Shi Jing (The Book of Songs)

The Shi Jing (Classic of Poetry, also called the Book of Songs or Book of Odes) is the oldest surviving collection of Chinese verse: 305 anonymous poems in four parts, composed between about 1000 and 600 BC under the Zhou dynasty. They are the songs of the feudal States (Part I), the minor and greater odes of the royal court (Parts II and III), and the hymns of the ancestral temple and altar (Part IV). Tradition ascribes the compilation to Confucius, who is said to have chosen them from a much larger stock; by the Han dynasty the collection was one of the Five Classics.

These versions are James Legge's rhymed English verse translation, The She King; or, The Book of Ancient Poetry (London: Trübner & Co., 1876), which keeps his own romanised titles (for example Kwan-ts‘eu for the opening ode, now usually written Guanju). The Codex Note on each Legge poem is Legge's own one-line argument, set in plain case. Four odes are not given here: three that this edition prints only in Scots-dialect versions, and one whose text is cut short in the scan. A second English verse translation, William Jennings's The Shi King: The Old 'Poetry Classic' of the Chinese (1891), is added in selection; its odes carry no Codex Note and keep Jennings's own descriptive titles. Odes whose scan text is too corrupt to restore are omitted.