Author ｜
Yi-hsueh Lee
Abstract ｜
Qing Dynasty was the first peak to study Li Shangyin’s poetry, when the rise of annotators in swarms was magnificent. In terms of interpretation style, the annotations of Zhu Heling, Yao Peichien, Cheng Mengxing, and Feng Hao form a system for the interpretation of Li Shangyin’s poetry which has become the mainstream. Among them, Zhu Heling’s Li Yishan Poetry Annotations (1659) was published the earliest, that “people were eager to buy after the completion of book,” “it was prevalent in the whole country,” and “the book could merely found in few places.” The latecomer, Cheng Mengxing, focused on the supplement of Zhu’s annotations, as Renewed Li Yishan Poetry Annotations (1743) was signed as “Zhu Heling’s Annotations and Cheng Mengxing’s deletion and supplement” for the settlement that the two books were about to be combined as one. The situation was special that it was wondered whether Cheng’s deletion and supplement was to make compensation and extension or to simultaneously make discourse and creation to develop a new line. The issues regarding the acceptance and interpretation of texts were interesting and worth exploring. For this reason, this study intends to discourse on Cheng’s interpretation methods and features drawn from the deletion and supplement of Zhu’s annotations. Moreover, the sixth Explanatory Notes in the book especially took annotations of “Untitled” Poems and “poems describing objects” as examples, revealing that Cheng presented the understanding on such two sets of poems and allowed them being the proper cutting point to explore the annotations of Yishan Poetry. Nevertheless, the definitions of “poems describing objects” were too broad to be defined easily so that they were not discussed in this paper.
keywords ｜
“Untitled” poems, Cheng Mengxing, Renewed Li Yishan Poetry Annotations, Zhu Heling, Li Yishan Poetry Annotations