![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Sun Zhu’s initial 1763 edition of Three Hundred Tang Poems had 310 poems.* Over the centuries, later editors added a few more to 300TP, with the result that most modern editions have 320.** Specifically, while Sun Zhu included some sequences of poems that were written as a set, sometimes he picked out one or two from a set, for whatever reason. All those later additions in modern editions were filling in missing poems of sets—see for ex #39-42, of which only #41 was in the initial edition. However, comma, editors did not fill in all broken sets, for whatever reasons.
This has gotten me curious—what were the standards for inclusion? Since I recently translated the two included poems (#36-37) of a four-poem set, I went ahead and did the omitted two as well, to see if I can figure out what’s up. Here’s the complete set, which are folk-song-style poems:
Border Songs: Four Poems, Wang Changling
( They’ve all become the yellow dust, now old, / Their white bones scattered in among the weeds. )
In conclusion … yeah, IDK. Was the political satire of #3 too pointed for the notoriously ruthless Qing times? That’s my best guess—but it’s not like the collection doesn’t have other Confucian critiques of venal or indifferent officials. Or maybe the disconnect of the last couplet was considered too jarring. But then what’s wrong with #4? I just don’t have enough knowledge of the cultural/political nuances to judge.
Oh, well. The poems were fun to puzzle through, anyway.
* Plumping out your round-number collection with a few extras is a long tradition in China, going at least as far back as the Classic of Poetry of the mid-6th century BCE, which has 305 poems and was initially called 300 Poems (before its association with Confucius made it considered a Classic).
** Interestingly, the version Witter Bynner used in Jade Mountain, the first complete translation into English, was (or was based on) the original 310 edition.
Index of Chinese translations
---L.
Subject quote from 1979, Smashing Pumpkins.
This has gotten me curious—what were the standards for inclusion? Since I recently translated the two included poems (#36-37) of a four-poem set, I went ahead and did the omitted two as well, to see if I can figure out what’s up. Here’s the complete set, which are folk-song-style poems:
Border Songs: Four Poems, Wang Changling
( They’ve all become the yellow dust, now old, / Their white bones scattered in among the weeds. )
In conclusion … yeah, IDK. Was the political satire of #3 too pointed for the notoriously ruthless Qing times? That’s my best guess—but it’s not like the collection doesn’t have other Confucian critiques of venal or indifferent officials. Or maybe the disconnect of the last couplet was considered too jarring. But then what’s wrong with #4? I just don’t have enough knowledge of the cultural/political nuances to judge.
Oh, well. The poems were fun to puzzle through, anyway.
* Plumping out your round-number collection with a few extras is a long tradition in China, going at least as far back as the Classic of Poetry of the mid-6th century BCE, which has 305 poems and was initially called 300 Poems (before its association with Confucius made it considered a Classic).
** Interestingly, the version Witter Bynner used in Jade Mountain, the first complete translation into English, was (or was based on) the original 310 edition.
Index of Chinese translations
---L.
Subject quote from 1979, Smashing Pumpkins.