T

THE SHIH KING

(INTRODUCTION)

HE character of the Shih King, or Classic of Poetry, has been explained in the general introduction to this volume. It contains five parts. The first is made up of fifteen small books of songs collected from fifteen ancient Chinese States. The second contains eight books of ritual songs for minor festivals. The third has three books of songs for the greater festivals; and the fourth, five books of hymns and eulogies. The last of all these books is chronologically the first. It contains some strange old songs of the Shang Dynasty, glorifying the hero Thang, of whom the early books of the Shu King have already told us. We have here, then, some verse which dates back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century в.с. The reader may profitably begin the quaint collection of the Shih by delving first into this last, but oldest, book of Shang.

The other poems of the Shih are of later date and touch many themes. Their meaning is not always clear even to the most learned of Chinese commentators. The authors and occasions of the ancient songs have been long forgotten, and tradition has usually assigned to each piece some kingly author, some noted State occasion, and some mystic meaning. These rather pompous explanations are at times whimsically inconsistent with the lines themselves.

There is, however, a yet subtler difficulty in understanding the poems. The Chinese language, even in prose, can not be literally expressed in English. It has no such grammatical structure as our sentences. And when we come to Chinese poetry, each character stands as the symbol of a separate idea. What relation these ideas bear to one another is left chiefly to the reader's imagination. Hence two Chinamen reading the same poem will draw from it quite different meanings, and each reader may be convinced that he alone has been in sympathy with the poet, has caught his underlying reason for grouping this particular series of ideas or word-pictures in this particular succession. The celebrated sage Mencius, indeed, explained that only in such fashion could the Five Classics be in the least understood. He said, "We must try with our thoughts to meet the scope of a sentence; and thus we can grasp its larger meaning."

When to this difficulty of understanding a Chinese rhapsody we add the further problem of putting English words of connection and grammatical syntax to these inchoate ideas, we can realize why no two translations of a Chinese poem and especially of an antique poem - are ever alike. To illustrate the width of this inevitable divergence we give here four different translations of the poem commonly set first in the Shih. Without this preliminary warning a reader might easily accept them as four separate poems. Yet each of the translators offers his work in good faith as conveying the intent and spirit of the original. Moreover, each has understood the original fully; his difficulty lies in reconveying that meaning to English readers by English words.

The first translation has been culled from a contemporary scholarly journal of China. The writer is influenced mainly by the mechanical form of Chinese poetry. He seeks to echo that. Each line of the original poem, as indeed of most Chinese poems, consists of four symbols. So that the usual four-line stanza suggests a four-square fortress, angular and bristling like a thorn-hedge, the antithesis of everything melodious. Its four times four symbols offer sixteen ideas very brief, much repeated, loosely related. This brief and angular spirit is what our first translator echoes.

Next we give Mr. Allen's graceful and vigorous versification of the poem. His idea is that, to the old Chinese, the little song offered something pleasing. It must have seemed to them simple and natural. Therefore to create the same impression on us, he also must have simple and natural lines, holding the spirit, not the mechanics, of the original.

Next we give Professor Legge's attempt at what is called a "literal" translation. That is to say, he takes the four Chinese symbols of each line and makes of them an English line containing the same four ideas. These he connects in sense, but only so far as our grammatical language makes necessary. They are left almost as independent as in the original; though the translator has ventured so far as to assign the various actions to the various actors, an essential point which the Chinese verse left to the judgment of the reader.

Finally we give Professor Legge's more elaborate rendering of the poem in the smooth English verse. In this he endeavored to give full expression to what he regarded as the true meaning of the poem. The Chinese commentators have, of course, supplied this little song, as they have all the others of the Shih, with a complete explanation, in fact with several differing explanations. Professor Legge adopts the most authoritative of these, and so offers us the poem as he thinks it must present itself to a devout modern Chinaman.

To wrestle thus with all the details of the three hundred and more poems of the entire Shih would require volumes. So that, after this first book of primitive songs from Chau, we give only the most striking and characteristic poems. These are, first, some typical local songs from other regions beside Chau, from the rude "far west" of China, and from Thang, the home of the earliest civilization and half mythical kings. Then follow a number of the songs of the lesser and greater festivals or ceremonies, and some of the most impressive pieces from the book of Hymns, including a wellknown "national anthem." The whole closes with the ancient and impressive Odes of Shang.