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“Song Lyric,” ci, remains one of the most loved forms of Chinese poetry. From the early eleventh century through the first quarter of the twelfth century, song lyric evolved from an impromptu contribution in a performance practice to a full literary genre, in which the text might be read more often than performed. Young women singers, either indentured or private entrepreneurs, were at the heart of song practice throughout the period; the authors of the lyrics were notionally mostly male. A strange gender dynamic arose, in which men often wrote in the voice of a woman and her imagined feelings, then appropriated that sensibility for themselves.
As an essential part of becoming literature, a history was constructed for the new genre. At the same time the genre claimed a new set of aesthetic values to radically distinguish it from older “Classical Poetry,” shi. In a world that was either pragmatic or moralizing (or both), song lyric was a discourse of sensibility, which literally gave a beautiful voice to everything that seemed increasingly to be disappearing in the new Song dynasty world of righteousness and public advancement.
Stephen Owen is James Bryant Conant University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University.
- "If we wonder why song lyrics gradually became so popular, this is part of the answer: songs constructed a space figuratively "outside the empire", or a space for the self in which the empire was irrelevant and unmentioned. Only in the world of song lyric do they have such a power, defined against of"
- "最后，我们会讨论张先的词集。张先寿命较长，因此他的作品集同时展现了旧的小令世界和在20世纪六七十年代逐渐流行的慢词。张先的词集中也有些作者归属不一的作品，但比例远小于上述几部词集。（第15页） ——这里的20世纪应该是12世纪？"
- "晏几道词有时候最后会化为梦境或回忆的片段。上阕中，旧日的爱恋只剩下碎片般的几个场景：初见，相逢，露水沾湿的罗裙，风中飞扬的发丝，墨色的眉，羞红的脸。这正是回忆的呈现方式，似拍快照一般；恋爱也的确是业余摄影师最好的唤起者。快照总是把地点的具体信息包含在内。这些信息别无深意，只会提醒听众那人就在“阶前”。 爱情电影的开场和片尾偶尔会采用快照组成的蒙太奇（这些照片的主角通常是女子）：“某某在海边”“某某在散步”“某某吃花生”。即使观众（不论男女）本来对照片的主角没有什么特珠的感情（毕竟那只是个虚构或半虚构的人物，他们也常常会被这种熟悉的注意力结构触动一这是我们以饱含爱意的目光注视爱人的方式，记忆把这"
- "小山：“记得小蘋初见，两重心字罗衣。”……两重“心”字正好精彩地展现了英文谚语“wearing one's heart on one's sleeve”（把心穿戴在衣袖上）的意思。"
- "英谚典出莎士比亚《奥赛罗》，意谓人把心事表露在外。"
- "Our hypothesis suggests that the origin of ci, song lyric as a textual genre, may be traced to a change in transcription practice, writing down songs as they were sometimes sung. This has two moments. In the Dunhuang manuscripts we seem to have scribes writing down songs as they were actually sung. "
- "If there was such a practice in the Tang, it is invisible because it would have been taken for granted this was "a way to sing the poem." It becomes visible in the Song because there is a written textual difference between a classical poem and heterometric lyric."
- "如果我们讶异词为何渐渐流行起来，这就是答案之一环：词建构了一个在修辞上悬置于“帝国之外”的空间；在这个自我的空间，帝国事务无关紧要，也不会被提起。"
