The Book of Songs: Annotated and Translated

The Book of Songs is the earliest anthology of poetry in China, collecting poems composed over roughly five centuries from the early Western Zhou to the mid-Spring and Autumn period. Tradition holds that Confucius compiled and edited it. Three hundred and five poems survive, along with six shengshi pieces that have titles but no lyrics. The work is divided by music and region into three sections: Feng, Ya, and Song. The fifteen Guo Feng are mostly regional folk songs about courtship and marriage, labor, conscription, and the hardships of common life. The Xiao Ya and Da Ya consist mainly of music for banquets and court assemblies and of political satire. The Zhou Song, Lu Song, and Shang Song are hymns for sacrifice and blessing. This book is Mr. Ma Chiying's annotated translation of the Book of Songs. Following the traditional arrangement, it is organized into Guo Feng, Xiao Ya, Da Ya, Zhou Song, Lu Song, and Shang Song, and proceeds poem by poem, explaining the sound and meaning of words, the names of things and institutions, and the sense of each stanza and line, with a modern Chinese vernacular translation. It seeks to preserve the flavor of the original poems while allowing readers without a grounding in classical Chinese to read them smoothly. The annotated translation originates in the "Ancient Texts Annotated and Translated" series organized by a Taiwan cultural revival institution and edited by the publisher Wang Yunwu. The manuscript was repeatedly polished after completion, correcting errors in popular editions, with annotations aiming at accuracy and translations at fluency. The mainland Chinese edition was introduced by China Friendship Publishing Company in 2022 as part of the "Wang Yunwu-edited Classics of Chinese Studies Series." It should be noted that electronic versions circulating under labels such as "refined new revised edition" or "with pinyin for rare characters" are mostly typeset by readers themselves and are not the same publication as the paper edition described above; the text and page numbers may differ, and the word count is not found in any authoritative record.