Shijing
Chinese poems. It comprises 305 poems divided into 160 folk songs (feng, or airs); 74 minor festal songs (ya, or odes), traditionally sung at court festivities; 31 major festal songs, sung at more solemn court ceremonies; and 40 hymns and eulogies (song, or hymns), sung at sacrifices to gods and ancestral spirits of the royal house. The work is one of the Five Classics, traditionally ascribed to Confucius.
The poems are written in four character lines. The airs are in the style of folk songs, although the extent to which they are real folk songs or literary imitations is debated. The odes deal with matters of court and historical subjects, while the hymns blend history, myth and religious material.
Commentators have also given the Book of Songs a second tripartite division, into fu, bi and xing poems. Roughly, fu poems are those with a straightforward narrative content; bi are those with explicit comparisons; while xing are based on implied comparisons.
Translations
- The Book of Odes, in The Sacred Books of China, translated by James Legge, 1879
- The Book of Songs, translated by Arthur Waley, edited with additional translations by William Jennings, New York: Paragon Book, 1969.
- The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, translated by Ezra Pound, Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1954.
- The Book of Odes, translated by Bernhard Karlgren, Stockholm: The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1950.
