Did Men of Song Belt Out "Tang Ci"? An Explanation of the Poem "I Only Fear the Spring Breeze Will Chop Me Apart"

Abstract:This essay was originally published in Chinese in the 1990s by the polymathic Hong Kong scholar Jao Tsung-i 饒宗頤 (1917–2018), and exemplifies a larger debate about the Tang origins and identity of the ci genre that unfolded between Jao and Ren Bantang 任半塘 (1897–1991) in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Jao emphasizes the continuity between the term ci 詞 and its referent, which may be either "lyrics" to a tune, generally speaking, or a specific ci-genre of poetry. He argues, moreover, that Tang ci, and in particular the poems of the Yunyao ji 雲謠集 (Cloud ballad collection) discovered in Dunhuang manuscripts, are an integral part of ci-genre history; poems made to tunes and called ci in the Tang are inseparable from the genre that flourished as a literati form in the Song, and ci poetics is thus rooted firmly in Tang history. Placing the vernacular Tang ci on equal footing with literati Song ci is corollary to a larger historiographic shift that wrests authority from transmitted texts (official histories, critical anthologies, elite textual traditions) as the sole legitimate historical sources, and empowers manuscript sources to rewrite history.