Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Odes of the Temple&Altar, Praise-Odes Of Lu & Sacrificial Odes Of Shang

[x_los]

LAST WEEK OF SHI JING!!

Get your comments in on what we do next here, and I'll put up the poll on Saturday!

* 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.

Comments

Re: 魯頌 - Praise-Odes Of Lu: 297. 駉 - Jiong

[superborb]

Baike says this poem is praising Lu Xi, monarch of Lu (a vassal state of the Zhou, near modern day Shandong) + the prosperity of the country of Lu.

Fascinating that the word 驈 ('black and white-breeched' per Legge) does just mean "black horse with white legs" in a modern dictionary, that is so specific? Also interesting that per Baike gloss and Legge tl, in this poem it means a black horse with white hind, so there was still language drift in such a specific word. (Baike gives a pronunciation, so this is probably not a common knowledge word)

Baike glosses the 皇 light yellow horse as 'yellow-white varicolored', and the 驪 pure black as ...'pure black', so agrees for those.

Interesting that Legge translates 黄 'yellow' (Baike glosses as golden / yellow red) to bay?

"His thoughts are without limit; -" This is an interpretation difference by Legge. Baike glosses the word "thoughts" to 'auxiliary word for the start of the sentence', and so its vernacular tl is "the road run is far and long".

Huh, Baike's gloss on the 骓 'piebald, green and white' is 'dark blue / deep green / ash gray - white varicolored'. 骓 means piebald generally though.

駓 'others, yellow and white' is not glossed at all, but Baike's separate article on the character indicates it originally meant a yellow and white horse.

骍 'yellowish red' is glossed as red yellow, but 骐 'dapple gray' is 青黑色相间的马 -- which would literally be alternating green black, but I suspect 青 is not meant to invoke green here.

驒 'flecked as with scales' is glossed as 青色而有鳞状斑纹的马 which has the qing blue/green/black color again and then a 'with an appearance of scaly streaks'. Internet searching gave me the impression that the scales lent a kind of "shimmering" "light spots on dark" feeling?

There are so many hyperspecific words for horses... 骆 'white and black-maned' is just in the dictionary as that (as the archaic meaning; it means camel now)

駰 'cream-coloured' is iron-gray in the dictionary; baike glosses as gray with mixed white. Baike does agree for 騢 'red and white'

However, it disagrees with Legge for 驔 'white hairy legs', which the dictionary says is a black horse, and which Baike glosses as a black horse with a yellow back.

The fishes' eyes refers to a particular kind of marking where there are circles of white hair around the horses' eyes.

Baike says this poem uses Fu and not Xing.

Re: 魯頌 - Praise-Odes Of Lu: 297. 駉 - Jiong

[x_los]

Thanks for doing all this horse work, damn.