Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Odes of the Temple and the Altar, Sacrificial Odes of Zhou, Chen Gong

[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 21.** 

ONLY 3 SHI JING WEEKS LEFT, THIS INCLUDED!   

Comments

277. 噫嘻 - Yi Xi

[x_los]

噫嘻成王、既昭假爾。
率時農夫、播厥百穀。
駿發爾私、終三十里。
亦服爾耕、十千維耦。

Oh! yes, king Cheng,
Brightly brought himself near.
Lead your husbandmen,
To sow their various kinds of grain,
Going vigorously to work on your private fields,
All over the thirty li.
Attend to your ploughing,
With your ten thousand men all in pairs.

Re: 277. 噫嘻 - Yi Xi

[x_los]

"Brightly brought himself near." near to WHAT, dog?

Who is this injunction to?

Re: 277. 噫嘻 - Yi Xi

[superborb]

Baike says it's controversial who is speaking / spoken to. One controversy is over if this is Cheng Zhou wang or Kang Zhou wang. (Cheng can mean "becoming", and also potentially Cheng wang indicates a birth name instead of a posthumous title.) Of course, then it might not be the king himself, but one of his ministers speaking. Then the other controversy is over who is being spoken to -- the "brightly brought himself near" bit -- either used for the gods or ancestors / former kings (what the vernacular translation goes for) or to the subjects / farmers.

Also something interesting is that the final four lines are written in a really stylized syntax, such that the adjacent characters form pairs.

Re: 277. 噫嘻 - Yi Xi

[x_los]

oh so '*brightly* brought himself' has this whole other meaning of--signalling gods/ancestors/dead kings?

Maybe the characters in pairs suggest the labourers in their pairs.

Re: 277. 噫嘻 - Yi Xi

[superborb]

Yeah, but like, controversial what exactly is meant-- brightly is the literal translation