The Songs of the South: An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets

This edition of "Songs of the South" is a revised form (1985) -- rather more extensively altered than Hawkes' modest description might suggest -- of a complete, and annotated, translation (first edition 1959) of one of the oldest anthologies of Chinese poetry. Among surviving poetic texts, the "Ch'u Tz'u" (Wade-Giles transliteration) is supposedly second in age only to the "Book of Songs," traditionally edited by Confucius himself. Time and layers of interpretation, mainly derived from an early commentary of uncertain reliability, have made it a difficult work, but it is reputed to contain poetry of great beauty. David Hawkes managed to capture at least some of that beauty, and to supply an interpretive framework, and a great deal of fascinating lore about early Chinese civilization. Large portions of the "Songs of the South" in fact clearly belong to the Han dynasty, several centuries later. These sections are imitations and extensions of a group of poems supposed to be the work of a certain Qu Yuan (Ch'u Yuan), a minister of the state of Ch'u (Pinyin Qu) in "southern" (now more like central) China, around 300 B.C. These "original" poems are themselves supposed to be imitations of traditional religious songs of the region, written by the minister while in exile from the royal court, and intended as criticism of the king's policies, and treatment of the author. The shamans (men and women) who courted the gods are seen as the minister seeking the king. Their supposed author himself became the subject of a sentimental legend of a noble official who drowned himself rather than witness the destruction of his ruler and country, and was later still connected with the Dragon Boat Festival, which was said to re-enact the search for his body. The exotic and troubling imagery of spirit lovers was thus adjusted to the self-image of the scholar-bureaucrats of Imperial China. Although this political reading still has its defenders (see Geoffrey R. Waters' "Three Elegies of Ch'u" for an elaborate example), Hawkes spent decades studying this original core as more or less direct reflections of Chinese religion, myth, and legend before they were subjected to Confucian systematization. From this point of view (shared by, among others, Arthur Waley, who also translated a number of these poems), the appropriation of their imagery for Taoist-sounding visionary poems and prose extravaganzas in the rest of the anthology makes perfect sense. A political application of the relations between a shaman (male or female) and a sought-after deity is, of course, not ruled out. The "Nine Songs" (actually there are more; eleven) are extremely moving, whatever interpretation is adopted. Another of the early poems, "Tian wen," or "Heavenly Questions," appears to be a collection of riddles about early gods, kings, and heroes, and is a somewhat opaque source of evidence for early Chinese narratives. Hawkes supplies it with fascinating notes, and cautiously favors the theory th