The Songs of the South by Qu Yuan
Published -278 · 60,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Poetry, Classic Literature
How hard is The Songs of the South to read?
The Songs of the South scores 77 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 88 out of 100
- The Chu dialect vocabulary of plants, minerals, deities and ritual objects is the most obscure in classical Chinese; a third of Hawkes's pages are notes and identifications.
- Sentence structure: 76 out of 100
- Long irregular lines hinged on the untranslatable particle xi, with unmarked speaker changes inside a single hymn.
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Political grievance argued through cosmological journey and shamanic ritual, with allegory operating at every level.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- Dense with mythological geography, dynastic exempla and the names of dozens of plants used as moral emblems, all requiring apparatus.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- It is never clear whether the speaker is Qu Yuan, a shaman, a rejected consort or an allegorical figure, and the Chinese commentary tradition has argued the point for two millennia.
- Symbolic density: 90 out of 100
- Every flower and stone is a moral emblem, the courtship of goddesses stands for the search for a worthy ruler, and the whole poem is a coded political argument.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- The grievance is sincere, but the elaborate self-adornment invites and has received readings that treat the speaker as compromised.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- The Li Sao ends with the flight abandoned and the poet resolving to join a dead sage in the water, which resolves nothing about the state he leaves.
- Structural complexity: 80 out of 100
- An anthology of works by several hands over three centuries, mixing shaman hymns, allegorical journeys, riddles and a soul-summoning ritual, with attribution disputed throughout.
How The Songs of the South is regarded
The Songs of the South holds a literary regard score of 85 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.