Die Hymnen der chinesischen Staatsopfer: Literatur und Ritual in der politischen Reprasentation von der Han-Zeit bis zu den Sechs Dynastien.

• Author: SAUSSY, HAUN
• Position: Review

Die Hymnen der chinesischen Staatsopfer: Literatur und Ritual in der politischen Reprasentation von der Han-Zeit bis zu den Sechs Dynastien. By MARTIN KERN. Sinologica Coloniensia, vol. 19. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 1997. Pp. 340. DM 120 (paper).

Chinese poetry is strange stuff. If we come to it expecting it to resemble post-medieval European poetry, we will be alternately elated and disappointed. To account for the unfamiliar features of the tradition, some of the wiliest American interpreters have proposed general descriptions starting from first principles, attempting to show how "Chinese poetry" arose and how it works through individual poems. Martin Kern's work takes a different tack. It offers a close yet abundantly contextualized analysis of a small set of examples and for this reason serves as a check on the broader accounts. It gives the reader a more exact sense, for a specific period, of the scope of style and genre, the influence of ritual and cosmological thought on poetic practice, and the relationship of poet and official (who might be two sides of the same person). Such specificity is welcome, especially since it does not dissolve into detail for detail's sake. Modest though Kern's argument is in form--it is essentially a translation with a long introduction-it provides an extremely revealing case study.

A quotation will show the value of Kern's intensive-extensive method:

A survey of the sacrificial songs [from Han to Northern Zhou], with their consciously narrow range of vocabulary, form and imagery and their ultimately monotonous character, leads us to ask whether authors of exceptional aesthetic competence were really necessary for these commissioned utilitarian texts, the classicizing diction of which seems to have exclusively political motives ... Everything that comprises the quality of a poetic text-the surprising image, polysemy and openness to multiple interpretation, the transformation of the commonplace--would endanger the hieratic, closed and normative claims made on behalf of the validity and order of ritual song. (p. 69)

This is almost an admission that the sole interest of the ritual hymns is historical and sociological, rather than literary. Of course, earlier attempts to explain or excuse the specificities of Chinese poetry have emphasized precisely its "hieratic, closed, and normative" features, and extended these qualifiers to the whole tradition. Kern's study usually modifies such generalizations...