雲を吹く風 : 「汾上驚秋」の解釋をめぐる和漢比較文學論攷

Abstract

This paper examines 'Fen shang jing qiu' 汾上驚秋 (Surprised by autumn along the Fen), a quatrain by the early Tang poet Su Ting 蘇頲 that was anthologized in Tang shi xuan 唐詩選. The poem reads: 北風吹白雲 萬里渡河汾 心緒逢搖落 秋聲不可聞. Two theories have been proposed concerning the interpretation of the second line and there is still no firm consensus: one interprets the subject of the verb "cross" 渡 as "I, " meaning the poet himself, and the other takes it instead as the "north wind." The first is an old theory that was proposed in the Ming dynasty and has become the standard interpretation in annotated editions written by Japanese commentators. However, consider such examples as Bao Zhao's 鮑照 lines 胡風吹朔雪 千里度龍山 (from his poem 學劉公幹體) and Xie Tiao's 謝朓 lines 朔風吹飛雨 蕭條江上來 (from his poem 觀朝雨), both of which are included in the Wen xuan 文選, as well as Su Ting's own lines 北風吹早雁 日夕渡河飛. In all three of these cases, a similar pattern of expression can be seen in which the north wind blows upon something, crossing over mountains or rivers. These and other examples make the second theory seem the more likely. In other words, to interpret the lines as "When the north wind blows the white clouds, I in the course of my journey of ten thousand leagues cross over the Fen River" is a mistake. With these observations in mind, I propose two reasons to account for why Japanese readers have been particularly likely to commit such a mistake. The first is that in Japanese waka poetry, it is conventional for a traveler to gaze at clouds in the midst of his journey and feel the sorrow of parting. We can understand the misunderstanding as having arisen from interpreting the lines of Su Ting's poem in accord with the conceptions of such waka. Another reason relates to differences in the conceptualization of space between Sinitic and Japanese poetry. In Sinitic poetry, it is typical to imagine that the wind blows forth clouds from a distance of ten thousand leagues, and Su Ting's poem is an example of this. The Sinitic poem has the capacity to imagine what lies beyond the horizon. However, in the world of waka, it is conventional to depict wind-blown clouds within the space delimited by the edge of the mountains; clouds are not imagined to be blown forth across limitless space. The spatial sensibility of waka poetry, nurtured in basin-like valleys surrounded by mountains, seems to have interfered with understanding that "white clouds" could be the subject of the second line: "crossing ten thousand leagues over the Fen River."