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dankodesThis week, we're reading poems 7-12 in this collection. Because of the nature of the book in question, I'll ask you to refer here for Chinese and English copies of the poems and the images together.
You can view the scroll as a whole more easily and read some background on the Met's website; the Wiki page will also help orient you. In case it's useful, here is a plain-text version of the scroll.
This is the second of three weeks we'll be spending on this collection. I'll link us to some additional background information in the coming weeks, once we've had a chance to orient ourselves; this is the first time the piece we're looking at has come with its own explanatory material, and that's a sound starting-point.
This Harvard project on the scroll looks interesting, but I can't access it in Chrome or Safari; it might just be dead.
The Met provides us with some short, online-accessible monographs which offer may context for the pictorial aspect of the scroll:
You can view the scroll as a whole more easily and read some background on the Met's website; the Wiki page will also help orient you. In case it's useful, here is a plain-text version of the scroll.
This is the second of three weeks we'll be spending on this collection. I'll link us to some additional background information in the coming weeks, once we've had a chance to orient ourselves; this is the first time the piece we're looking at has come with its own explanatory material, and that's a sound starting-point.
This Harvard project on the scroll looks interesting, but I can't access it in Chrome or Safari; it might just be dead.
The Met provides us with some short, online-accessible monographs which offer may context for the pictorial aspect of the scroll:
Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632–1717)
Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, Eighth–Fourteenth Century
Along the Border of Heaven: Sung and Yüan Paintings from the C. C. Wang Collection
12. Messengers Arrive
破瓶落井空永沉，故鄉望斷無歸心。
寧知遠使問姓音，漢語泠泠傳好音。
夢魂幾度到鄉國，覺後翻成哀怨深。
如今果是夢中事，喜過悲來情不任。
A broken bottle dropped into a well is lost forever.
With no hope in sight, I have given up all thought of returning.
How could have I known that an envoy would come from afar, asking names?
The Han speech, pleasing to the ear, brings happy news.
How many times had my soul wandered home in my dreams?
Each time after I awoke my sorrow was deeper still.
Now that I am faced with what I dreamt,
Grief comes after joy; my emotions become unbearable.
Re: 12. Messengers Arrive
So does her husband have no say in an arrangement made between the two rulers? It doesn’t seem a question of whether he’ll go for it.
Again with the dreams.
Struggling to identify who the messenger is in this scene? Is he just not pictured? The guy in blue is her husband, right? The commentary on this suggests she’ll miss her husband, and honestly that feels like an extrapolation on these guys’ parts, she’s never said one good word about him. In fact, he’s scarcely present as a character in all this. …like, is husband necessarily the right word for, arguably, Wenji’s captor and rapist? Are they even necessarily ‘married’ in a way her tradition recognises?
Re: 12. Messengers Arrive