Early Tang poetry

Author: Yuwen Suo'an
Translator: Jia Jinhua
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-12-01
Features: The English versions of Early Tang Poetry and High Tang Poetry were published about a quarter of a century ago. At that time, the academic field of classical Chinese literature in China was very different from what it is now. We had the basic raw materials, although Wang Ji’s five-volume collected poems were not published until 1987, ten years after Early Tang Poetry came out; many annotated collections of poems had not yet appeared, and we also lacked the significant research by scholars like Fu Xuancong on the lives of authors and the chronology of their poems. Today, electronic literature makes word searches extremely easy, greatly facilitating research work, whereas twenty-five years ago, all of this was unimaginable. We lacked the research tools we have now and had to rely on the academic achievements of the Qing and Republican periods. Most importantly, in the past twenty-five years, Chinese scholarship has made great strides, and the field of Tang studies has become vibrant and inspiring.
Early Tang Poetry and High Tang Poetry have their limitations, errors, and shortcomings. If they could be rewritten, they would be very different. Whether personally or in terms of the academic research I have used and drawn upon, much has changed. However, even after many years, I believe that some of the basic arguments in the books and the perspective they take on literary history still hold some validity.
Literary history is not simply the history of the famous. It must include the famous, but its most important role lies in understanding literary practices in flux, using contemporary literary practices as the context for understanding the famous. We should not make sweeping generalizations about a century-long period but should examine shorter periods, groups of writers, and different regions. In this way, traditional academic research, such as studies of literary associations and chronologies, can be combined with literary history writing and theoretical research, gaining entirely new significance.
Literary history attempts to connect specific details with an understanding of the whole, but the complexity of the whole often makes simple generalizations inadequate. In the study of poetry, the sole purpose of academic work is to help us better understand specific poems. A good literary history always returns to the poems themselves, allowing us to clearly see the astonishing, beautiful, and bold creations of the poets.
Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Jia Jinhua, the translator of these two books: if Tsinghua University Press believes that these works are still worth republishing in China two and a half decades later, half of the credit belongs to Professor Jia.
August 2004