Shan’ge, the ’Mountain Songs’: Love Songs in Ming China is an edition and translation of Ming folksongs from the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. These songs were collected and rewritten by the writer Feng Menglong, who is also well-known for his collection of Chinese folk stories. While, as with his prose stories, Feng turned to these folk songs as a way of reinvigorating Chinese literature, from the folklorist’s perspective they are valuable because, as Santangelo points out in his preface, they preserve aspects of Chinese folk culture and language that would have otherwise been lost to us. The songs originated as popular or folk songs, but were often rewritten by Feng, and some of the songs are his own imitations of the folk songs. As Santangelo notes, “Feng Menglong’s undertaking was extremely innovative, as he not only recorded the lyrics of oral songs, but also included compositions written by himself in imitation of Suzhou songs in dialect” (xi). The volume is part of a new series of books from Brill “on the representation of emotions and imagery” (ix), and is a useful addition to the literature on Chinese folklore written in Western languages.

The book opens with a general introduction by ?ki Yasushi that places Feng Menglong’s work in its literary and cultural contexts. While this introduction is very useful, it is a summary of a book in Japanese by ?ki Yasushi, which becomes problematic at several points where the reader would like more detailed information, but where, rather than encountering further explanation in this English-language introduction, the reader is referred back to the original Japanese work. The volume’s second introduction is by Paolo Santangelo. This introduction considers more closely the stylistic aspects of the poems, as well as some functional aspects of the poems such as their role in social control.

The translation reads well, and is well annotated. It includes Feng’s commentary on the poems in addition to the notes by the translators. The glossary covers all of the words in the text, but in one sense is something of a disappointment. Santangelo’s introduction to the glossary (291¬325) sets out rather nicely how a glossary of the text could be used to study the emotional language and private life of Ming China, but what is given in the glossary is a simple gloss of the words—the possible semantic and historical studies of the words outlined in the introduction are not carried out in the glossary.

It should be noted that ?ki and Santangelo translate only part of Feng’s collection. The choice of what to translate seems to have been predicated on ?ki’s and Santangelo’s interest in feelings and emotions: the lyrics they translate comprise the first seven chapters of Feng’s collection, which are all composed of songs relating to emotions and feelings. The later chapters of Feng’s collection include much of folkloric interest, however, so it is to be hoped that they too will be translated at some point.

This is, then, a worthy addition to the English-language literature on Chinese folklore. But the potential buyer ought to be aware that the physical book is not up to Brill’s usual high standards of bookmaking—indeed, the endpapers of my reviewer’s copy, which looks like a book-on-demand book, have already begun to pull away from the binding.

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[Review length: 545 words • Review posted on January 9, 2012]