We are delighted to invite you to watch the third topic of our video series “How to Read Chinese Poetry,” titled “The Book of Poetry: The Han Canonization.” This topic delves into the interpretive transformation that the Book of Poetry underwent during the Han dynasty.
Episode 7: A Love Song and A Moral Exemplum (“Osprey”)
This episode explores how the anonymous author of the “Prefaces to the Book of Poetry” reinterpreted “Osprey,” the first of the 305 Shijing poems, from a lively love song into a moral exemplum by means of gender switching. It further explains how such reinterpretation was facilitated by features of classical Chinese grammar, particularly the ungendered use of pronouns and the frequent omission of sentence subjects.
Episode 9: Dead Deer Meat as a Gift (“There is a Dead Doe in the Wilds”)
This episode examines the collaborative efforts of three prominent Han commentators to allegorize a poem composed of seemingly disjointed or contradictory elements. It also reflects on the ironic fact that the Han commentators’ allegorizing process itself constituted an imaginative literary exercise—one that foreshadowed the later Tang poets, such as Du Fu and Li Shangyin, who skillfully exploited semantic, syntactic, and structural ambiguities in their own work.
Have fun watching and feel free to share your thoughts!