The Book of Songs (Two Volumes)

The Book of Songs is China's first collection of poetry, containing 305 poems from the late Shang (or, some say, the early Zhou) to the mid-Spring and Autumn period, plus 6 titles with no surviving text, collectively known as the "Three Hundred Poems." The book is arranged in three categories: Feng, Ya, and Song. The Guofeng are folk songs from various regions of the Zhou dynasty; the Ya, divided into Lesser Ya and Greater Ya, are the "proper sounds and elegant music" of the Zhou people; and the Song, divided into Zhou Song, Lu Song, and Shang Song, are ritual songs used by the court and aristocratic ancestral temples. The content covers labor and love, war and corvée, marriage and customs, banquets and sacrifices, and even mountains, rivers, plants, trees, birds, and beasts; it is regarded as a mirror of social life in the Zhou dynasty. This edition is one title in Zhonghua Book Company's "Chinese Classics: Complete Text, Full Annotation, Full Translation Series." It uses the Book of Songs in the Thirteen Classics with Commentaries and Subcommentaries as its base text, includes the entire work, and makes no abridgments. Each poem has an introductory note explaining its theme and background; difficult words, phrases, allusions, and names of things are annotated item by item, with a complete vernacular translation of the poem that strives for clarity and fluency; and the commentary section interprets the poem from literary, historical, philosophical, folkloric, linguistic, and cultural perspectives, absorbing previous and contemporary scholarship as much as possible in textual collation, annotation, and authentication. The book is set in simplified Chinese, horizontally typeset, in two hardcover volumes of moderate length; it is a convenient introductory and reference edition for contemporary readers to read the Book of Songs systematically from beginning to end.