Neunzehn Alte Gedichte (Gushi shijiu shou [phrase omitted]) aus der Han-Zeit.

• Author: Richter, Antje
• Position: Book review

Neunzehn Alte Gedichte (Gushi shijiu shou [phrase omitted]) aus der Han-Zeit. By MANFRED W. FRUHAUF. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2019. Pp. x + 369. [euro]58 (paper and e-book).

At just 1,270 characters in 127 pentasyllablc couplets, the Nineteen Old Poems have been of enormous importance for the history of Chinese poetry and have generated a great amount of scholarship inside and outside of China. This new book by Manfred W. Fruhauf may well be the longest study of the Nineteen Old Poems to date. The poems first appear as a group in the early sixth-century multigenre anthology Wen xuan, where they head the "Diverse Poetry" (za shi) section, placed before poems ascribed to several Han dynasty writers. No writers are given for any one of the Nineteen Old Poems in this early source, but the poems' authorship has given rise to many speculations. Other collections, among them the sixth-century Yutai xinyong and the twelfth-century Yuefu shiji, have attributed several of the poems to certain poets, although no general agreement has been reached. The date of composition of the poems has also been discussed extensively. Based on linguistic and poetological features (rather than on the poems' placement in the Wen xuan) most scholars agree that the Nineteen Old Poems are of Han dynasty origin, as indicated in the title of the book under review here.

Important editions with Chinese commentary include Sui Shusen's Gushi shijiu shou jishi (1936) and Zhu Ziqing's Gushi shijiu shou shi (1941). The only previous book-length study in a Western language was Jean-Pierre Dieny's Les dix-neuf poemes anciens (1963). There is nothing comparable in English yet. Many eminent scholars have published research on the Nineteen Old Poems, among them Ma Maoyuan (1957), Yoshikawa Kojiro (1959), Cai Zong-qi (1996), Daniel Hsieh (1998), and Xiaofei Tian (2009). Translations of the whole set or of individual poems are plentiful as well, especially into English, French, and German. One merit of the present study is that it takes the most important scholarship and previous translations into account, although not all to the same extent, as Fruhauf declares that translations into German are of particular interest to him (p. 15).

At the heart of Fruhauf's book is the translation and detailed discussion of each of the Nineteen Old Poems (pp. 27-260). Two opening chapters (pp. 1-23) are dedicated to a general introduction of the poems and the challenges of translating them into...