A Conversation with Asia Center Author Nicholas Morrow Williams

This week, we’re speaking with Nick Williams, Professor of Chinese at Arizona State University, whose new book, 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘶𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘢𝘳𝘬: 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 “𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘘𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴” 𝘈𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘴 𝘛𝘸𝘰 𝘔𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘯𝘪𝘢, traces how Chinese readers and scholars since the Han dynasty have variously interpreted the ancient poem “Heavenly Questions” (Tianwen), an enigmatic work attributed to Qu Yuan (fl. ca. 300 BCE).

Could you give us an overview of your book
My book explores how Chinese readers, writers, and scholars have engaged with the ancient poem "Heavenly Questions." This is a long poem from the Warring States period (ca. 475-221 BCE). It consists of a series of questions about mythology and history from even earlier periods, going back to the founding of the Zhou dynasty around 1045 BCE and even earlier. 

Since it deals with such remote history, it has been challenging to readers ever since. My focus is not so much on the original meaning of the poem but on how it has been understood. The book deals primarily with three time periods in the poem's reception: first, the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), when scholars edited the text and wrote commentaries to it; second, the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), when the banished poet Liu Zongyuan wrote a long response to the poem in poetic form, "Heavenly Responses"; and third, how scholars from the last few centuries have continued to analyze and interpret the poem, gradually resolving more and more of the enigmas it presents.

What drew you to this area of research?
What really fascinated me about this topic was how difficult it was for readers in the Han dynasty to understand the poem. Since they were only a few centuries removed from the creation of the poem, you might think they would have better access to its original meaning than we do. That may be true in some regards, but in my book I also identify some particular issues where Han readers are confused, but modern scholars can understand the poem pretty. The most dramatic is the case of Wang Hai from the Shang dynasty (16th-11th centuries BCE), a revered ancestor whose name had been forgotten by the Han, but whom we can identify from the oracle bone inscriptions, which were only rediscovered in the 20th century.

More broadly, this particular poem is part of a larger anthology called Elegies of Chu (Chuci), which I had already been working on for quite a few years. People tend to read this anthology as a whole and look at a set of themes that tie the anthology together, such as its exotic imagery and shamanistic religious ideas. But at some point, I started to notice that "Heavenly Questions" stands out within the anthology as something that is uniquely mysterious. Usually when reading texts from antiquity, we tend to think they are hard to understand because a lot of the original context and meaning has been lost. But in the case of "Heavenly Questions," the mystery is the point: the poem to me seems to be pointing out lots of mysteries and contradictions in the historical record.

What was the question (or questions) that were driving the writing of this book?
The main questions are about hermeneutics: how can we interpret texts from the remote past? How can we make use of earlier readers' attempts, even if they may seem mistaken or biased to us? What are the special challenges of trying to identify the original meaning of a poem, which may have been pointing to something mystical or obscure even from its very creation?

If you had to distill it, what’s the central argument or theme readers should take away?
My main argument is suggested by the title: when we are trying to interpret difficult texts from an ancient or foreign culture, the process is more like a series of dialogues than a scientific investigation. Because there is no single or definitive answer about the meaning of a literary text, we need to make use of past interpretations to help guide us to how the meaning of the text has changed over time. Ultimately we will put forward our own original interpretations too, but these are one more contribution to the dialogue, not the conclusion of it.

How did you structure the research in this book? (Chronologically, by theme ect) Why did you decide to structure this way?
The book basically follows a chronological structure. Chinese history is so long and intricate that this is usually the safest way to organize our research.

The more unusual aspect of the book's structure is the role of translation. The different interpretations of the poem over time are not just about its deeper implications, but also about the surface meaning of the text. I wanted to illustrate that by means of translation, so in this book I provide three separate translations of the entire "Heavenly Questions." The first includes the Han-dynasty commentary to the poem; the second includes Liu Zongyuan's response; and the third includes my own commentary referencing numerous suggestions by modern scholars. I felt this was an important aspect of the book, because sometimes the different interpretations of the poem vary so much that they really transform how we translate it into English.
What was the most challenging part of the research or writing process?
I enjoy refining the thesis of a research project in my mind, and also delight in the work of writing out my arguments and translating the Chinese texts to support them.  But the final work of editing, and especially making sure that  all the references and translations are consistent, is quite an ordeal, so I was glad to have the help of HUAC in editing and proofreading!

Who do you imagine as the audience for this book?
The most likely audience is going to be students and scholars of classical Chinese literature, who are already familiar with the broader picture and turn to this book to learn more about this particular topic. But I hope it will also be of interest to readers curious about Chinese history, Chinese poetry, or hermeneutics in general.

What do you hope readers will be thinking about after finishing it?
I hope readers will keep thinking about what a contingent and uneven process underlies our knowledge of the distant past. There's a lesson there that applies not just to the Shang dynasty but also to a lot of what we know about American history as well.

Do you have any stories from the process—fieldwork, archival finds, or even how you chose the title/cover—that give readers a glimpse of how the book took shape?
A lot of the ideas in this book originated from my teaching in Hong Kong, where I lived for a decade. Some of the courses I taught there were conducted in Chinese, so I would lecture in Mandarin. Sometimes it is easier to discuss literature in the original language, not in translation. But if you just read out the original text of a work like "Heavenly Questions" in Chinese today, nobody can understand it at all. So that experience helped me to appreciate how much even Chinese readers rely on commentary and scholarship to understand their own tradition.

One of the more complicated things I had to do to finish up the book was to track down the image that serves as the frontispiece, a photograph of an oracle bone that mentions Wang Hai. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use an image of an oracle bone, since the discovery of these inscriptions at the beginning of the 20th century marks a huge turning point in the story. But they are scattered all around the world in different museum collections. I eventually discovered that this particular one is held by the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The curators there were very helpful in locating the particular item I needed and in providing a high resolution image. For most of my work I can use print books and other materials that are easier to access, so it was a fun challenge to track down such a tangible object: an actual ox bone that had been inscribed with an important message more than three thousand years ago.