106
JOHN MCCOY
Catullus or Boccaccio, and sometimes approaches Robert Burns' Merry Muses of Caledonia without a similar need to expunge words from the Chinese text.
From the literary point of view, one of the problems of handling the Mountain Songs, and especially any attempt to translate them, is just the question of how to handle the double meanings which are so much the key to these verses and their enjoyment. Too many footnotes would kill a translation and too little by way of explanation would probably leave a lot of the allusions lost to modern readers. Some of this is of course already lost forever because we have no way to recover all of the secondary references so familiar to the original singers of these songs. Even some of the primary references are difficult and it will take considerable research to dig all of the meaning out of some of the obscure vocabulary. But the problems of handling the grammatical markers and functors of this dialect are solvable. In spite of the fact that some of these items are written with characters not to be found in most dictionaries and obviously made up to handle the unusual Wu dialect pronunciations of the time, we are still able to reconstruct probable phonetic approximations and to propose probable meanings on the basis of our knowledge of modern dialects. It is in this special area that the linguist is in a unique position to help the student of literature.
If this sort of popular poetry attracts interest, we will necessarily need the services of the dialect specialist to solve some of the problems of interpretation. The linguist will gain a great deal from the information the Mountain Songs give him on Ming Dynasty dialects. Then the linguist will in turn enrich Chinese literature studies by opening up a neglected field.
Although their reasons are quite different, Western scholars are beginning to agree with Peking that we have neglected popular literature too long. It seems reasonable to predict that more departments will give some room to folk songs and poetry in Chinese literature courses if the genre can be made accessible to the average reader.
From the linguist's point of view, an analysis of the rhyme patterns of the Mountain Songs, done much on the same plan as Karlgren's Ancient Chinese, would be very useful when we are ready to work out a reconstruction of proto-Wu. I have carded
106
JOHN MCCOY
Catullus or Boccaccio, and sometimes approaches Robert Burns' Merry Muses of Caledonia without a similar need to expunge words from the Chinese text.
From the literary point of view, one of the problems of hand!- ing the Mountain Songs, and especially any attempt to translate them, is just the question of how to handle the double meanings which are so much the key to these verses and their enjoyment. Too many footnotes would kill a translation and too little by way of explanation would probably leave a lot of the allusions. lost to modern readers. Some of this is of course already lost forever because we have no way to recover all of the secondary references so familiar to the original singers of these songs. Even some of the primary references are difficult and it will take con- siderable research to dig all of the meaning out of some of the obscure vocabulary. But the problems of handling the grammati- cal markers and functors of this dialect are solvable. In spite of the fact that some of these items are written with characters not to be found in most dictionaries and obviously made up to handle the unusual Wu dialect pronunciations of the time, we are still able to reconstruct probable phonetic approximations and to propose probable meanings on the basis of our knowledge of modern dialects. It is in this special area that the linguist is in a unique position to help the student of literature.
If this sort of popular poetry attracts interest, we will neces- sarily need the services of the dialect specialist to solve some of the problems of interpretation. The linguist will gain a great deal from the information the Mountain Songs give him on Ming Dynasty dialects. Then the linguist will in turn enrich Chinese literature studies by opening up a neglected field.
Although their reasons are quite different, Western scholars are beginning to agree with Peking that we have neglected popular literature too long. It seems reasonable to predict that more departments will give some room to folk songs and poetry in Chinese literature courses if the genre can be made accessible to the average reader.
From the linguist's point of view, an analysis of the rhyme patterns of the Mountain Songs, done much on the same plan as Karlgren's Ancient Chinese, would be very useful when we are ready to work out a reconstruction of proto-Wu. I have carded
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