聞分館君 Ask BunKanKun

珠玉詞

6 min read

Text ID
KR4j0001
Date
1004–1055
Dynasty
宋

Zhūyù cí 珠玉詞

Pearl-and-Jade Lyrics by 晏殊 (撰)

About the work

The Zhūyù cí 珠玉詞 is the personal cí collection of the great Northern-Sòng councillor and prosodist Yàn Shū 晏殊 (991–1055; zì Tóngshū 同叔, posthumous Yuánxiàn 元獻). One juǎn in the Sìkù edition, it is conventionally received as the foundational corpus of the Sòng xiǎolìng 小令 (“short tune”) tradition: gentle, restrained, refined erotic and seasonal lyrics in the Huājiān 花間 and Féng Yánsì 馮延巳 manner, but tightened to the elegant register that became the model of the early-Sòng cí. Its 130-odd surviving songs touch the canonical themes of parting, spring sorrow, banquet, and reflection on time; the most famous couplet — wú kě nài hé huā luò qù, sì céng xiāngshí yàn guī lái 無可奈何花落去，似曾相識燕歸來 (“there is nothing to be done as the flowers fall; here come the swallows, as if old acquaintances”) — survives both inside this collection (in a 浣溪沙 cí) and again in one of Yàn’s regulated heptasyllabic verses, a curious case of self-quotation discussed in the Tíyào.

Tiyao

Zhūyù cí, one juǎn, by Yàn Shū of the Sòng. Yàn has the Lèiyào 類要, separately catalogued. Mǎ Duānlín 馬端臨’s Jīngjí kǎo 經籍考 records that Yàn’s cí was issued as Zhūyù jí 珠玉集 in one juǎn; the present text was cut by Máo Jìn 毛晉, and matches Mǎ Duānlín’s record. The Míngchén lù 名臣録 also calls Yàn’s cí by the title Zhūyù jí and records that Zhāng Xiān 張先 (zì Zǐyě 子野) wrote its preface; the present volume lacks Xiān’s preface, which has been lost in the line of transmission. Yàn was by nature stern and severe (賦性剛峻), yet his cí are uniquely tender and lovely (婉麗): Liú Bān 劉攽’s Zhōngshān shīhuà 中山詩話 holds that Yuánxiàn was good at Féng Yánsì 馮延巳’s song-lyric manner, and that what he composed himself is no less than Yánsì’s. Zhào Yǔshí 趙與時’s Bīntuì lù 賓退錄 records that Yàn’s youngest son, Yàn Jǐdào, used to say that his father’s cí “does not write the language of women” (不作婦人語); but the present collection has no shortage of erotic and ornate lyrics, so this is Jǐdào defending his father’s name, not a sound critical statement. The two lines of the Chūnhèn 春恨 cí to the tune Huàn xī shā 浣溪沙 — wú kě nài hé huā luò qù, sì céng xiāngshí yàn guī lái — were originally the inner couplet of a seven-syllable regulated poem Yàn showed to Magistrate Zhāng of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices (張寺丞) and Editorial Assistant Wáng (王校勘); the Fùzhāi mànlù 復齋漫錄 records as much. Now they are filled into a cí: surely Yàn so loved his own coinage that he did not mind the repetition. So too in the collected works of Xǔ Hún 許渾 [Táng], the couplet yī zūn jiǔ jǐn qīng shān mù / qiān lǐ shū huí bì shù qiū 一罇酒盡青山暮，千里書回碧樹秋 appears twice, front and back; whereby we know the ancients did have such a practice. — Compiled, Qiánlóng 45 / 1780, 9th month, by Zǒngzuǎnguān 紀昀, 陸錫熊, 孫士毅, Zǒngjiàoguān 陸費墀.

Abstract

The Zhūyù cí corresponds to the 1-juǎn Zhūyù jí recorded by both the Sòng shǐ Yìwénzhì and Mǎ Duānlín’s Wénxiàn tōngkǎo Jīngjí kǎo. The transmitted text descends through the late-Míng Liùshí jiā cí 六十家詞 of Máo Jìn (Jígǔ gé 汲古閣), which the WYG edition reproduces with minor corrections. The original preface by Zhāng Xiān, an older friend whose own cí output is the parent of the slightly later but more elaborate màncí 慢詞 style, is lost. Modern textual work (notably the Quán Sòng cí 全宋詞 of Táng Guīzhāng 唐圭璋 唐圭璋, rev. 1965, 1999) reconstructs roughly 136 cí assigned to Yàn Shū, drawing additionally on song-lyric anthologies such as the Huācǎo cuìbiān KR4j0073 and the Yuèfǔ yǎcí KR4j0065. The corpus is famously stable in its tonal register but contested at the margins: a small number of pieces are doubled with poems by Féng Yánsì or with the cí of Yàn’s son Jǐdào (whose Xiǎoshān cí is catalogued at KR4j0010). The collection became the canonical entry-point to the Sòng xiǎolìng and was singled out as such by every major SòngYuánMíng cí-historian; the Sìkù editors’ acceptance of the Máo Jìn text into the imperial library marks its definitive status in late-imperial taste.

Translations and research

  • James J.Y. Liu, Major Lyricists of the Northern Sung (Princeton University Press, 1974) — chapter on Yàn Shū with extensive translations.
  • Táng Guī-zhāng 唐圭璋 et al., eds., Quán Sòng cí 全宋詞 (Zhōng-huá shū-jú, 1965; rev. 1999) — collated text of Yàn Shū’s surviving cí (vol. 1).
  • Xià Chéng-tāo 夏承燾 and Zhāng Zhāng 張璋, Jīn-Yuán Míng-Qīng cí xuǎn and related works — standard scholarly commentaries situate the Zhū-yù cí historically.
  • Daniel Bryant, Lyric Poets of the Southern T’ang: Feng Yen-ssu, 903–960, and Li Yü, 937–978 (UBC Press, 1982) — frames the Yàn Shū style as continuator of the Féng Yán-sì line.
  • Stuart Sargent, “Tz’u,” in Victor H. Mair, ed., The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (Columbia, 2001), 314–336 — survey including Yàn Shū.

Other points of interest

The traditional reading that paired the two great early-Sòng cí-masters — Yàn Shū the dignified councillor on one side, Liǔ Yǒng 柳永 the dissolute professional on the other — runs back at least to the SòngYuán shīhuà literature; the Zhūyù cí is invariably cited as the locus classicus of polite xiǎolìng. The famous “Wú kě nài hé” couplet of the Huàn xī shā is the most quoted single distich of Sòng cí.

Graph View

Backlinks