Elaborations on the Book of Songs

“I love every man and woman in the three hundred poems...” Muxin on the Classic of Poetry: “Three hundred poems, one word sums them up: they meet in me.” Muxin's poetry collection Shijing Yan, originally titled Hui Wu Zhong, was edited by Muxin himself in his later years. Drawing on the Classic of Poetry, it creatively injects modern content—each poem 14 lines, 300 in all. The inner section contains 263 poems including “Tong Pao,” “Holding Hands,” “Guan Guan,” “Peach Tree,” “No Address,” “Three Stars,” “Wuzhen,” “Fish Intrude,” “Reeds,” “Your Collar,” and “Ten Acres”; the outer section contains 37 poems including “I Hear,” “Canglang,” “Watching Water,” “Shouldering Mountains,” “All Under Heaven,” “Chaos,” and “Its Revival.” The language is classical, the ideas modern; savoring the beauty of rhetoric, it is a lavish revel in the meanings, shapes, and sounds of Chinese characters. Of China's traditional classics Muxin said, “Of the Four Books I like the Analects best; of the Five Classics, the Classic of Poetry.” He held that China's “person” and China's “nature,” from the Classic of Poetry through the Chu and Han rhapsodies and Tang and Song poetry, display a relationship of equal mutual penetration—rejoicing in their joys, grieving in their sorrows. A Chinese character is a cultural history; a Chinese character is a lock. Muxin is “a writer's writer,” and Shijing Yan is an astonishing “Muxin edition of the Classic of Poetry.” Heavenly books need an “unlock code,” and each poem in Shijing Yan now comes with annotations by classical literature experts—three thousand years apart, with an energy akin to textual archaeology, Shijing Yan conducts an experiment on modern Chinese that has yet to be fully explored.