dankodes | Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Lessons from the states, Odes Of Bei

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Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Lessons from the states, Odes Of Bei

This is a longer chapter than the previous two, and people are still catching up with the last two chapters/acclimating to the format. Thus we'll only do one chapter this week.

I'm going to post this week's poem translations in the body of the discussion to make commenting a bit easier.

Get your 'odes of bae' jokes out early, before the rush.

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終風且暴、顧我則笑。
謔浪笑敖、中心是悼。

The wind blows and is fierce,
He looks at me and smiles,
With scornful words and dissolute, - the smile of pride.
To the center of my heart I am grieved.

終風且霾、惠然肯來。
莫往莫來、悠悠我思。

The wind blows, with clouds of dust.
Kindly he seems to be willing to come to me;
[But] he neither goes nor comes.
Long, long, do I think of him.

終風且曀、不日有曀。
寤言不寐、願言則嚏。

The wind blew, and the sky was cloudy;
Before a day elapses, it is cloudy again.
I awake, and cannot sleep;
I think of him, and gasp.

曀曀其陰、虺虺其靁。
寤言不寐、願言則懷。

All cloudy is the darkness,
And the thunder keeps muttering.
I awake and cannot sleep;
I think of him, and my breast is full of pain.

An alternate translation:

Zhong-feng: Wild and Windy
by Arthur Waley
Wild and windy was the day;
You looked at me and laughed,
But the jest was cruel, and the laughter mocking.
My heart within is sore.

There was a great sandstorm that day;
Kindly you made as though to come,
Yet neither came nor went away
Long, long my thoughts.

A great wind and darkness;
Day after day it is dark.
I lie awake, cannot sleep,
And gasp with longing.

Dreary, dreary the gloom;
The thunder growls.
I lie awake, cannot sleep,
And am destroyed with longing.

These translations feel pretty different to me? I see how the are saying the same thing, but as a linguistically challenged person translation seems so complex and magical

Oo, so, I think I kind of know this one? This poetic form is HIGHLY condensed, so the relations between the characters themselves can be read quite a few ways *for Chinese speakers* (as well as the reading involving a serious translation effort for modern Chinese speakers, because this is a v ancient form of the language). So more even than most translations, because there's not really an English equivalent of this evocative open terseness, the translation effort involves choosing a *reading* of the text. This is kinda clearer if you look at the How to Read Chinese Poetry book in the Reference section, I'm not sure what chapter goes into it.

The poetry anthology I've been reading did talk about this ambiguity, but since it only has one translation of each poem, I haven't really seen it in action before.

All of these angsty poems by neglected wives >:(

Am I losing it, or does this have the equivalent of an eye rhyme, at the end of the lines?

終風且曀、不日有曀。
寤言不寐、願言則嚏。

...for cloudy and gasp?

GT gives this horrifying translation, which tells me I am years away from being able to read these poems in the original:

The wind will end and will soon be awkward.
Talking is insomnia, willing to talk is sneezing.

曀 and 嚏 fully rhyme in modern chinese, but are not an eye rhyme

They do look like an eye rhyme to me but perhaps that's just bc I'm not very familiar with Chinese characters, so stuff that looks quite dissimilar to proper speakers, I don't appreciate the significant distinctions between.

How does one 'neither come nor go away'? Like. Is he standing there like John Travolta in the meme?

[embarrassing fannish bit]

"He looks at me and smiles,
With scornful words and dissolute, - the smile of pride.
To the center of my heart I am grieved."

"I think of him, and am destroyed with longing"

sorry your boyfriend is full of demons now, lwj. wop wop woooooop.

Oh thank you so much for replying! Do eye rhymes even exist—characters that look similar or have the same/related radicals? Surely they must....

So the majority of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds or pictophonetic compounds: the semantic component (the radical) indications something about its meaning, while the phonetic component gives a clue about its pronunciation (sometimes due to sound changes, the phonetic component is 0% useful, but it's usually like, rhyming or vaguely related).

If we take the examples of 曀 (yi4, obscure, sun hidden by clouds) -- the radical means sun, and the phonetic component sounds like yi1 (though it's not really used anymore; it mostly exists as a fancy way to write "one" for financial stuff); 嚏 (ti4, sneeze) -- the radical means mouth, and the phonetic component is zhi4, which I guess rhymes.

Anyway, if you take two words that have the same phonetic component, there's a reasonable chance they sound similar?

This is blowing my tiny mind. I should say that I'm an American poet who is enrolled in beginning Chinese but I clearly know nothing about orthography or how the semantic and phonetic interact. This information is like water on my dusty dry brain and I'm so so grateful for your generosity with this knowledge. <3

PS x_los THIS IS WHY I'M HERE

Okay so here is my Colossally Stupid Question: what is with the repetition/variation. In the first week we'd have 3 stanzas repeated/varying, and now we have 4. But like...why. What is that about? Is it like in Western popular music, when you repeat the chorus but change a few words to make it more poignant? What about this form would have made its audience swoon? It's really fascinating to me. Sorry for being a ninnyhammer, I'm just a very simple poet.

(You just could never get away! with doing this! in an Anglophone contemporary poem!)

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Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Lessons from the states, Odes Of Bei

30. 終風 - Zhong Feng

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