塞吉阿与中国的辞赋（英文）

Saj? and the Chinese Rhymed Prose

阿拉伯的“塞吉阿”韵文,曾散见于贾希利叶时期的演说辞、箴言与巫师卜辞.由于它和《古兰经》的密切关系,在伊斯兰教产生之初反而受到抑制.后来伴随着书牍文学的兴起,“塞吉阿”韵文传统得以复兴,被广泛应用于书信写作、书籍序言和标题,在伊历四世纪也出现了以韵文描写虚构故事的玛卡梅文体.我国的辞赋传统历史悠久,辞赋的起源和它的早期应用与“塞吉阿”颇有类似之处.本文以“塞吉阿”和贾希利叶时期的巫师传统为主线,以中国辞赋的早期发展为副线,比较了“塞吉阿”在伊斯兰教兴起之后、辞赋在儒教兴起之后的不同命运.本文也试图说明巫文化在韵文的产生和发展中具有的特殊意义.

Sajc is a highly artificial style of Arabic literature which can be traced back to pre-Islamic soothsaying and the Qur＇an. It is characterized by rhythms and rhymes, as well as “the use of an obscure, archaizing,bizarre and cabalistic vocabulary.” In the Islamic period,Saj、 not only reasserted itself with the development of Arabic oratorical art, but also became increasingly used in official correspondence and other forms of prose writing such as the maqamah genre.In the Chinese literature, there is also an archaic genre called cifu that lies midway between prose and poetry, and “had close ties with a tradition of wizardry.59 Cifu became very popular in the Han period （ca. 206 B.C.E.-220 C. E.） for its lush verbal imagery and descriptive function.Very few scholarly ink has been spilled comparing Arabic sajc and Chinese cifu, the two famous examples of rhymed prose in pre-modem world literature.This paper aims at discussing the origins of the two styles, their different fates after the advent of Islam and Confucianism, as well as some of their common usages in later literary texts, in the hope that we may consider both Arabic and Chinese rhymed prose in a broader context.