琴瑟之交 kinshitsu no majiwari Close as Two Zithers

琴瑟 kinshitsu is the qin and the se, two Chinese zithers; a Japanese dictionary calls the se a large qin. 之 is of, and 交 majiwari is a bond between people.

In English, one translator of a Chinese poem rendered 琴瑟 zither and lute. A dictionary of classical Chinese warns against lute, which is the pipa, a quite different instrument. It renders the pair zither and zithern.

Fujiwara no Umakai 藤原宇合 (694–737) sets the phrase in a poem to a friend passed over when the emperor called for able men. The two had been given their posts on one day, and parted. Our bond of qin and se is held far apart, he writes, our pledge of 芝 and orchid has no way to meet. Later in the poem: Beneath the sun, in the imperial capital, you hold a jade; at the edge of the clouds, in a border land, I tune my strings.

In Umakai's poem, 琴瑟之交 is set line for line against 芝蘭之契, the pledge of 芝 and orchid. 芝蘭 is a figure for a person excellent in nature, gifts and virtue. Nothing in the poem is a marriage: it is a man writing to a man. The commentaries of 1927, 1933 and 1937, as far as we read them, give the phrase as friendship. In 1933 one wrote that of a husband and wife one says 琴瑟和, but here it is the bond of friends.

Qin and se said of men is found in Chinese texts older than Umakai's poem. Our history found it in three places in the sixth-century anthology Wenxuan. In one, Cao Zhi's elegy for Wang Can, who died in 217, says our harmony as qin and se, our bond more than friends'. The anthology's commentator glosses all three from the Book of Songs: wife and children in accord, as when qin and se are played.

Two of the Japanese books our history read, of 1884 and 1894, say the phrase of a pair. A translation of 1884 says it of a bond of passion, beside the pledge of a pair of mandarin ducks. In 1894 the poet Kitamura Tōkoku 北村透谷 says it of Emerson and his wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker: their bond of qin and se had lasted not a year.

Hepburn's dictionary of Japanese and English, as printed in 1888, gives the phrase as intimate friendship. Two Japanese dictionaries, of 1912 and 1925, use 琴瑟 for brothers and friends in harmony. They use it for husband and wife, too. The Japanese ones we read today give the marriage alone.

Our history of the phrase offers a reading, signed as a reading and not as a finding. It reads the phrase as a friendship, with a marriage standing behind it from the start. The Book of Songs already set qin and se for wife and children in accord. Read alone today, 琴瑟之交 says a happy marriage. To say what Umakai said, it needs his poem beside it.

A phrase of Fujiwara no Umakai's poem to a friend in the capital, written while he governed Hitachi after 719 and kept in the Kaifūsō of 751; no Chinese use of the four characters has been found in the texts searched.