Guan Ju - Modern Interpretations

Modern Interpretations

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Western sinologists and literary scholars began to study the Shi Jing. While some of the first, including the Jesuit Seraphin Couvreur, the first translator of the text into French, persisted with readings based on the Mao school’s interpretation, the majority of Western scholarship has sought novel hermeneutic approaches.

James Legge, who published one of the poem's early English translations in 1871, rejected the explanatory prefaces to the poems in the Mao text, "to follow which would reduce many of them to absurd enigmas".

The late twentieth century scholar Qu Wanli (屈萬里) takes "Guan ju" as expressing the emotional anxiety and excitement of a man about to be married, whose wife is greeted at the end of the poem with the ceremonial rites of the wedding as signified by the musical instruments.

The French translator Marcel Granet saw "Guan ju", among with the other "Airs of the States", as lyrics accompanying physical festivities. In his 1911 study Fêtes et Chansons anciennes de la Chine, Granet declared that he excluded "all interpretations which are symbolic or which imply subtlety in the poet." Granet reads the poem as a record of a rural festival involving boys and girls beginning to court each other. The opening image of birds calling to each other is taken by Granet as a metaphor for the young couples, hiding away to seduce each other in private. The final sections of the poem, describing musical instruments are, in Granet’s schema, elements of a feast at the end of the festival - a ceremonial conclusion to the rural gathering.

Arthur Waley agreed with Granet that traditional readings distort the "true nature" of the poems, but he did point out that it was facilitated by the multivalent meanings of words and social practices. For Waley, the Shi Jing was a diverse collection which does not necessarily display a unified function, and, as such, cannot be approached merely with one reading strategy.

C. H. Wang has been vehemently critical of what he calls "a manifest distortion of this classic anthology" and argues that the earliest definition of poetry in Chinese tradition (in Shang Shu) links it with song rather than ethics. He considers that the Shi Jing poems have their roots in oral transmission rather than literary composition, and directed contested the claims of the Mao school that the poems are the product of specific authors referring to specific events in their lives.

Pauline Yu rejects the notion that there is any form of allegory in "Guan ju".

However, not all Western sinologists agree. Edward L. Shaughnessy argues that "Guan ju" is an example of "correlative thought" in traditional Chinese thinking:

Strange though it may seem that the crying of an osprey could evoke the image of a nubile girl, we can begin to see in it something of the intellectual consciousness of the time. Elsewhere in the Shi jing, as in later Chinese culture and in many other cultures as well, the image of the fish signifies sexual fertility. Knowing that the osprey is a fish-eating bird, it is not hard to see that this is a poem concerned with the hunt for a sexual partner. Indeed, the sound of the osprey's cry, as written onomatopeically by the poet, confirms this, guan means "to join, to bring together." The poet heard the osprey calling out: "Join, join."