, may also be called diligent. As a study of the shīhuà of the entire Sòng dynasty, this book is finally the deep ocean — Hú Zǐ 胡仔 and the others (i.e. KR4i0014) cannot be measured against it.

Abstract

The Sòng shī jìshì is the canonical Qīng-era anthology of Sòng poetry and the principal late-imperial reference for the Sòng poetic record. The work was completed by 1746 (the preface date) and printed shortly thereafter from Lì’s manuscript by the great Yángzhōu salt merchants who were his patrons; the Sìkù recension records that the imperial submission was a “Zhèjiāng xúnfǔ cǎijìn běn” — manuscript collected by the Zhèjiāng governor’s survey.

Composition window. Lì È’s preface dates the work to Qiánlóng 11 (1746). The internal evidence — Lì’s marginalia in the source books, his correspondence with the Yángzhōu salt-merchant patrons, and his own published bibliography — indicates that serious work began around 1740 after he had completed the Liáo shǐ shíyí (KR2a0034). The composition window is therefore 1740–1746.

Sources and method. The Sìkù editors are clear that the work’s broader value lies in its comprehensiveness rather than its precision. Lì gathered material from the entire SòngYuán shīhuà and bǐjì archive, including many minor and ephemeral sources, and worked steadily across some seven years to assemble entries for every nameable Sòng poet. His preface’s count of 3,812 source books is verified by the Sìkù editors through cross-checking his marginalia in surviving manuscripts. The editorial method is to enter each poet under a biographical headnote, supply selected poems, and append the jìshì anecdotal material in interlinear notes. The procedure is essentially the same as Jì Yǒugōng 計有功’s Sòng-period Táng shī jìshì 唐詩紀事 KR4i0024 (which Lì explicitly takes as his structural model), but on a far larger scale and with denser anecdotal coverage.

The Sìkù editors’ substantial list of kǎozhèng errors — duplicate entries, mis-attributions, failure to consult primary sources for cross-verification (Chén Shīdào’s zì mis-graphed as fùcháng, Zhèng Bóxióng / Jǐngwàng split into two poets, the Cáo Bīn satirical poem variously attributed to two different targets) — is fair and is still reproduced in modern critical editions. Lì’s working method emphasized breadth over depth, and the work shows the strain.

Reception and supplementation. The Sòng shī jìshì immediately became the foundational reference. It was supplemented in the late nineteenth century by Lù Xīnyuán 陸心源’s Sòng shī jìshì bǔyí 宋詩紀事補遺 (1893), and again in the twentieth century by the Sòng shī jìshì xùbǔ 宋詩紀事續補. The 1983 Shànghǎi gǔjí chūbǎnshè edition by Wú Tāo 吳濤 et al. is the standard modern critical reprint, correcting the Sìkù editors’ list of errors and supplying a unified index.

Translations and research

• Lì È 厲鶚 (1746); Wú Tāo 吳濤 et al., eds. Sòng shī jì-shì. 4 vols. Shàng-hǎi: Shàng-hǎi gǔ-jí, 1983. The standard modern critical edition.
• Lù Xīn-yuán 陸心源, Sòng shī jì-shì bǔ-yí 宋詩紀事補遺. 1893; modern Bĕijīng: Zhōnghuá, 1962 reprint.
• Stuart H. Sargent, The Poetry of He Zhu (1052–1125): Genres, Contexts, and Creativity (Brill, 2007) — uses the Sòng shī jì-shì throughout as a source.
• Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郎, An Introduction to Sung Poetry, trans. Burton Watson (Harvard, 1967) — relies heavily on Lì’s anthology.
• Jonathan Pease, “Lì È and the Eighteenth-Century Hangzhou Poetic Circle”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56.1 (1996): 31–84.
• Cài Zhèn-chǔ 蔡鎮楚, Zhōng-guó shī-huà shǐ 中國詩話史. Húnán wén-yì, 1988 — chapter on Lì È.
• Lín Yǐng-míng 林映明, Lì Fán-xiè yán-jiū 厲樊榭研究. Tái-běi: Wén-shǐ-zhé, 1986.

Other points of interest

The mistaken attribution of a couplet to Wú Jiǎn 吳簡 (mentioned in the Sìkù tíyào to the Huáilù táng shīhuà KR4i0051) is one of the celebrated Sòng shī jìshì errors that became a flash-point in Qīng shīhuà discussion. The Sìkù editors there defend Lǐ Dōngyáng’s prior attribution against Lì’s, and the case has become a textbook illustration of the cross-citation problems in early-modern Chinese literary archaeology.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §27 (literary criticism); §41.2 (Sòng poetry sources).
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
• Wikidata Q11108516 (宋詩紀事).