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Games Poets Play: Readings in Medieval Chinese Poetry. By Anne Birrell. Cambridge, UK: McGuinness China Monographs, 2004. viii, 449 pp. $35.00 (paper).

2009; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0021911809990994

1752-0401

Sujane Wu,

Chinese history and philosophy

More than two decades ago, Anne Birrell made an important contribution to the field of medieval Chinese poetry by translating into English Xu Ling's (507–83) entire anthology, Yutai xinyong (New Songs from a Jade Terrace). In her most recent book, Games Poets Play: Readings in Medieval Chinese Poetry, she again offers interesting, illuminating, but controversial reading and analysis by applying Western postmodernism to the study of this medieval Chinese anthology (pp. 10–13). She believes that postmodern approaches can provide “new strategies for analyzing silent codes and hidden structures” (p. 341) in the poems, arguing that poets skillfully conceal their meaning to their contemporary readers and to those of us who are “distanced from the work through time and cultural space” (p. 341). Birrell reads the entire anthology as a masterwork of amatory verse. She groups and analyzes the poems through a variety of postmodern topics such as gendered power games (chapter 1), sexual politics (chapters 2–3), voyeurism and male gaze (chapters 4–6), homoeroticism (chapter 7), as well as failure and success of married love (chapter 8). By doing so, she hopes “to assess the anthology in nonjudgmental terms, free from moral evaluation, historical causation, and political correctness, and to restore it to its role and place in the continuity of the literary tradition” (p. 1). The reader can sense her enthusiasm to reverse the long misunderstanding and mistreatment of the anthology (pp. 329–41). With her postmodernist perspectives, she wishes to treat the collection as “a pure form of humanistic expression” (p. 279). Birrell argues that this anthology is a representation of a youthful and new culture written in a playful mode during the period of court exile from the north to the south, as well as a product of the rejection of past moral values, making it a rival of the classical literary tradition and the reversal of dull elite culture.Despite Birrell's new approach of reading the anthology, one wonders that when the old East confronts with the new West, how much is too much when applying Western postmodernism to medieval Chinese literature? Can medieval Chinese love poems be understood without imposing on them postmodern theory? While Birrell strives to free the anthology from a moral code, and her analysis presents a new look at the text, the reader may sense that she in fact has relabeled it as “a kind of erotic category.” According to Birrell, almost all of the objects in the anthology contain sexual metonymic meanings. One obvious example is presented in her renditions of the first two characters of the anthology's title: yü (jade) and tai (terrace) (pp. 7–9). She explains that they contain multiple metonymic meanings, and the most significant one has a sexual erotic implication. On the one hand, we appreciate her search for a new exploration and understanding of ancient Chinese poetry through links with modern taste; on the other hand, we need to remind ourselves not to read what is not there.In chapter 9, Birrell deconstructs Xu Ling's preface to the anthology and believes that, on the surface, Xu Ling's compilation is for the “educated and literary women of the palace who have the leisure and poetical inclination,” but in reality, his intended readers are mainly the male poets, courtiers, and royal patrons (p. 327). This argument has been challenged by Xiaofei Tian, who convinces us that we should not deny the “obvious” intention that this anthology was compiled for female readership, exactly as Xu Ling stated in his preface (see Xiaofei Tian, Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502–557) [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007], 191–92).Chapter 6, “In the Voice of Women: Three Female Poets,” is particularly noteworthy. Birrell remarkably identifies three female poets in the anthology, Bao Linghui (fl. c. 464), Shen Manyuan (c. 540), and Liu Lingxian (late fifth to early sixth century), and “discuss[es] the self-representation of the woman” by these female poets of the early medieval era (p. 176). She analyzes with sophistication these women's works to evaluate how these women demonstrated their poetic personalities and to determine “whether they inscribed their female experience and values into their poems” (p. 179). The author has opened up a world for later scholars to explore further the women writers of this period—a world that, in my opinion, has been neglected and should be taken up and more fully studied in the near future with a complete translation of these women's literary works in English.