Little Primer of Du Fu, Poems 1-5

[x_los]

This week we start David Hawkes' Little Primer of Du Fu. I'll replicate the poems themselves here, but this book contains considerable exegesis, so I do advise you to grab this copy.

Because this exegesis is relatively substantial, let's start by reading poems 1 through 5, inclusive. There are 35 poems in the collection, so this should take us about seven weeks (unless we scale either up or down, after speaking about it).

I'm gathering additional research materials, but for this first week I'd like us to concentrate on Hawkes' introduction and the first of these poems. 

Comments

Re: 2. 兵車行 Bīng-chē xíng

[x_los]

So this was the sequence of events wherein I learned you cannot just blithely search for the characters and listen to audio to get an idea of flow:

“I’m so fucking mad never has anything sounded less like the letters used to describe it 
https://youtu.be/orQEwNYljio 
I thought only Wales could fuck me over like this

Does this guy have an accent or do words have no meaning 

Xing ren is said ‘huang yan??’ 
what kind of establishment are they running. I would like to speak to the manager of pinyin.

OH THANK GOD it was Canto that’s why only some words made sense to me based off phonetics I know at all phew PHEW”

So you know, only do that—with caution.



In (Mandarin) recitation, this feels like it has iambs almost? I caught my fingers moving up and down on the tracking pad, expecting the movement of the line.

““xíng is a type of ballad” is this then a different sing from ‘how to read chinese poetry’’s xing, which was either the nature image the poem used to establish its mood or juxtapose its core content or the turn between the two components?



“Po Chüi’s famous ‘Song of Everlasting Grief’”: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Song_of_Everlasting_Regret We read this one! https://dankodes.dreamwidth.org/9382.html

how the fuck do they get Po Chüi from Bai Juyi?

“Rather it is a completely original poem written in the ballad style.” Is that common?

Fascinating point about the Book of Odes’ reputation

enclitic /ɪnˈklɪtɪk,ɛnˈklɪtɪk/ a word pronounced with so little emphasis that it is shortened and forms part of the preceding word, for example n't in can't.

hendiadys /hɛnˈdʌɪədɪs/ the expression of a single idea by two words connected with ‘and’, e.g. nice and warm, when one could be used to modify the other, as in nicely warm.

“Lǒng-mǔ: lǒng on its own is used of the baulks of earth which divide the fields in the Chinese countryside.” Like hedgerows but raised dirt?

“Note that Chinese frequently uses a rhetorical question where in English we would use a negative statement. The oddity of much translation from the Chinese is due to the failure of translators to make allowance for this fact. It isn’t English to say ‘Dare I tell you?’ when we mean ‘I dare not tell you’.” An interesting note!

“Bǎi-cǎo: the ‘hundred’ in such expressions is really little more than a plural prefix: ‘the grasses of the field’.” and this

Kokonor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinghai_Lake

“Jiū-jiū” didn’t this crop up in shi jing too?

Re: 2. 兵車行 Bīng-chē xíng

[douqi]

Re: xing - It's a different word altogether - the 'xing' in the Shijing is 兴 (fourth tone) and the 'xing' in the title here is 行 (second tone).