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Idema, Wilt L.; Sieber, Patricia
2021 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
Starting from a discussion of Yao Shouzhong's sanqu suite “The Complaint of the Ox,” in which the slaughtered animal lays its plaint before King Yama, this article calls attention to the scholarship on sanqu of the Japanese scholar Tanaka Kenji (1912–2002) of the 1950s and 1960s, which culminated in his 1969 article “Gendai sankyoku no kenkyū” (A Study of the Sanqu Songs of the Yuan Period). In this long and highly original article, Tanaka first traced the origin of sanqu back to the tradition of vernacular ci of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that resulted in the detailed description of daily life, including its less pleasant aspects. He next noted how sanqu, through impersonation, transformed the tradition of yongwu poetry by allowing the objects of description to speak in their own voice. Seeing the true originality of the genre in the combination of these two developments, Tanaka hailed Yao Shouzhong's work and some comparable texts as the genre's culminating achievement.
Myhre, Karin; Sieber, Patricia
2021 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
Reading Sui Jingchen's song suite “Gaozu Returns to His Home Village” against early sources, this article explores how Sui's work selects and inverts the elements that ground definitive historical accounts of rulership to refashion a familiar narrative in a theatrical mode. The sanqu's use of performance tropes expands the scope of criticism in this humorous piece past concerns about Yuan rulership, or even the imperial institution, to broader questions of representational instability and uncertainty. These shifts implicate readers in a social and political critique and engage issues often associated with early modern fiction and drama, including authenticity, imposture, and interpolations of author, character, player, reader, and audience.
Chang, Wenbo; Sieber, Patricia
2021 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
This article investigates how sanqu composition modifies the social contract of poetic composition in how a text is mediated between authorship and social identity, through a close analysis of Jia Zhongming's sanqu songs written in the supplement to The Register of Ghosts. It challenges the conventional reading of Jia's songs as reliable sources of biographical information on individual playwrights to whom those songs are dedicated and argues instead that, if read together as a whole, they represent a catalog of various personas Jia constructs for the social role of playwright. The authorial figure that plays a central role in more polite poetic genres is reduced to a faceless and easily replaceable mannequin with a name tag on it—be it Guan Hanqing, Wang Shifu, or any other name—in Jia's sanqu songs, only to foreground the fashioning of the playwright's social role from his particular perspective. The role Jia Zhongming constructs for the playwright displays the imprint of urban commercial theater as well as the influence of the state and elite values. Therefore, the true value of Jia's songs lies in how they help us better understand the condition of playwrights in Jia's time. Moreover, a proper interpretation of Jia's songs also helps us better understand the performativeness of sanqu as a genre.
Lee, Jaehyuk; Sieber, Patricia
2021 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
Zhang Kejiu occupies an important position in the history of sanqu (colloquial song). Not only does the sheer volume of his sanqu songs account for one-fifth of the extant sanqu songs, but his significance also lies in the unique style of his songs. In particular, his sanqu songs hybridize traditional literary elements with the up-and-coming form of sanqu. This article examines how Zhang embodied the aesthetics of classical poetry in the format of sanqu through a detailed examination of meter, parallel lines, and rhyme. Also, to demonstrate that the synthetic style of Zhang's sanqu songs was not merely the result of combining literary and colloquial styles, this article aims to reconstruct Zhang's idea about poetic functions underlying his literary syncretism by exploring his literary activities in the cultural context at his time.
Ye, Ye; Wang, Erxin; Sieber, Patricia
2021 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
When examining songs in Chinese literature, we can distinguish among literary, musical, and communal aspects of their circulation. Sanqu songs became popular in the form of musical texts in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, but the ci song lyrics, by the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) if not earlier, had already become a form of communal text in a broad sense. While relying on musical and literary aspects in the early stages of circulation, such ci song lyrics also became increasingly meaningful as social artifacts characterized by diverse forms of usage and participation, and they have been widely appreciated as a “literary-cultural phenomenon” unrelated to music per se. Standard histories of Chinese literature typically interpret the interaction between Song dynasty ci song lyrics and Yuan dynasty sanqu songs and song-drama as a natural evolution of literary forms. To be sure, these histories address the vitality of the musicality and popular nature of such songs while also paying attention to the artistic styles, inherent characters, and originality of sanqu song composition (tige xingfen 體格性分). From such an analysis, however, we know very little about the textual forms and mechanisms of transmission of Yuan-Ming sanqu songs beyond the realm of music and songwriters. In this regard, this article explores whether it was possible for the ci song lyrics, as a literary genre of greater maturity and higher status, albeit divorced from music, to transfer its literary experience to sanqu songs. Such a line of inquiry is also relevant to the study of the survival of various forms of Chinese musical literature beyond their original environments. It also helps us think about the complex relationships between the musical and communal functions of ci song lyrics and sanqu songs.
Tan, Tian Yuan; Sieber, Patricia
2021 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
This article explores the textual world and functionalities of sanqu songs in relation to the court milieu. The imperial court is not usually considered a natural habitat for the sanqu genre, best known for its portrayal of “disengagement” and “retirement” from official life, yet one cannot ignore the presence of a substantial number of sanqu songs that addressed and engaged with various court contexts and imperial occasions. I call this type of songs “courtly sanqu songs,” written in a style suitable for presentation to the imperial court or for courtly occasions. By identifying a number of Ming dynasty qu anthologies that prominently feature courtly sanqu songs, this article examines how these anthologies, through their organizational structure, draw the reader's attention to courtly sanqu songs. Ming anthologies also act as the major source for tracing the textual lineage of courtly sanqu and the spectrum of songs contained within this textual world. Using one song suite (“Nation Blessed”) as a case study, the article traces its variations and different “positions” over time, across anthologies, and across different editions of the same anthology, thereby uncovering the status and place of such songs in the court milieu and beyond.
Sieber, Patricia; De Grandis, Mario; Wang, Ke; Yao, Hui; Gao, Jingying; McNally, Ian; Yichun, Xu; Nunes, Jenn Marie; Sieber, Patricia
2021 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
This article consists of an introduction by Patricia Sieber and six short essays on translation approaches together with actual translations of sanqu songs by Mario De Grandis, Ke Wang, Hui Yao, Jingying Gao and Ian McNally, Xu Yichun, and Jenn Marie Nunes. The introduction provides a short history of the translation of sanqu songs into English, followed by a reflection on which distinctive features of the genre beg for attention in the translation process. In particular, it argues that the different sonic features of sanqu merit close consideration, the loss of the notational contours of the original tunes notwithstanding. Rather than bemoaning the absence of the underlying music, it suggests that, in keeping with Walter Benjamin's vision of the “task of the translator,” translation into another language can be an opportunity to reinvent that musicality in different ways. The six short essays that follow consider sanqu songs from the corpus of diasporic writers from the Yuan dynasty, with a view toward enriching the repertoire of translation strategies for sanqu in terms of musicality and other salient features of the genre. The six essays discuss, respectively, pronouns, rhyme, punctuation, language registers, allusion, and citational practice. In contextualizing such strategies theoretically and illustrating them with examples, the short essays seek to contribute more broadly to the theory and practice of the literary translation of Chinese poetic forms.
Sieber, Patricia; Sieber, Patricia
2021 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
This article proposes a new typology of the sanqu corpus. The discussion analyzes a cross section of sanqu songs in terms of how they engaged with language registers, on the one hand, and how they recontextualized existing motifs and media, on the other. Specifically, the article focuses on three subsets of songs: songs that foreground everyday vignettes, songs that celebrate festive occasions at court, and songs that revisit the exemplars of Chinese literature, history, and religion. The article suggests that everyday songs and court-oriented songs prized the aesthetic of immediacy, while certain mixed-register songs more explicitly exhibited differently oriented signs of hypermediacy.
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