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漱玉詞

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Text ID
KR4j0027
Date
1101–1140
Dynasty
宋

Shùyù cí 漱玉詞

Lyrics of Rinsed-Jade by 李清照 (撰)

About the work

The Shùyù cí 漱玉詞 is the slim Sìkù cí collection (seventeen cí in the present cutting) of Lǐ Qīngzhào 李清照 (1084–ca. 1155; hào Yìān jūshì 易安居士) — supreme woman cí-writer of Chinese literature, daughter of the Lǐbù láng Lǐ Géfēi 李格非, wife of the antiquarian-archeologist Zhào Míngchéng 趙明誠 (governor of Húzhōu), and survivor of the SòngJīn rupture in which her husband died and the family’s vast antiquities-and-books collection was largely destroyed. The transmitted seventeen cí — appended in the Máo Jìn 毛晉 cutting with the Jīnshí lù hòu xù 金石錄後序 (her foundational personal essay, recounting the destruction of the antiquities collection) — represent only a fragment of the 1-, 3-, or 5-juǎn corpora that the Sòng catalogs record. The Tíyào’s judgment — that Lǐ “as a single woman attained a cí-register raising her above Zhōu 周邦彥 and Liǔ 柳永” and that her Yǒngyù lè · Yuánxiāo, Niàn nú jiāo · Chūn cí, and Shēngshēng màn mark her out as “of the rare-breath kind” (jiànqì 間氣) — is the most exalted single judgment in the Sìkù tíyào of the Cí qū lèi.

Tiyao

Shùyù cí, one juǎn, by Lǐ Qīngzhào of the Sòng. Qīngzhào, hào Yìān jūshì, a woman of Jǐnán, daughter of the Lǐbù láng and Tídiǎn Jīngdōng xíngyù Lǐ Géfēi, wife of the Prefect of Húzhōu Zhào Míngchéng. Qīngzhào worked in shī and wén, but it was for the cí that she became renowned. Hú Zǐ’s Tiáoxī yúyǐn cónghuà records that she remarried Zhāng Rǔzhōu and the relationship soured before long; her petition to Qí Chǔhòu — “I unworthily took the sāngyú (mulberry-elm) twilight years to be matched to a market-broker of low material” — was passed around till everyone laughed. The petition is preserved in full in Zhào Yànwèi 趙彥衛’s Yúnlù mànchāo; Lǐ Xīnchuán 李心傳’s Jiànyán yǐlái xìnián yàolù records the post-husband lawsuit in particular detail. The present text was cut by Máo Jìn of Jígǔgé: at the end the Hòu shìyì (anecdotes and lost writings) are extensively recorded, but this Qí Chǔhòu petition is not included — clearly out of taboo. Chén Zhènsūn 陳振孫’s Shūlù jiětí records Shùyù cí in one juǎn with the note “alternative print in five juǎn”; Huáng Shēng 黃昇’s Huāān cí xuǎn records it in three juǎn — all now lost. This text gives only seventeen cí, appended with the Jīnshí lù xù 金石錄序 — clearly later-day editorial recovery; not the original. The Jīnshí lù hòu xù in this volume differs widely in detail from the cut-print version; appears to be taken out of Hóng Mài’s Róngzhāi wǔbǐ, also not the complete piece. Qīngzhào as a single woman attained a cí-register raising her above Zhōu and Liǔ. Zhāng Duānyì 張端義’s Guì’ěr jí extols her Yuánxiāo (Yǒng yù lè), her Qiū cí (Shēngshēng màn), saying that for the inner-chamber to have this brush-strength is to be “of the rare-breath kind” — no exaggeration. Although the pieces are few, one cannot help but treasure and preserve them: she is one great patriarch of the cí family. — Compiled, Qiánlóng 46 / 1781, 12th month.

Abstract

The transmitted Shùyù cí in the Máo Jìn cutting collects seventeen cí plus the Jīnshí lù hòu xù and an anecdotal apparatus drawing from Hóng Mài, Zhāng Duānyì, and others. Sòng catalogs register the work as 1, 3, or 5 juǎn; modern editions (Wáng Yántì 王延悌, Lǐ Qīngzhào jí jiàozhù 李清照集校注, Rénmín wénxué, 1979; Xú Pèijūn 徐培均, Lǐ Qīngzhào jí jiānzhù 李清照集箋註, Shànghǎi gǔjí, 2002) reconstruct around 50 cí from anthology sources, of which roughly 45 are securely Lǐ’s. Lǐ’s life is reconstructed from her Hòu xù, the Sòng shǐ and from CBDB: birth in Yuánfēng 7 / 1084 in Jǐnán; marriage to Zhào Míngchéng in Jiànzhōng / 1101; the long Qīngzhōu / Láizhōu / Zīzhōu antiquities period of 1101–1127; the 1127 flight south and Zhào’s death at Jiànkāng (1129); the long Yuèzhōu / Línān refugee period afterward; the alleged remarriage to Zhāng Rǔzhōu (the Tíyào’s “zhōukuài” anecdote is now widely disputed by modern scholars including Ronald Egan, The Burden of Female Talent, 2014, who argues the remarriage story is largely fabrication by zhèngtǒng moralists of the late Sòng); and her death ca. 1155 in Línān. Her signature cí — Yǒng yù lè · Luò rì róng jīn, Niàn nú jiāo · Xiāotiáo tíngyuàn, Shēngshēng màn · Xúnxún mìmì, Yú jiā ào · Jì mèng, Wǔlíng chūn · Fēng zhù chén xiāng, Línjiāng xiān · Tíngyuàn shēn shēn, Yī jiǎn méi · Hóngǒu xiāng cán, Zuì huā yīn · Bó wù nóng yún — together establish the canonical Yìāntǐ 易安體, the most distinctive single voice in Chinese cí.

Translations and research

  • Ronald C. Egan, The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China (Harvard, 2014) — the standard English-language critical study; argues against the historicity of the Zhāng Rǔ-zhōu remarriage.
  • Eugene Eoyang, The Complete Ci-poems of Li Qingzhao: A New English Translation (Friends of the Princeton University Library, 2006).
  • Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford, 1999) — includes substantial translations.
  • Wáng Yán-tì 王延悌, Lǐ Qīng-zhào jí jiào-zhù 李清照集校注 (Rén-mín wén-xué, 1979).
  • Xú Pèi-jūn 徐培均, Lǐ Qīng-zhào jí jiān-zhù 李清照集箋註 (Shàng-hǎi gǔ-jí, 2002).
  • Stephen Owen, “The Snares of Memory,” in Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Harvard, 1986) — sustained reading of the Jīn-shí lù hòu xù.

Other points of interest

The Jīnshí lù hòu xù appended to the Shùyù cí is one of the supreme single pieces of Chinese autobiographical prose: Lǐ’s narrative of the destruction, by Jīn troops and by ordinary thieves, of the manuscript-and-bronze collection she and Zhào Míngchéng had assembled over twenty years, is the foundational document of the post-1127 “loss-of-the-world” literature. The Sìkù compilers’ taboo on the Qí Chǔhòu petition (the most extant first-person account of the disputed remarriage to Zhāng Rǔzhōu) reflects the late-imperial moralizing reception of Lǐ; modern scholarship has largely overturned that erasure.

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