The Ballad of Mulan

[x_los]

Just one poem this week, but it's a long and famous one. We were planning on starting Eighteen Old Poems this week and then doing the Northern Wei (circa 400 AD) Ballad of Mulan after, but because we've been going in a mostly chronological order, I wanted to flip the sequence rather than jumping to Tang poems set in a Song scroll, then doubling back on ourselves.

Because the Ballad of Mulan has been adapted so many times, I'm not going to be able to easily pull together a source-post on it. Instead, I have some links. 

The quite good wiki page for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Mulan
Some background context in English: https://mulanbook.com/pages/northern-wei/ballad-of-mulan
A meh podcast on the ballad: https://www.chineseliteraturepodcast.com/?p=285
Other translations of the text: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Ballad_of_Mulan ; https://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/mulan.php

( Chinese Text )

( English text )