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

275. 思文 - Si Wen

[x_los]

思文后稷、克配彼天、立我烝民、莫匪爾極。
貽我來牟、帝命率育。
無此疆爾界、陳常于時夏。

O accomplished Hou-ji,
Thou didst prove thyself the correlate of Heaven;
Thou didst give grain-food to our multitudes; -
The immense gift of thy goodness.
Thou didst confer on us the wheat and the barley,
Which God appointed for the nourishment of all;
And without distinction of territory or boundary,
The rules of social duty were diffused throughout these great regions.

Re: 275. 思文 - Si Wen

[x_los]

Again with the fancy pronouns.

"correlate of Heaven;" oddly put

"And without distinction of territory or boundary," what is this doing?

Re: 275. 思文 - Si Wen

[superborb]

Baike spends a lot of time discussing if Zhou Gong did or did not write this poem-- and concludes that the original intention was that the person who first proposed that only meant that it reflected the thinking of Zhou Gong, not that he wrote it. (Zhou Gong helped the first three Zhou kings that we've seen a bunch in this series.)