New songs for the Jade Terraces

Seminar open to PhD students and M2 students (Ifrae Axis 1, Theme 1, Project 1).

Editor: Valérie Lavoix, in collaboration with Michel Vieillard-Baron (Crcao)

Compiled around 534–535 by Xu Ling (507–583), under the title *New Songs for the Jade Terrace* (*Yutai xinyong* 玉臺新詠*) and under the patronage of the Crown Prince of the Liang dynasty (502–557) Xiao Gang 蕭綱 (503–551), this anthology of courtly poetry constitutes a cornerstone of the history of Chinese regulated verse (shi 詩). The ‘palace style’ (gongti 宮體) which it promotes constitutes ‘modern’ poetry within the contemporary literary and sociological context: the formal innovations (notably parallelism and tonal counterpoint) that characterise it would become definitively enshrined in the codified poetic form (known as ‘modern style’, jinti 近體) from the Tang dynasty (618–907) onwards. The aim of this fortnightly seminar is to collectively complete the partial translation of the New Songs for the Jade Terraces begun by François Martin (1948–2015), to produce the missing translations, but also, and above all, to compile the essential critical apparatus – particularly given the fundamentally allusive nature of the ‘palace style’.

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