Handwritten Chinese Font Generation with Collaborative Stroke Refinement

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Handwritten Chinese Font Generation with Collaborative Stroke Refinement Handwritten Chinese Font Generation with Collaborative Stroke Refinement Chuan Wen1 Jie Chang1 Ya Zhang1 Siheng Chen2 Yanfeng Wang1 Mei Han3 Qi Tian4 1Cooperative Madianet Innovation Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University 2Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories 3PingAn Technology US Research Lab 4Huawei Technologies Noah’s Ark Lab falvinwen, j chang, ya zhang, [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract source : 풙 Thin issue Automatic character generation is an appealing solu- final synthesis standard synthesis tion for new typeface design, especially for Chinese type- faces including over 3700 most commonly-used characters. Auxiliary branch This task has two main pain points: (i) handwritten char- acters are usually associated with thin strokes of few infor- mation and complex structure which are error prone dur- ing deformation; (ii) thousands of characters with various Dominating shapes are needed to synthesize based on a few manually branch Refine branch designed characters. To solve those issues, we propose a (multiple stroke weights) novel convolutional-neural-network-based model with three main techniques: collaborative stroke refinement, using col- laborative training strategy to recover the missing or broken strokes; online zoom-augmentation, taking the advantage of the content-reuse phenomenon to reduce the size of train- ing set; and adaptive pre-deformation, standardizing and aligning the characters. The proposed model needs only final synthesis 750 paired training samples; no pre-trained network, extra dataset resource or labels is needed. Experimental results Figure 1. Collaborative stroke refinement handles the thin issue. show that the proposed method significantly outperforms Handwritten characters usually have various stroke weights. Thin strokes have lower fault tolerance in synthesis, leading to distor- the state-of-the-art methods under the practical restriction tions. Collaborate stroke refinement adopts collaborative train- on handwritten font synthesis. ing. An auxiliary branch is introduced to capture various stroke arXiv:1904.13268v3 [cs.CV] 6 May 2019 weights, guiding the dominating branch to solve the thin issue. 1. Introduction font transfer is a low fault-tolerant task because any mis- Chinese language consists of more than 8000 characters, placement of strokes may change the semantics of the char- among which about 3700 are frequently used. Designing acters [7]. So far, two main streams of approaches have a new Chinese font involves considerable tedious manual been explored. One addresses the problem with a bottle- efforts which are often prohibitive. A desirable solution is neck CNN structure [1, 2, 7, 15, 12] and the other proposes to automatically complete the rest of vocabulary given an to disentangle representation of characters into content and initial set of manually designed samples, i.e. Chinese font style [19, 24]. While promising results have been shown in synthesis. Inspired by the recent progress of neural style font synthesis, most existing methods require an impracti- transfer [6, 9, 10, 18, 21, 26], several attempts have been re- cable large-size initial set to train a model. For example, cently made to model font synthesis as an image-to-image [1, 2, 7, 15] require 3000 paired characters for training su- translation problem [7, 19, 24]. Unlike neural style transfer, pervision, which requires huge labor resources. Several re- 1 “radical” mation to standardize characters. This allows the proposed reusing networks focus on learning high-level style deformation. “single-element” reusing Combining the above methods, we proposed an end- to-end model (as shown in Fig.3), generating high-quality characters with only 750 training samples. No pre-trained …… network, or labels is needed. We verify the performance of the proposed model on several Chinese fonts including both handwritten and printed fonts. The results demonstrate the significant superiority of our proposed method over the Figure 2. Online zoom-augmentation exploits the content-reuse state-of-the-art Chinese font generation models. phenomenon in Chinese characters. A same radical can be The main contributions are summarized as follows. reused in various characters at various locations. Online zoom- augmentation implicitly model the variety of locations and sizes • We propose an end-to-end model to synthesize hand- from elementary characters without decomposition, significantly written Chinese font given only 750 training samples; reducing the number of training samples. • We propose collaborative stroke refinement, handling the thin issue; online zoom-augmentation, enabling cent methods [12, 19, 24] explore learning with less paired learning with fewer training samples; and adaptive pre- characters; however, these methods heavily depend on ex- deformation, standardizing and aligning the charac- tra labels or other pre-trained networks. Table 1 provides a ters; comparative summary of the above methods. • Experiments show that the proposed networks are far Most of the above methods focus on printed font synthe- superior to baselines in respect of visual effects, RMSE sis. Compared with printed typeface synthesis, handwritten metric and user study. font synthesis is a much more challenging task. First, its strokes are thinner especially in the joints of strokes. Hand- 2. Related Work writing fonts are also associated with irregular structures and are hard to be modeled. So far there is no satisfying Most image-to-image translation tasks such as art-style solution for handwritten font synthesis. transfer [8, 13], coloring [5, 23], super-resolution [14], de- This paper aims to synthesize more realistic handwrit- hazing [3] have achieved the progressive improvement since ten fonts with fewer training samples. There are two main the raise of CNNs. Recently, several works model font challenges: (i) handwritten characters are usually associ- glyph synthesis as a supervised image-to-image translation ated with thin strokes of few information and complex struc- task mapping the character from one typeface to another ture which are error prone during deformation; (see Fig- by CNN-framework analogous to an encoder/decoder back- ure 1) and (ii) thousands of characters with various shapes bone [1, 2, 4, 7, 12, 15]. Specially, generative adversarial are needed to synthesize based on a few manually de- networks (GANs) [11, 16, 17] are widely adopted by them signed characters (see Figure 2). To solve the first issue, for obtaining promising results. Differently, EMD [24] and we propose collaborative stroke refinement that using col- SA-VAE [19] are proposed to disentangle the style/content laborative training strategy to recover the missing or bro- representation of Chinese fonts for a more flexible transfer. ken strokes. Collaborative stroke refinement uses an aux- Preserving the content consistency is important in font iliary branch to generate the syntheses with various stroke synthesis task. “From A to Z” assigned each Latin alpha- weights, guiding the dominating branch to capture charac- bet a one-hot label into the network to constrain the con- ters with various stroke weights. To solve the second issue, tent [20]. Similarly, SA-VAE [19] embedded a pre-trained we fully exploit the content-reuse phenomenon in Chinese Chinese character recognition network [22, 25] into the characters; that is, the same radicals may present in various framework to provide a correct content label. SA-VAE also characters at various locations. Based on this observation, embedded 133-bits coding denoting the structure/content- we propose online zoom-augmentation, which synthesizes reuse knowledge of inputs, which must rely on the extra a complicated character by a series of elementary compo- labeling related to structure and content beforehand. In nents. The proposed networks can focus on learning va- order to synthesize multiple font, zi2zi [2] utilized a one- rieties of locations and ratios of those elementary compo- hot category embedding. Similarly, DCFont [12] involved nents. This significantly reduces the size of training sam- a pre-trained 100-class font-classifier in the framework to ples. To make the proposed networks easy to capture the provide a better style representation. And recently, MC- deformation from source to target, we further propose adap- GAN [4] can synthesize ornamented glyphs from a few ex- tive pre-deformation, which learns the size and scale defor- amples. However, the generation of Chinese characters are 2 Table 1. Comparison of Our with existing Chinese font transfer methods based on CNN. Methods Requirements of data resources Dependence of extra label? Dependence of pre-trained network? Rewrite [1] AEGN [15] 3000 paired samples. None None HAN [7] zi2zi [2] Hundreds of fonts (each containing 3000 samples). Class-label DCFont [12] Hundreds of fonts (each containing 755 samples). for each font. Pre-trained font-classifier based on Vgg16 SA-VAE [19] Hundreds of fonts (each containing 133-bit structural code for each character. Pre-trained character recognition network EMD [24] 3000 samples). 14 None None Ours Only 755 paired samples 풚 concat concat CNN Discri- source: x layers minator1 32x32x128 32x32x64 32x32x128 32x32x64 32x32x128 64x64x1 CNN 土 dominated branch layerslayers 64x64x1 4x4x512 data flow 32x32x64 32x32x64 target: 풚 conv refine branch 품(·) 품(품(풃 (풚))) 풃(·) dilation operation 품(·) max-pooling auxiliary branch 품(풃(풚)) 품(·) 풃(·) 풃 (풚) adaptive pre-deformation CNN Discri- bold
Recommended publications
  • Cataloguing Chinese Art in the Middle and Late Imperial Eras
    University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Spring 2010 Tradition and Transformation: Cataloguing Chinese Art in the Middle and Late Imperial Eras YEN-WEN CHENG University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Asian Art and Architecture Commons, Asian History Commons, and the Cultural History Commons Recommended Citation CHENG, YEN-WEN, "Tradition and Transformation: Cataloguing Chinese Art in the Middle and Late Imperial Eras" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 98. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/98 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/98 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Tradition and Transformation: Cataloguing Chinese Art in the Middle and Late Imperial Eras Abstract After obtaining sovereignty, a new emperor of China often gathers the imperial collections of previous dynasties and uses them as evidence of the legitimacy of the new regime. Some emperors go further, commissioning the compilation projects of bibliographies of books and catalogues of artistic works in their imperial collections not only as inventories but also for proclaiming their imperial power. The imperial collections of art symbolize political and cultural predominance, present contemporary attitudes toward art and connoisseurship, and reflect emperors’ personal taste for art. The attempt of this research project is to explore the practice of art cataloguing during two of the most important reign periods in imperial China: Emperor Huizong of the Northern Song Dynasty (r. 1101-1125) and Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty (r. 1736-1795). Through examining the format and content of the selected painting, calligraphy, and bronze catalogues compiled by both emperors, features of each catalogue reveal the development of cataloguing imperial artistic collections.
    [Show full text]
  • Sinitic Language and Script in East Asia: Past and Present
    SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS Number 264 December, 2016 Sinitic Language and Script in East Asia: Past and Present edited by Victor H. Mair Victor H. Mair, Editor Sino-Platonic Papers Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA [email protected] www.sino-platonic.org SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS FOUNDED 1986 Editor-in-Chief VICTOR H. MAIR Associate Editors PAULA ROBERTS MARK SWOFFORD ISSN 2157-9679 (print) 2157-9687 (online) SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS is an occasional series dedicated to making available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished. The editor-in-chief actively encourages younger, not yet well established, scholars and independent authors to submit manuscripts for consideration. Contributions in any of the major scholarly languages of the world, including romanized modern standard Mandarin (MSM) and Japanese, are acceptable. In special circumstances, papers written in one of the Sinitic topolects (fangyan) may be considered for publication. Although the chief focus of Sino-Platonic Papers is on the intercultural relations of China with other peoples, challenging and creative studies on a wide variety of philological subjects will be entertained. This series is not the place for safe, sober, and stodgy presentations. Sino- Platonic Papers prefers lively work that, while taking reasonable risks to advance the field, capitalizes on brilliant new insights into the development of civilization. Submissions are regularly sent out to be refereed, and extensive editorial suggestions for revision may be offered. Sino-Platonic Papers emphasizes substance over form.
    [Show full text]
  • Handbook of Chinese Mythology TITLES in ABC-CLIO’S Handbooks of World Mythology
    Handbook of Chinese Mythology TITLES IN ABC-CLIO’s Handbooks of World Mythology Handbook of Arab Mythology, Hasan El-Shamy Handbook of Celtic Mythology, Joseph Falaky Nagy Handbook of Classical Mythology, William Hansen Handbook of Egyptian Mythology, Geraldine Pinch Handbook of Hindu Mythology, George Williams Handbook of Inca Mythology, Catherine Allen Handbook of Japanese Mythology, Michael Ashkenazi Handbook of Native American Mythology, Dawn Bastian and Judy Mitchell Handbook of Norse Mythology, John Lindow Handbook of Polynesian Mythology, Robert D. Craig HANDBOOKS OF WORLD MYTHOLOGY Handbook of Chinese Mythology Lihui Yang and Deming An, with Jessica Anderson Turner Santa Barbara, California • Denver, Colorado • Oxford, England Copyright © 2005 by Lihui Yang and Deming An All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yang, Lihui. Handbook of Chinese mythology / Lihui Yang and Deming An, with Jessica Anderson Turner. p. cm. — (World mythology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57607-806-X (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-57607-807-8 (eBook) 1. Mythology, Chinese—Handbooks, Manuals, etc. I. An, Deming. II. Title. III. Series. BL1825.Y355 2005 299.5’1113—dc22 2005013851 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, Inc. 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper.
    [Show full text]
  • Issues in Teaching Chinese Characters and Strategies for Foreign Learners Outside the Chinese Character Culture Circle
    BI WEI ISSUES IN Teaching CHINESE Characters AND Strategies FOR FOREIGN LEARNERS OUTSIDE THE CHINESE Character Culture Circle Learning Chinese is far from an easy task and acquiring Chinese characters is prob- ably the greatest challenge. Many foreign students outside the Chinese Character Culture Circle, beginners in particular, give up learning Chinese characters because of the ideographic system. This system embraces phonology, glyphs and seman- tic meaning, which are completely different from alphabetic writing. What makes things worse is that TCCF has been ignored for a long time in TCFL. TCFL started to develop in China in the early 1950s, and that involved teaching some simple characters including strokes, the order of strokes and structural analy- sis.1 There were no independent character textbooks for foreigners. The content concentrating on teaching characters did not play a leading role in materials for teaching Chinese. Furthermore, most teachers paid little attention to, or neglected character teaching and training, due to the lack of linguistic knowledge. After the mid-1990s, more and more scholars began to attach importance to the research on TCCF, which has gone deep into character components, radicals, con- stituent theory, etc. A large number of articles was reported in scientific journals. At the same time, several character textbooks for foreign beginners were also pub- lished, such as 500 Basic Chinese Characters,2 Guidance of Chinese Characters,3 Easy Way to Learn Chinese Characters.4 Character classes as voluntary or compulsory courses have been offered by many schools. In addition, some teaching concepts and methods were proposed, such as “interaction between Pinyin and characters”, “teaching method of componential structure”,5 “basic component + basic character system”,6 “character recognition/ 1 Zhou Jian, Chinese Character Teaching Theory and Method, Beijing 2007.
    [Show full text]
  • Jade Myths and the Formation of Chinese Identity
    Journal of Literature and Art Studies, April 2017, Vol. 7, No. 4, 377-398 doi: 10.17265/2159-5836/2017.04.001 D DAVID PUBLISHING Jade Myths and the Formation of Chinese Identity YE Shu-xian LIU Wan-er Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China Reality is constructed by societies, whose process must be analyzed by the sociology of knowledge. The “reality”, taken as granted by the public, has sharp contrast from one society to another. By Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman: The Social Construction of Reality Chinese civilization is the only surviving one that has a continual history that lasts for several thousand years since the Stone Age. What’s the secret of its lasting cultural vitality? How can it live through numerous military conflicts and political transitions and still firmly hold a large population of various ethnics within its administration? A long-established cultural centripetal force, i.e. cultural identity shared by multi parties, shall be the key to former questions. According to current focus of cultural research, this force is termed as “Chinese identity”, which explores the formation and continuation of Chinese civilization from the perspective of cultural identity. What is cultural identity? A simplified answer is: Cultural identity fundamentally refers to ethnicity. This characterizes a group whose members claim a common history or origin and a specific cultural heritage, no matter that the history or origin is often mythicized or that the cultural legacy is never totally homogeneous. The essential thing is that these common elements are lived by the concerned group as distinctive characteristics and perceived as such by others1.
    [Show full text]
  • The Variation of Qu Yuan's Image in Hawkes' Translation of Li
    ISSN 1923-1555[Print] Studies in Literature and Language ISSN 1923-1563[Online] Vol. 18, No. 3, 2019, pp. 68-75 www.cscanada.net DOI:10.3968/11089 www.cscanada.org The Variation of Qu Yuan’s Image in Hawkes’ Translation of Li Sao LI Yafang[a],*; TAN Honghui[b] [a] The School of Foreign Languages, Yangtze University, Jingzhou, China. INTRODUCTION [b] Professor. The School of Foreign Languages, Yangtze University, Chu Ci, as the first anthology of poems in the south of Jingzhou, China. China, possesses unshakeable status in Chinese literature. * Corresponding author. In Chu Ci, the most popular poetry is Li Sao, written by Supported by the work presented in this submission: This research Qu Yuan in the late period of the Warring States of ancient is supported by the Project Fund of Human Social Science in Hubei China. It is considered an allegory of Qu Yuan’s life. Province (2018) for the research of reconstructing China identity in the The first western translation of Li Sao was published by translation of Chu Ci under research grant number 18D027. Fitzman in 1852, under the title Li Sao and Jiu Ge, which Received 3 February 2019; accepted 25 May 2019 was brought out in the report of the Royal Academy of Published online 26 June 2019 Science in Vienna. Since then, the translated versions have been repeatedly reprinted by different publishers. Abstract Hawkes’ English version of Li Sao is widely regarded Chu Ci, as the first anthology of poems in the south of as a classic in the history of the translation of Chinese China, possesses unshakeable status in Chinese literature.
    [Show full text]
  • The WAY of CHINESE CHARACTERS
    The WAY of CHINESE CHARACTERS 漢字之道 The ORIGINS of 670 ESSENTIAL WORDS SECOND EDITION JIANHSIN WU SAMPLEILLUSTRATED BY CHEN ZHENG AND CHEN TIAN CHENG & TSUI BOSTON Copyright © 2016 by Cheng & Tsui Company, Inc. Second Edition All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning, or any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. 23 22 21 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Published by Cheng & Tsui Company, Inc. 25 West Street Boston, MA 02111-1213 USA Fax (617) 426-3669 www.cheng-tsui.com “Bringing Asia to the World”TM ISBN 978-1-62291-046-5 Illustrated by Chen Zheng and Chen Tian The Library of Congress has cataloged the first edition as follows: Wu, Jian-hsin. The Way of Chinese characters : the origins of 400 essential words = [Han zi zhi dao] / by Jianhsin Wu ; illustrations by Chen Zheng and Chen Tian. p. cm. Parallel title in Chinese characters. ISBN 978-0-88727-527-2 1. Chinese characters. 2. Chinese language--Writing. I. Title. II. Title: Han zi zhi dao. PL1171.W74 2007 808’.04951--dc22 2007062006 PrintedSAMPLE in the United States of America Photo Credits front cover ©Fotohunter/ShutterStock CONTENTS Preface v Basic Radicals 1 Numerals 17 Characters by Pinyin (A-Z) A - F 21 G - K 65 L - R 106 S - W 143 X - Z 180 Indexes CHARACTER INDEX by Integrated Chinese Lesson 227 CHARACTER INDEX by Pinyin 239 CHARACTER INDEX: TRADITIONAL by Stroke Count 251 CHARACTERSAMPLE INDEX: SIMPLIFIED by Stroke Count 263 ABOUT the AUTHOR JIANHSIN WU received her Ph.D from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
    [Show full text]
  • Integrated Chinese
    Levels0art 1 Integrated Chinese TEXTBOOK Simplified Characters Third Edition THIRD EDITION BY Yuehua Liu and Tao-chung Yao Nyan-Ping Bi, Liangyan Ge, Yaohua Shi ORIGINAL EDITION BY Tao-chung Yao and Yuehua Liu Liangyan Ge, Yea-fen Chen, Nyan-Ping Bi, Xiaojun Wang, Yaohua Shi CHENG & TSUI COMPANY BOSTON Copyright © 2009, 2005, 1997 Cheng & Tsui Company, Inc. Third Edition / third printing May 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning, or any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. All trademarks mentioned in this book are the property of their respective owners. 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Published by Cheng & Tsui Company, Inc. 25 West Street Boston, MA 02111-1213 USA Fax (617) 426-3669 www.cheng-tsui.com “Bringing Asia to the World”TM ISBN 978-0-88727-644-6 — ISBN 978-0-88727-638-5 (pbk.) Cover Design: studioradia.com Cover Photographs: Man with map © Getty Images; Shanghai skyline © David Pedre/iStockphoto; Building with masks © Wu Jie; Night market © Andrew Buko. Used by permission. Interior Design: Wanda España, Wee Design Illustrations: 洋洋兔动漫 Transportation photograph (p. 271, top): Courtesy of Kristen Wanner Subway photograph (p. 271, bottom): Courtesy of Andrew Buko Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Integrated Chinese = [Zhong wen ting shuo du xie]. Traditional character edition. Level 1, part 1 / Yuehua Liu ... [et. al]. — 3rd. ed. p. cm. Chinese and English.
    [Show full text]
  • Does the Sex Ratio of Singleton Births After Frozen Single Blastocyst Transfer Differ According to Blastocyst Morphology?
    Does the sex ratio of singleton births after frozen single blastocyst transfer differ according to blastocyst morphology? Hua Lou The Third Aliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University Na Li The Third Aliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University Xiaoke Zhang The Third Aliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University Ling Sun The Third Aliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University Xingling Wang The Third Aliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University Dayong Hao The Third Aliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University Shihong Cui ( [email protected] ) Research Keywords: Blastocyst, Frozen-thawed transfer, Inner cell mass, Trophectoderm, Sex ratio Posted Date: March 13th, 2020 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-17132/v1 License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Read Full License Version of Record: A version of this preprint was published on July 15th, 2020. See the published version at https://doi.org/10.1186/s12958-020-00623-x. Page 1/17 Abstract Purpose: To investigate the associations between morphological blastocyst parameters and the sex ratio (male:female) of singleton live births resulting from single-blastocyst frozen embryo transfer (FET) cycles. Methods: This retrospective analysis included 1210 couples who underwent single-blastocyst FET of warmed day 5 or 6 blastocysts and achieved a singleton live birth between January 2015 and February 2019. The sex ratios in the different blastocyst groups were compared using the chi-square test. The associations of morphological blastocyst parameters, including the blastocoel expansion, inner cell mass and trophectoderm grades, with the sex ratios of live births were analyzed using multiple regression models. Results: The included female patients had an average age and body mass index of 30.5±4.5 years and 23.6±3.2 kg/m2, respectively.
    [Show full text]
  • Figure and Flight in the Songs of Chu (Chuci)
    figure and flight in the chuci Asia Major (2019) 3d ser. Vol. 32.2: 1-31 lucas rambo bender Figure and Flight in the Songs of Chu (Chuci) abstract: This article discusses a previously unnoticed figural technique found in several po- ems and series in the Chuci 楚辭, one of the earliest poetry anthologies from ancient China. In these poems, images that appear in one sense reappear later on in a strik- ingly different meaning. In some of these poems and series, the effect may be merely coincidental, the result of poets or performers working with limited repertoires of tropes that therefore return in different ways. Elsewhere, however, the technique be- comes regular and purposeful, part of a metatextual reflection upon the poems’ own use of figures and images. By examining the poems and series that employ it, we can begin to trace the contours of a heretofore unwritten early history of literary theori- zation in China. keywords: Chuci, early Chinese literary theory, figurative language INTRODUCTION here is a moment in Li sao 離騷, a long poem of uncertain authorship T that represents one of the most ancient and mysterious sources of the Chinese poetic tradition, wherein the relationships among its images seem to shift. This shift corresponds with the first transition in the poem between the modes of tristia (lament) and itineraria (journey), the two main categories of Chuci 楚辭 materials identified by David Hawkes in his seminal essay, “Quest of the Goddess.”1 Before the speaker of the poem decides to leave behind his lamentations about the human world and instead to “go off to view the four wilds,” the poem’s figurative tropes overlap one another in ways that make their interrelationships unclear.
    [Show full text]
  • After Confucius
    After Confucius After Confucius Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy Paul R. Goldin University of Hawai`i Press Honolulu ( 2005 University of Hawai`i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 09 0807 06 05 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goldin, Paul Rakita. After Confucius : studies in early Chinese philosophy / Paul R. Goldin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8248-2842-9 (alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, ChineseÐTo 221 b.c. 2. Philosophy, ChineseÐ221 b.c.±960 a.d. I. Title: Studies in early Chinese philosophy. II. Title. B126.G65 2005 1810.11Ðdc22 2004017241 University of Hawai`i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by University of Hawai`i Press production staff Printed by IBT Global Gilbert L. Mattos (1939±2002) in memoriam Z«BUÊ (æ{ Év\è !(eºl Àj ãÝ ÄÃ¦ê ¨ò[ÃÈ #ý0Ì åÓ­UÁ YÄw ô»ÆA) °b G C9 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Toward a Thick Description of Chinese Philosophy 1 1. The Reception of the Odes in the Warring States Era 19 2. Xunzi in the Light of the Guodian Manuscripts 36 3. Han Fei's Doctrine of Self-Interest 58 4. Li Si, Chancellor of the Universe 66 5. Rhetoric and Machination in Stratagems of the Warring States 76 6. Insidious Syncretism in the Political Philosophy of Huainanzi 90 7. BanZhaoinHerTimeandinOurs 112 8. Those Who Don't Know Speak: Translations of Laozi by PeopleWhoDoNotKnowChinese 119 Appendix: References to the Odes in Pre-Imperial Texts, Arranged by Mao Number 135 Notes 153 Bibliography 215 Index 261 vii Acknowledgments The debts that I have accumulated in the course of writing this book are numerous, but I owe the most to my parents and to my wife, Edilma.
    [Show full text]
  • By Qu Yuan (Simplified Chinese Script Version)
    山鬼–屈原 (简 体 版) shan- gui^ qu- yuan' jian' ti' ban' The Mountain Spirit – by Qu Yuan (Simplified Chinese script version) 冯欣明注译 Translated and Annotated by Feng Xin-ming 2008 http://www.tsoidug.org/Literary/Mountain_Spirit_Simp.pdf (To Complicated Chinese 到繁體版: http://www.tsoidug.org/Literary/Mountain_Spirit_Comp.pdf ) NOTE The author, Qu Yuan (340 BCE - 278 BCE), was the famous loyal minister of the state of Chu during the Warring States who was banished by his king for trying to dissuade him from taking a series of disastrous actions, and in whose honor the annual Chinese and Korean "Dragon Boat" or Duan Wu Festival is held. Qu Yuan is also a great poet in his own right - fortunately many of his works have survived. TEXT 若 有 人 兮 山 之 阿, 被 薜 荔1 兮 带 女 萝2。 ruo` you^ ren’ xi‐ shan‐ zhi‐ e‐ pi' bi` li` xi‐ dai` nv^ luo' Lo, there's someone at the mountaintop, wearing fig leaf1 clothing and dodder vine2 ribbons. 既 含 睇 兮 又 宜 笑,子 慕 予3 兮 善 窈 宨。 ji` han' di` xi‐ you` yi' xiao` zi^ mu` yu' xi‐ shan` yao^ tiao^ She has both expressive eyes and a ready smile: “You admire me3, Sire, for being so elegant.” 1 薜荔 bi` li`: this refers to Ficus pumilis, a member of the fig family. See Ci Hai (“Sea of Terms” 《辞海》), Shanghai 1989, p. 698. 2 女萝 nv' luo': this is the same as 菟丝 tu` si­ and therefore Custcuta chinensis i.e. the twining dodder herb.
    [Show full text]