Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries.

• Author: Sargent, Stuart

Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries. By STEPHEN OWEN. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, vol. 114. Cambridge, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2019. Pp. 420. $49.95.

The subtitle of this book makes it sound like an anthology of translated poems, and to be sure, there are many lyrics translated here. But a comparison between these renditions and the more evocative translations of some of the same lyrics in Owen's 1996 Anthology of Chinese Literature (Norton) confirms that his intention here is not to seduce the novice but to support a new, rich, and complex study for the specialist of the development of the lyric (ci [phrase omitted]) in the Song dynasty. The present book brings together and expands on several lines of inquiry on which Owen has been working productively for several years. One of these is adumbrated in his chapter "Who Wrote That?" in Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry, edited by Paul Kroll (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Anyone preparing to teach a class on the lyric would do well to read that chapter, just as anyone doing serious work on the genre should read Just a Song to get a more comprehensive, detailed picture of the problem of authorship in what was at one time a performance genre. Another theme is what Owen called "quotation" in his essay "Meaning the Words" in Voices of the Song Lyric in China, edited by Pauline Yu (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994); some of the basic premises from that earlier work are adapted here for the discussion of yinkuo [phrase omitted] in the sense of "redoing a poem (shi [phrase omitted]) as a song lyric."

Sometimes Just a Song seems to be throwing together too many things at the same time--how early ci may have come into being in the process of performing classical quatrains, the problem of attribution when dealing with repertoires of songs, the aesthetic effects of the isometric form of the lyric, the reasons why the textbook parade of early lyricists is so deceptive in its certainty--but once one is familiar with the recurrent themes, the book becomes a delightful companion to be visited often. Keep this in mind, though: the index is your friend. Cross references generally do not include page numbers, and Owen sometimes brings up a text or item of information that may mean nothing to the reader until it is properly introduced pages later.

Owen wisely refers us to Anna Shields for her work on the Huajian ji and to Ronald Egan for his work...