Sheng Tang Poetry -- Series of Works by Stephen Owen

Author: Yuwen Suo'an (USA) / Jia Jinhua
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-12-27
Features: If we set aside the myths of the Tang Dynasty, we would find that Li Bai and Du Fu were not typical representatives of that era. Later readers often cling to the images of Li Bai and Du Fu, viewing them not only as the peaks of poetry but also as two opposing exemplars of poetic personality. However, the contemporary poetic background allows us to see Li Bai and Du Fu in a very different light, a perspective that reveals the essence and degree of their originality.
The prefaces to Early Tang Poetry and High Tang Poetry in English were published about a quarter of a century ago. At that time, the academic field of classical Chinese literature in China was quite different from what it is today. We had the basic raw materials, although Wang Ji’s five-volume collection of poems was not published until 1987, ten years after Early Tang Poetry appeared. Many annotated collections of poetry were still unavailable, and we had not yet benefited from the significant research by scholars like Fu Xuancong on the lives of authors and the chronological arrangement of their poems. Today, electronic literature has made word searches extremely easy, greatly facilitating research work, whereas twenty-five years ago, all of this was unimaginable. At that time, 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 Dynasty studies has flourished, which is both gratifying 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 utilized and referenced, much has changed. However, even after many years, I believe that some of the fundamental 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. While literary history must include the famous, 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, thereby gaining new meaning.
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 today, more than two decades later, half of the credit goes to Professor Jia.
August 2004