Duàncháng cí 斷腸詞
Heart-Broken Lyrics by 朱淑眞 (撰)
About the work
The Duàncháng cí 斷腸詞 (“Lyrics of the Broken Heart”) is the surviving cí collection of the female poet Zhū Shūzhēn 朱淑眞 (style Yōuqī jūshì 幽棲居士), preserved in one juǎn of 27 pieces — almost certainly a fragment of an originally larger corpus. Zhū Shūzhēn, with Lǐ Qīngzhào 李清照, is one of the two great women cí-poets of the Sòng. The title is taken from her main work, the Duàncháng shījí 斷腸詩集 (ten juǎn, recorded by Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí but only fragmentarily preserved), whose framing biography (the jìlüè 紀畧 by Wèi Zhònggōng 魏仲恭 of Wǎnlíng 宛陵) describes her as a woman whose marriage was unhappy and whose verse is the cry of that grief. The textual transmission of the Duàncháng cí is famously vexed by mis-attributed pieces (above all the famous Shēngzhāzǐ attributed to her in late-Míng anthologies but actually by Ōuyáng Xiū 歐陽修), and the Sìkù editors devote much of their tíyào to setting that record straight.
Tiyao
(The Sìkù tíyào for the Duàncháng cí is appended to the Shípíng cí tíyào in the _000.txt for KR4j0057; we translate it here.)
Duàncháng cí, one juǎn, by Zhū Shūzhēn of the Sòng. Shūzhēn was a woman of Hǎiníng, self-styled Yōuqī jūshì. The collection is prefaced by a jìlüè 紀畧 [biographical note] which calls her the niece of Zhū Wéngōng (Zhū Xī). But Zhū Xī’s people were of Xīnān (Huīzhōu) and resided in Mǐn (Fújiàn); the genealogy and chronological tables record no separate brother registered at Hǎiníng. We suspect this is a later puff trading on the great name; it is by no means certain. The same jìlüè further says: “her match was not according to her kind; she could not follow her true wishes; she composed the Duàncháng jí in ten juǎn to assuage herself” — yet her cí are only attested in one juǎn by Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí, and the world has long lacked any transmitted text. The present volume was cut by Máo Jìn at Jígǔ gé; his colophon says that he had seen only two pieces of her cí in the Cǎotáng anthology and one more in the Shídàqǔ, scattered as morning stars; then he came upon this one juǎn, in a Hóngwǔ-era manuscript, and printed it alongside the Shùyù cí 漱玉詞 of Lǐ Qīngzhào. Yet her cí here number only 27 pieces — this too cannot be the original text. Yáng Shèn’s Shēngān cípǐn prints under her name the Shēngzhāzǐ 生查子 piece containing the line Yuèshàng liǔshāo tóu, rén yuē huánghūn hòu 月上柳梢頭，人約黄昏後 (“The moon climbs above the willow’s tip, a tryst at dusk”), which Máo Jìn’s colophon calls “a flaw on white jade.” But this very cí is preserved at juǎn 131 of Ōuyáng Xiū’s 歐陽修 Lúlíng jí — one does not know how it came to be slipped into Zhū Shūzhēn’s collection, falsely libeling her with the manners of SāngPú 桑濮 (i.e. lewd conduct). Yáng Shèn folded it into his Cípǐn without checking; Máo Jìn, in cutting the Liùshí jiā cí 六十一種, prints in his ŌuyángXiū volume the Liùyī cí without cross-noting it as also being in the Duàncháng cí — his own indexing principles thus shipwrecked — and in this volume neither investigates nor distinguishes, but cheerfully calls the piece a “flaw on white jade.” This is reckless in the extreme. We now cut out that one piece, and so spare the lady from a millennium’s posthumous libel. — Qiánlóng 46 / 1781, 12th month, Zǒngzuǎnguān 紀昀, 陸錫熊, 孫士毅, Zǒngjiàoguān 陸費墀.
Abstract
The Duàncháng cí survives only in the 27-piece Máo Jìn / Jígǔgé recension on which the WYG depends; the original count of 10 juǎn (per Chén Zhènsūn) is irretrievable. Two parts of the transmitted-text problem are conventionally distinguished. First, the historicity of Zhū Shūzhēn: the “niece-of-Zhū-Xī” claim cannot be substantiated, but on the strength of internal evidence and the framing jìlüè by Wèi Zhònggōng and the lost biography by Wáng Tángzuǒ 王唐佐 (preserved in fragments in the Wǔzhōu fāngzhì), Zhū Shūzhēn is a real person, of mid-twelfth-century Hǎiníng — though the conventional life-dates remain contested between the early window (c. 1095–c. 1131, taken by the Sìkù catalog meta and CBDB) and the later window (c. 1135–c. 1180, favored by most modern scholarship; see Tāng Guīzhāng 唐圭璋 and Yè Jiāyíng 葉嘉瑩). Second, the attribution of individual pieces: the Shēngzhāzǐ “Yuèshàng liǔshāo tóu” — historically the most-quoted single piece in her name and a major locus classicus of polite Sòng eroticism — is by Ōuyáng Xiū, attested in his own collected works, and the Sìkù editors expressly excise it from her name. The corpus that remains is conventionally read as the Sòng’s principal cí-document of female interiority outside Lǐ Qīngzhào, with major yǒngwù / yǒngjié pieces on plum and on autumn standing as the masterpieces.
Translations and research
- Anthony C. Yu and Kang-i Sun Chang, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford, 1999) — substantial selections of Zhū Shū-zhēn in translation.
- Wilt L. Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China (Harvard, 2004) — context and translations.
- Táng Guī-zhāng 唐圭璋, Quán Sòng cí 全宋詞 (Zhōnghuá shū-jú, 1965; rev. 1999) — collated text of the Duàn-cháng cí.
- Yè Jiā-yíng 葉嘉瑩, Jiā-líng tán cí — close readings of major Zhū Shū-zhēn pieces.
Other points of interest
The Shēngzhāzǐ “Yuèshàng liǔshāo tóu” — one of the most-quoted single distichs in all of Chinese literature — has been textually orphaned and re-fathered between Ōuyáng Xiū and Zhū Shūzhēn for over half a millennium; the Sìkù’s decision to expel the piece (and Máo Jìn’s “white-jade flaw” condemnation of the morality the line implies) is one of the most-cited adjudications of textual attribution in the Sìkù.