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5.0 out of 5 stars
I think it still holds up, February 1, 2002
This review is from: Three Elegies of Ch'u: An Introduction to the Traditional Interpretation of the Ch'u Tz'u (Hardcover)
[I rate it five because I am the author.] I don't recall seeing much else on the Nine Elegies - or for that matter, any of the Chu Ci sections - since this was published. There will be no second edition. If there were, I'd fix a few things, but I think the study still holds up: both the content and the method.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Ian Myles Slater on: A Lesson in Critical Method, January 5, 2005
This review is from: Three Elegies of Ch'u: An Introduction to the Traditional Interpretation of the Ch'u Tz'u (Hardcover)
I value this book on "Three Elegies of Ch'u" as a rare example (in English) of how educated Chinese traditionally approached their heritage of poetry. Waters gives a political / moral explication of a group of poems which modern scholarship has treated as fairly direct literary adaptations of popular (or regional) religious texts. His exposition incorporates the basic Chinese commentaries (in translation); which I find extremely valuable in itself. And Waters gives them an impressive interpretation / application.
The poems in question come from a sequence known as "The Nine Songs" (actually a group of eleven; the title is variously explained) in a collection known as "Ch'u Tz'u (in the old Wade-Giles system for rendering Chinese. All or portions of the sequence have been rendered many times; and there is a complete translation of the whole collection, which contains both Warring States and Han Dynasty texts, by David Hawkes. (I have reviewed the revised edition of his "Songs of the South," where I give more details of the problems, and various translations; unfortunately, Penguin has allowed it to go out of print.)
As it happens, I think that Waters underestimates the amount of traditional religion active in the poems, and that the highly specific interpretations he gives are an over-reading. The poems can successfully be read as literary imitations or adaptations of rituals invoking spirits, and considering this a mere cover for a more dignified setting seems to me almost a mirror-image of the Christian reading of one of Virgil's poems as religious instead of political.
Of course, I do not claim any independent value for my judgment, but the readings proposed by Arthur Waley, David Hawkes, and Edward Schafer, among others, seem to me to make excellent sense, and do not require assuming that Han Dynasty critical methods were current so early. Or that all Chinese men of letters of the Warring States period had assimilated Confucian readings of the "Shih Ching," or "Book of Songs," into their habits of composition.
However, Waters has a couple of millennia of astute native readers on his side, many of whom did write poetry with this type of reading in mind. Whether or not the shamanistic reading of the poems in question continues to be the standard model, or the court-politics interpretation re-assumes its primacy, "Three Elegies of Ch'u" has a value of its own, as an intelligent and sympathetic presentation of traditional Chinese literary culture.
(Reposted from my "anonymous" review of September 10, 2003.)
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