Early Tang Poetry -- The Series by Stephen Owen

Author: Yu Wenmo
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-12-01
Features: Preface in English to the trilingual edition of Early Tang Poetry and High Tang Poetry. 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 Jie's five-volume collection of poems was not published until 1987, ten years after the publication of Early Tang Poetry; many annotated collections of poems had not yet been published, and we had not yet achieved 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 it very easy to search for words, bringing great convenience to research work, but twenty-five years ago, all of this was unimaginable. At that time, we lacked the research tools we have today and had to rely on the academic achievements of the Qing and Republican periods. Most importantly, in the past twenty-five years, Chinese academia has made great progress, 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 utilized and drew upon, much has changed. However, even after many years, I believe that some of the fundamental arguments in the books and the perspective on literary history still hold some validity. Literary history is not the history of "great masters." Literary history must include great masters, but its most important role lies in understanding literary practices in flux, using contemporary literary practices as the context for understanding the masters. 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 on literary associations and chronologies, can be combined with literary history writing and theoretical research, thereby gaining new significance. Literary history attempts to connect specific details with an understanding of the whole, but the complexity of the whole often reveals the inadequacy of simple generalizations. 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 for translating these two books: If Tsinghua University Press believes that these works are still worth republishing in China today after more than two decades, then half of the credit belongs to Professor Jia.
August 2004
The author claims this book is a "trial exploration of the history of Chinese literature," but it is more like a selected collection of translated poems. The book is divided into five parts and twenty-five chapters, with each chapter ranging from three to thirty pages. Part I discusses the Court Poetry and its opposition, Part II analyzes the Four Masters of Early Tang, Part III focuses on Chen Zi'ang, Part IV introduces the court poets of Wu Zetian and Emperor Zhongzong's reign, and Part V covers Zhang Yue and the transition to High Tang.