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* The 'due date' for this batch is the week of August 18th: I just thought I'd make the post now so that people can trickle in whenever. There were two votes in favour of East Asia Student's translations, so that's what I've gone with. If you prefer or would like to bring another translation into the discussion, please feel free. 

* Chapter Five of
How to Read Chinese Poetry is specifically about the Nineteen Old Poems.

* 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.

* Remember you can also look at
How to Read Chinese Poetry in Contextthough it doesn't specifically treat this collection.

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

* 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.

Re: 1. 行行重行行 - Marching On and On

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2021-08-16 09:14 pm (UTC) - Expand
Date: 2021-08-17 12:12 am (UTC)

Re: 1. 行行重行行 - Marching On and On

elviaprose: (Default)
From: [personal profile] elviaprose
I really like the language of this poem. I wonder how the turn at the end reads to someone more familiar with this poetry/genre/emotional register?
Date: 2021-08-22 09:24 pm (UTC)

Re: 1. 行行重行行 - Marching On and On

superborb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] superborb
The TL of that last line seems strangely-- muted to me? Like, nuli feels stronger than just a please to me. But possibly it's just that the entreaty to eat more feels more loving in Chinese than English, so it comes out not strong enough in the TL.

Baike:

生別離 [Living far away from you] is a set phrase from that era, means an eternal parting/separation.

Baike glosses the barbarian horses as merely northern and also just says northern in its vernacular TL. Also says one source says that the 'depends' character can be read as a neigh.

The white sun in [The drifting clouds obscure the sunlight] used to refer to the sovereign king, here the husband.

Baike glosses the old in [Longing for you makes one grow old] as wasting away and a wan and sallow appearance.

The phrase 加餐饭 [Please make sure you are eating well], which literally means eat an extra meal, was a set phrase used to comfort others at this time.

Re: 1. 行行重行行 - Marching On and On

From: [personal profile] vorvayne - Date: 2021-08-25 10:32 am (UTC) - Expand
Date: 2021-08-25 10:57 am (UTC)

Re: 1. 行行重行行 - Marching On and On

vorvayne: Abarai Renji, guy with long red hair and intense expression (Default)
From: [personal profile] vorvayne
I love this one actually it's very. Well for a start I knew most of the hanzi so that was nice and every time I see a gloss of a classical line I feel like I get more how to parse it.

I too don't see homesickness in the first line but I do see a kind of longing-over-distance so it's like. Similar? Ish? But I don't think it's *home* the poet is longing for. I don't know that it's even the person, or even a longing; they're just like feeling the weight of distance and separation. That's how the xing xings feel to me. I don't know, like, how and whether words that mean different things echo their other meanings in Chinese poetry because that's very like, language dependent, but chong (重) also can mean 'heavy, important'. And there exist other words for 'again' and 'repeated' in classical cn.

I wonder if the line

棄捐勿復道
qì juān wù fù dào
[reject] [abandon] [do not] [again] [speak]
But let’s not speak any more of this rejection;

contains a similar ambiguity. Like: wu fu dao, wu (do not) fu (return, go and come back) dao (road, walk) - you could also read it like, let's not close the distance between us and come back together. Like I worry I'm doing that thing where you read shakespeare and you're like, I know what this word means in modern English therefore - but I don't see why not bc afaik those meanings are all old.

Anyway I just really like this one. I feel like it uses similar sorts of conventions and metaphors as the Shijing ones but is just like a little more immediately comprehensible.

ALSO there's a lot of tianya ke vibes here actually and I think it's because of

各在天一涯
gè zài tiān yī yá
[each] [at] [sky] [one] [horizon]
Each of us at opposite ends of the sky.

and like tianya ke is 天涯客 - where 天涯 is, yeah, 'the edge of the sky/world, the horizon' but also metaphorically 'the other end of the world, a distant place'. Like this could even be the poem that that comes from. Like this is a whole Tradition, you get shit like

海内存知己,天涯若比邻
[whole world][exists][one who knows me], [distant lands][like][neighbour]
hard to fucking translate but like
'if in this world there is one who knows me, then the ends of the earth seem familiar/near'

Tang dynasty apparently, dude called Wang Wei google tells me. CanNOT help but feel Priest has read this one.

Re: 2. 青青河畔草 - Green, Green, Grass on the Riverbank

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2021-08-16 09:55 pm (UTC) - Expand
elviaprose: (Default)
From: [personal profile] elviaprose
I love the contrasts in this poem. A bit clearer to me how the duality in this one works compared to in #1.
superborb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] superborb
Baike:

The gloss on the window is... SO LONG. Anyway, this window is specifically the one on the wall (and not on the ceiling, which is where the modern day word for window comes from), between the main hall and the room.

The singing girls, according to the Shuowen Jiezi (one of the early dictionaries), are definitely prostitutes.

Interestingly, the baike vernacular TL is from the POV of the wandering vagrant? Like, 'she used to be in a brothel, and hoped to live an ordinary life as the wife of a wanderer / I don't want to be a wanderer to travel and never come back, abandoning her to stay alone is unbearable'

The description here, just like for 1, is that these poems were probably not made by one person and were written in the Eastern Han Dynasty.

Re: 3. 青青陵上柏 - Green, Green, Cypress on the Mound

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2021-08-16 09:58 pm (UTC) - Expand
elviaprose: (Default)
From: [personal profile] elviaprose
Totally love the image of a busy, rich life this poem creates. A real departure from the first two poems in almost every way. Much less duality/contrast. Do we read the last line as ironic at all?

Re: 3. 青青陵上柏 - Green, Green, Cypress on the Mound

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2021-08-22 11:12 pm (UTC) - Expand
superborb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] superborb
Baike:

Thank you Baike for the 2384972389th discussion on the color of qing. Baike says here, it's the lushness of the vegetation.

It's interesting that Baike glosses the fact that 磊 is a combined ideogram formed of three 'stone' characters? I guess it must not be in wide use anymore, though the dictionary does not note that it is archaic or anything like that.

The 'guest travelling from afar' is a metaphor for the shortness of life, like a passing traveler in the world, who must go back soon.

The 'sparse' in 'our friendship is rife, let it not be sparse' is glossed as the aroma of the wine being insipid/weak.

The 'stubborn horses' are inferior, worn out horses. Also used as an adjective as a metaphor to mean substandard.

There were two palaces (north and south) in Luoyang city.

The towers are two platforms in front of ancient palaces, temples, or mausoleums, usually one on the left and one on the right, with a road in between, to allow people to keep watch. Also an alternate name for the palace gates.

Baike's gloss points out that it has the common theme of life being short with the poem 驱车上东门 in this collection, but the artistic implications are different.
elviaprose: (Default)
From: [personal profile] elviaprose
What is the significance of the unvoiced thoughts to the meaning of this poem? I find it intriguing.
superborb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] superborb
Baike:

'highest horses' = good horses

'and be the first to seize the roads and fords?': be the first to occupy the most important positions

This time period was full of turmoil and corruption, so the ordinary scholars had no way to return home and were very disillusioned. To relieve their depression, they reflect on the values of life and the final destination.

I guess this is the narrator trying to shake his fellow scholars out of their funk and trying to get them motivated?

Re: 5. 西北有高樓 - A Tall Tower in the Northwest

From: [personal profile] ann712 - Date: 2021-08-16 10:11 pm (UTC) - Expand
From: (Anonymous)
Very much missing the social context of this poem, but the image is still incredibly beautiful

Re: 8. 冉冉孤生竹 - Frail Bamboo Growing Alone

From: [personal profile] ann712 - Date: 2021-08-16 10:23 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: 8. 冉冉孤生竹 - Frail Bamboo Growing Alone

From: [personal profile] superborb - Date: 2021-08-23 12:59 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: 8. 冉冉孤生竹 - Frail Bamboo Growing Alone

From: [personal profile] superborb - Date: 2021-08-23 12:57 am (UTC) - Expand
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