White Juyi Poetry Collection Annotations (Complete 6 Volumes)

Author: Xie Siwei
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2006-07-01
Features: The great Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi has over 2,800 extant poems. He personally compiled his collected works during his lifetime (originally titled Bai Shi Changqing Ji, later renamed Bai Shi Wenji), which were successively edited into fifty-volume, sixty-volume, sixty-seven-volume, seventy-volume, and the final seventy-five-volume editions. He copied five sets of them, three of which were sent to temples, and two were passed on to his family. Bai Juyi's prolific poetic output and the completeness of his preserved works rank him first among Tang Dynasty poets. This is due to his great appreciation for his own creations, as he personally edited and organized them (while the collected works of most other Tang Dynasty poets were compiled by later Song Dynasty scholars, and it is largely unknown whether they were ever personally compiled by the poets or what their original forms were). Of course, more importantly, his poems were widely cherished and beloved by readers both in his time and later.
Book Introduction: This book is a newly compiled edition of Bai Juyi's collected poems, which holds significant academic value. Its features are twofold:
1. Comprehensive
(1) This edition is a collated and annotated collection of all extant poems by Bai Juyi, including all works from Bai Shi Wenji as well as lost poems outside the collection.
(2) This edition is based on the (Ying Song Shaoxing edition) of Bai Shi Wenji, seventy-one volumes, and is collated with nearly twenty rare and excellent Chinese manuscripts (such as Dunhuang manuscripts, fragmented Song Dynasty manuscripts, Ma Yuantiao manuscripts, Zeng Daju manuscripts, etc.) and sixteen rare printed and handwritten manuscripts from Japan (such as the Kozuke Library edition, Daito-ji Temple edition, Shinfuku-ji Temple edition, and Fushimi Emperor's imitation edition, etc.). It also references related general collections such as Caitiao Ji and Wenyuan Yinghua, making it the most extensive and authoritative collation to date in terms of textual criticism.
2. New
(1) The collation and annotations of this book draw upon all representative collated and annotated editions published in China previously, as well as all representative relevant research achievements in Japan up to 2003, many of which are newly published research findings in recent years.
(2) This book compiles over a decade of research findings by the collator and annotator on Bai Juyi and his poetry, with many contents being newly discovered and leading in domestic and international studies. It provides great help for understanding Bai's poems and related literary and linguistic phenomena.