poetics of tihuashi as an epitomizing component of Tang poetics, which registers the influence of the Six Dynasties theories of painting, aims at capturing the shen (inner spirit) and zhen (trueness) of the painterly subject, and adds a discursive dimension to the poetic language. Chapter 5 explores Su Shi’s poetics of tihuashi as an integral component of literati poetics, which emphasizes poetic discursiveness and privileges formal nonresemblance over formal verisimilitude in rendering the spiritual likeness of the painterly subject. Chapter 6 highlights the work of representative tihuashipoets of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing periods, who synthesized the legacies from their predecessors and contributed to the refinement of Chinese interartistic poetics.
This work is a concise study intended to provoke further research on tihuashi and on its comparability with ekphrastic poetry—“casting a brick to attract jade,” as the Chinese idiom goes. My modest effort will be worthwhile if indeed this book sheds some interartistic and cross-cultural light on tihuashi as a lyrical resonance between Chinese poetry and painting.
All translations in this book are mine unless indicated otherwise. Most of the poems cited in this book have no previous English versions, and I have ventured to translate them by myself. My translation is far from being exemplary and only suggests a possible compromise between what is known in Chinese as zhiyi (literally, direct translation; cf., formal equivalence) and yiyi (literally, translation of meaning; cf., dynamic equivalence) without compromising too much of the source texts. I tried my best to live up to the “golden rules” of translation summarized by the well-known Chinese scholar and translator Yan Fu (1854–1921) in his three terms—xin (roughly, fidelity), da (roughly, fluency), and ya (roughly, elegance)—fearing all the time that my attempts would be more futile than fruitful.
This book owes a debt to a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship and a faculty research grant from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, which made my undertaking possible. My heartfelt thanks also go to Professor Emeritus John Rohsenow from