《人间词话》英译（六十六）

双声、叠韵之论，盛于六朝，唐人犹多用之。至宋以后，则渐不讲，并不知二者为何物。乾嘉间，吾乡周公霭先生著《杜诗双声叠韵谱括略》，正千余年之误，可谓有功文苑者矣。其言曰：“两字同母谓之双声，两字同韵谓之叠韵。”余按用今日各国文法通用之语表之，则两字同一子音者谓之双声。如《南史·羊元保传》之“官家恨狭，更广八分”，“官家更广”四字，皆从ｋ得声。《洛阳伽蓝记》之“狞奴慢骂”，“狞奴”两字，皆从ｎ得声。“慢骂”两字，皆从ｍ得声也。两字同一母音者，谓之叠韵。如梁武帝“后牖有朽柳”，“后牖有”三字，双声而兼叠韵。“有朽柳”三字，其母音皆为ｕ。刘孝绰之“梁王长康强”，“梁长强”三字，其母音皆为ｉａｎ也。自李淑《诗苑》伪造沈约之说，以双声叠韵为诗中八病之二，后是诗家多废而不讲，亦不复用之于词。余谓苟于词之荡漾处多用叠韵，促节处用双声，则其铿锵可诵，必有过于前人者。惜世之专讲音律者，尚未悟此也。

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Discussions of alliteration (shuang-sheng) and assonance (tieh-yun) flourished during the Six Dynasties period and T’ang writers still made extensive use of them. But fro Sung times on interest in them gradually declined to the point where no one actually understood what they were all about. During the Ch’ien-lung and Chia-ch’ing periods my fellow-townsman, Chou Ch’un, wrote Tu shih shuang-sheng tieh-yun p’u k’uo lueh (Comprehensive list of alliteratioin and assonance in Tu [Fu’s] poetry and corrected the mistakes made over the previous one thousand and more years. His was certainly a great contribution to the literary world. He said: ‘When two words have the same initial sound it is called alliteratoin. When two words have the same final sound it is called assonance’. If we were to borrow grammatical expressions used in various modern countries to convey the idea then two words with the same initial ‘consonant’ are called alliteration. For example, in the biography of Yang Hsuan-pao in the Nan shih (History of the Southern dynasties) there is the passage: ‘Kuân ka y Kuân ka yən-yâp, kang kwâng n-yâp, kang kwâng: pwǎt piuən’ （官家恨狭更广八分）. The four charactoers, kuân,ka, kang and kwâng: all start with the phoneme k. In the Lo-yang ch’ieh-lan chi (Recofd of monasteries of Loyang) there is the line: ‘Ning nue man-ma: （狞奴慢骂）. Ning and nuo both start with the phoneme n, while man-and ma: both start with m. Two words ending in the same ‘vowel’ are called assonance. For example, the line of Emperor Wu of the Liang: ‘yəu: iəu: jiəu: Xiəu: liəu: （后牖有朽柳）：has three characters, yən: iən: jiən:, that contain both alliteration and assonance. And jieu:, xieu:, and lieu: all have the vowel u. In Liu Hsiao-cho’s ‘Liang ywâng d’iang k’ âng g’iang’ （梁皇长康强）, liang, d’iang, and g’iang all have thw vowel sound ian. Ever since Li Shu in his Shih yuan [lei ko] (Classified rules and extracts [of critics] on poetry) falsely attributed the [eight ills] theory of prosody to Shen Yueh, mentioning alliteration and assonance as two of the eight ills, the majority of poets in later generations stopped discussiong these techniques and no longer used them in tz’u. it is my opinion that if poets had used more assonance in the choppy spots and more alliteration in the jerky spots, then their tinkling melodiousness would have surpassed that of their predecessors. It is a pity that the specialists in musical theory still do not understand this.