Amour et politique dans la Chine ancienne: Cent poemes de Li Shangyin (812-858).

• Author: KROLL, PAUL W.
• Position: Review

Amour et politique dans la Chine ancienne: Cent poemes de Li Shangyin (812-858). By YVES HERVOUET, Paris: DE BOCCARD, 1995. Pp. xxix + 282. FF 130 (paper).

Yves Hervouet, who has given us over the years many excellent studies of Han-dynasty texts, has published upon his retirement a long-meditated work on the fascinating and often difficult T'ang poet, Li Shang-yin. Although founded on a scholarly manuscript of several hundred pages that Hervouet says he labored over for more than twenty years and which was to be aimed at a Sinological audience, the present volume appears by the author's choice without footnotes, bibliography, or other scholarly apparatus in hope of attracting the general reading public. Sixty-four colleagues and former students of Hervouet contributed toward the costs of publishing the book, and all proceeds from sales are being channeled to the Association des Amis de l'Institut des Hautes Etudes Chinoises of the College de France to aid the Institute's publication of works on China. This volume is, then, at once a gift from Hervouet to his readers, from his colleagues to the author, and from both to the future projects of the IHEC.

In Western studies of Li Shang-yin, James J. Y. Liu's 1969 book, The Poetry of Li Shang-yin, Ninth-Century Baroque Chinese Poet (Univ. of Chicago Press), has held the field for many years, despite some serious flaws--e.g., Liu's total disregard of Japanese scholarship on the poet, his ignorance or misunderstanding of the Taoist imagery that plays a major role in many poems, and his often quirky translations and urge to construct grand theories about Chinese poetry as a whole from narrowly chosen examples. The overall impressiveness and seeming success of Liu's volume, however, has until now warned off subsequent studies on a like scale. Hervouet never mentions Liu by name hut he is obviously aware of his work (and that of dozens of Chinese and Japanese scholars, also referred to anonymously); it is hardly possible for this book not to be placed alongside Liu's and compared with it.

The frontmatter of Hervouet's book includes essays on Li Shang-yin's life (pp. viii-xxvii), his personality and thought (pp. xxvii-xxxi), the forms and themes of his poems (pp. xxxi-xxxv), and on questions of translation and interpretation (pp. xxxvi-xxxix). The essay on the poet's life is a definite improvement on that offered by Liu. However, the latter's essays on "Interpretations of Li's Poetry," "The Worlds of...