An interpolation in Zhong Hong's Shipin.

• Author: Rusk, Bruce

No part of Zhong Hong's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (469-518) Shipin [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Grading of Poets) has attracted more controversy than the entry on Tao Qian [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (365?-427). Since at least the Song dynasty, Zhong has been lambasted for placing Tao too low, merely in the middle rank and not the top where he supposedly belonged. His defenders have replied either by claiming that the received text is corrupt and that Tao originally appeared in the first rank or by rejecting the criticism as anachronistic and reflective only of later standards of taste. The first defense has proven unconvincing; despite some ambiguous evidence it seems certain that Tao was indeed in the middle rank. Both sides of the debate, indeed almost all commentators on Shipin, have shared an important assumption: that the entry represents the text as Zhong Hong wrote it. My purpose in this note is to question this assumption, in particular to claim that the final sentence of the entry is anomalous and, at least in its current form, unlikely to have been in the original text. A 1980 article by Li Wenchu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] raised the first objections to this line, though Li's critique was soon dismissed by Cao Xu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], editor of a now-standard edition of Shipin. (1) I will add further evidence to Li's and argue that the line, even if it is not an interpolation, at least raises interesting questions about the interpretation of Tao's entry and Shipin in general. The entry reads as follows:

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Tao Qian, Summoned Scholar of Song [His poems'] source is in Ying Qu (190-252), drawing also on the emotive power of Zuo Si (253?--307?). Their style is spare and almost never wordy. His thoughts are sincere and archaic and his verbal expressions congenial, so each perusal of his writings brings to mind his personal virtue. All the world exclaims upon his stolid straightforwardness, [but] could such lines as "in merry delight, buzzed on spring wine" and "at sundown, the sky is free of clouds," with their florid style and extravagant clarity, be the words of a mere farmer? He is the ancestor of recluse-poets, ancient and modern. (2) The notice is among the longer ones in Shipin, since in addition to recounting Tao's literary filiation and summarizing the qualities of his verse it also describes his character and quotes from his poetry. It is the last sentence that is of interest. A close examination in the context of Shipin and its time reveals a number of anomalies for which the most economical explanation is that this line was not in the original text.

The first objection is stylistic. The final sentence is in the noun predicate form (marked by ye [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], roughly equivalent to a copula), with Tao Qian as its implied topic. No other entry in Shipin ends this way, with a sentence whose unspecified first term is the poet in question and that equates him or her with a descriptive noun phrase. By contrast, the rhetorical question that precedes, which rejects the notion that Tao was a mere farmstead writer, is a typical conclusion, following a pattern shared with several Shipin entries. Nothing connects the final sentence to the remainder of the entry grammatically, nor is the shift in subject (from poetry to person) at all marked. While Zhong Hong does frequently switch silently between the two topics, a motion explicitly justified here (since the works remind one of the author), this transition is especially striking since the entry moves from the writings to the writer, again to the poetry, then back once more to the poet.

Not only is the closing sentence syntactically atypical of Shipin, it is unusual in terms of one of the fundamental themes of the work as a whole, the delineation of literary influence. The connections Zhong draws in the first line of the entry are representative of his usual approach: a poet is linked to earlier sources who are either named authors (here, Ying Qu and Zuo Si) or...