The Odes.—From the songs current in his day Confucius (551-479 B.C.) chose about three hundred which he regarded as suitable texts for his ethical and social teaching. Many of them are eulogies of good rulers or criticisms of bad ones. Out of the three hundred and five still extant only about thirty are likely to interest the modern reader. Of these half deal with war and half with love. Many translations exist, the best being those of Legge in English and of Couvreur in French. There is still room for an English translation displaying more sensitivity to word-rhythm than that of Legge. It should not, I think, include more than fifty poems. But the Odes are essentially lyric poetry, and their beauty lies in effects which cannot be reproduced in English. For that reason I have excluded them from this book; nor shall I discuss them further here, for full information will be found in the works of Legge or Couvreur.
Elegies of the Land of Ch’u.—We come next to Ch’ü Yüan (third century B.C.) whose famous poem “Li Sao,” or “Falling into Trouble,” has also been translated by Legge. It deals, under a love-allegory, with the relation between the writer and his king. In this poem, sex and politics are curiously interwoven, as we need not doubt they were in Chü Yüan’s own mind. He affords a striking example of the way in which abnormal mentality imposes itself. We find his followers unsuccessfully attempting to use the same imagery and rhapsodical verbiage, not realizing that these were, as De Goncourt would say, the product of their master’s propre névrosité.
“The Battle,” his one thoroughly intelligible poem, has hitherto been only very imperfectly translated. A literal version will be found on p. [23].
His nephew Sung Yü was no servile imitator. In addition to “elegies” in the style of the Li Sao, he was the author of many “Fu” or descriptive prose-poems, unrhymed but more or less metrical.
The Han Dynasty.—Most of the Han poems in this book were intended to be sung. Many of them are from the official song-book of the dynasty and are known as Yo Fu or Music Bureau poems, as distinct from shih, which were recited. Ch’in Chia’s poem and his wife’s reply (p. [54]) are both shih; but all the rest might, I think, be counted as songs.
The Han dynasty is rich in Fu (descriptions), but none of them could be adequately translated. They are written in an elaborate and florid style which recalls Apuleius or Lyly.
The Chin Dynasty.
(1) Popular Songs (Songs of Wu). The popular songs referred to the Wu (Soochow) district and attributed to the fourth century may many of them have been current at a much earlier date. They are slight in content and deal with only one topic. They may, in fact, be called “Love-epigrams.” They find a close parallel in the coplas of Spain, cf.:
El candil se esta apagando,
La alcuza no tiene aceite—
No te digo que te vayas, ...
No te digo que te quedes.
The brazier is going out,
The lamp has no more oil—
I do not tell you to go, ...
I do not tell you to stay.