Abstract:

Few books have shaped the modern reception of Tang poetry—and classical Chinese poetry more generally—more than Three Hundred Tang Poems (Tangshi sanbai shou唐詩三百首). Since its compilation in 1764 by Sun Zhu and his wife Xu Lanying, the anthology has been practically synonymous with the Tang poetic canon. The text has been republished in hundreds, if not thousands, of annotated editions, the earliest extant being Zhang Xie’s 1834 Three Hundred Tang Poems, with Commentary and Subcommentary (Tangshi sanbai shou zhushu 唐詩三百首注疏) of 1834. If world literature is, as David Damrosch would have it, writing that crosses borders, then Three Hundred Tang Poems fits the bill, perhaps more than any other anthology of Chinese poetry. This presentation aims to recount the reception history of this famous anthology. It will do this in two ways: first, I will compare Three Hundred Tang Poems to other well-known anthologies of Tang poetry, especially from the Qing, and demonstrate how it is the product of a specific anthologization culture, with pedagogical aims, that had reached a heyday in the late 18^th century. Second, I will examine the use of Three Hundred Tang Poems in educational contexts in the twentieth century, in both Chinese- and foreign-language settings. To do so, I will gather translations of Three Hundred Tang Poems into a variety of languages (modern Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Korean, Mongolian) and look at how its texts are used in textbooks of world literature and of classical Chinese poetry.

Biography:

Thomas Mazanec is associate professor of premodern Chinese and comparative literature at UC Santa Barbara, and currently a visiting researcher at the Institute for Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica. He is the author of Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China, forthcoming with Cornell University Press. He is currently completing a new translation of Three Hundred Tang Poems, with selections from traditional commentary, for the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature.