Nineteen Old Poems: Week 1 of 2

[x_los]

* 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 Context, though 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.

Comments

Re: 1. 行行重行行 - Marching On and On

[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.