Original Preface to 300 Tang Poems, Sun Zhu

[lnhammer]

If a secular child attending school is taught A Thousand Poems of the Masters, he very likely will succeed at reading it aloud, so its spread has not stopped. But the editor picked up poems in passing, including clumsy works without distinction—and moreover only in the two forms of regulated verse and regulated quatrains in five and seven characters, while Tang and Song people also wrote in various forms left out by his perverse organization. Focusing on the most popular of Tang poems, I have selected the most important in each of ten types, altogether 300-plus poems, copied whole into one collection to use as a textbook in homes and private schools, so enabling a child in his studies that as an old man he will not be able to forget them—compared to A Thousand Poems of the Masters, is this not far superior? The proverb says, “Learn 300 Tang poems by heart, then even if you cannot write poems, you can still recite them.” Please use my collection to test this.

蘅塘退士原序
世俗儿童就学，即授《千家诗》，取其易于成诵，故流传不废。但其诗随手掇拾，工拙莫辨，且止五七律绝二体，而唐宋人又杂出其间，殊乖体制。因专就唐诗中脍灸人口之作，择其尤要者，每体得数十首，共三百馀首，录成一篇，为家塾课本，俾童而习之，白首亦莫能废，较《千家诗》不远胜耶？ 谚云：“熟读唐诗三百首，不会作诗也会吟”。请以是编验之。

To my surprise, the preface to this collection of classical verse is in vernacular Chinese, which made it sooo much easier to read than the preface to #93 (which I still haven't finished picking through). Most modern editions, btw, organize things into either seven or eight forms, with disagreements between seven, eight, and ten being over how to deal with folk-song-style poems.

---L.

Comments

[sartorias]

That is quite the idiosyncratic preface!

[lnhammer]

Indeed it is. Even ignoring that HE gets to count the “two” forms listed in the previous anthology as four in his collection.