Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Odes of the Temple and the Altar, Sacrificial Odes of Zhou, Qing Miao

[x_los]

   * I found the best option for the weekly reminder emails, via Gmail. The external service options are more involved than our purposes require. Does anyone know anything about how to arrange an Apps Script? Basically all it has to do is tell ten people, on Saturdays, to come and get their juice/poems.

Until someone knows what to do there, I'll send out manual messages weekly. If you'd like to receive these and are not getting them, please let me know.

* If you haven't read it yet, chapter one, on tetrasyllabic shi poetry, in How to Read Chinese Poetry is hugely useful for the Book of Odes, imo. 

* Remember you can also look at How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context.

* IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS WHO MIGHT LIKE TO JOIN or have other ideas, please let me know on this post.

* Every week I search the poems' English results to see if I can find any scholarship or neat bits and pop the results in Resources. Here is this week's collection.

**NEXT BATCH JUNE 14.** 

ONLY 4 SHI JING WEEKS LEFT, THIS INCLUDED!   

Comments

270. 天作 - Tian Zuo

[x_los]

天作高山、大王荒之。
彼作矣、文王康之。
彼徂矣岐、有夷之行、子孫保之。

Heaven made the lofty hill,
And king Da brought [the country about] it under cultivation.
He made the commencement with it,
And king Wen tranquilly [carried on the work],
[Till] that rugged [mount] Qi,
Had level roads leading to it.
May their descendants ever preserve it!

Re: 270. 天作 - Tian Zuo

[x_los]

'Had level roads leading to it.'I guess this is just one example of the 'civilising the land' rather than particularly important in and of itself. Built environment/the cultivation of pastoral landscape is so BIG in the Shi Jing!

Re: 270. 天作 - Tian Zuo

[superborb]

Baike notes that this is one of the few poems in the Shijing that mentions a specific location, Qishan. (For MDZS nonsense, this is the same Qishan for the Wen clan.) Also, Baike notes that several individual words in this poem have multiple interpretations-- e.g. if 彼 in line 3 is interpreted as the common people, then they are the ones doing the building, vs if it's interpreted as the ancestor king. The other word is 康 in line four, which could be interpreted as stability and security or as inheritance.