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The songs or poems in this book are among the earliest literary works to have been written down anywhere in the world. They offer a rare window into the hearts of individuals in a distant country – China – almost three thousand years ago.
Because Old Chinese was an unusually simple language, the window is unusually transparent. The book translates the poems into straightforward English prose, and on facing pages it uses our alphabet to show them as they sounded in Old Chinese. Anyone who cares to read the poems aloud can hear the rhymes and rhythms heard by the original poets; it is easy to look up the words of the short lines in the glossary provided and see how the lines mean what the English says they mean. This is one of the few cases – perhaps the only case – where we can readily understand men and women speaking to us, in their own voices, across millennia.
The book contains 58 of the pieces found in a Chinese anthology whose title is commonly translated as The Book of Odes. The pieces chosen are linked by the theme of love.
The Book of Odes has been famous throughout Chinese history. But language changes down the ages have muffled its sound-music, destroying rhymes and eliminating onomatopoeia. And commentators interpreting the anthology in terms of the far more sophisticated culture of later Chinese history have sometimes obscured rather than clarified the original meaning. This book cuts away those complexities for Western readers. It displays the songs as their first hearers heard them and understood them.
(The reconstructed pronunciation is that of William Baxter’s Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, 1992, though with some modifications to the letter/sound correspondences in order to avoid the use of special phonetic symbols.)
The physical circumstances of the poets’ lives were utterly different from ours: the book’s Introduction sets the poems in their physical and historical background. The various aspects of love, on the other hand, are universal.
Unusually for such ancient literature, more than half of
these poems are written from the woman’s standpoint.
As a sample, though, here is one by a man:
|
|
The Red Pipe |
|---|---|
| Dzenk nrah gu tho, | That demure girl, how sweet she is; |
| zhuh ngáyh a deng ngo. | she was going to wait for me by the corner of the town wall. |
| Uts nu pu kéns, | I love her but I don’t see her, |
|
sóu lhouh dre-dro. |
I scratch my head and pace back and forth. |
| Dzenk nrah gu bront, | That demure girl, how beautiful she is; |
| lu ngáyh lóung kónt. | she gave me a red pipe. |
| Lóung kónt wuh wuyh, | Red pipe, you are really bright, |
|
lot lak na mruyh. |
and I delight in your loveliness. |
| Dzus muk kwuy lúy, | You have come to me like a tendril from the field, |
| whín mruyh tsah luks. | and you are really lovely and unusual; |
| Puyh na tu ways mruyh, | but it isn’t because you are lovely – |
| mruyh nin tu lu. | it is because a lovely girl gave you to me. |
(The “pipe” may have been a flute; no one knows for sure.)
Some critical comment:
- … does bring something new to the reading of these poems … To the extent that the reader will gain a better feel for the poems through these reconstructions, I think it is a fine contribution.
- — Edward Shaughnessy (University of Chicago), in Modern Philology
(For some issues of wider social relevance raised by Shaughnessy’s review, see my discussion on another page.)
vi + 176 pp.
Published by Shaun Tyas, 2006. Copies can be ordered direct from the publisher (e-mail pwatkins@pwatkinspublishing.fsnet.co.uk) or via the relevant Amazon.co.uk page.
ISBN 1 900289 75 X
last changed 15 Oct 2012