Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Lessons from the States, Odes Of Wei and Odes of Wang

[x_los]

Thanks for a nice crop of responses! Remember to check out the comments, and thank you to those who've contributed Baidu and other language insights that aren't accessible to non-Chinese speakers.

Some notes:

* Two chapters translate in pinyin into Odes of Wei. This is the first one, not the second.

* I'm posting these two chapters together because they're short. We'll drop to one chapter a week if a chapter hits 'about 20' poems rather than 'about 10'.

* 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.

* The first of our reminder emails should have gone out on Saturday. If you did not get an email but you'd like to be on the list, please let me know!

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* If you haven't read it yet, chapter one, on tetrasyllabic shi poetry, in How to Read Chinese Poetry is hugely useful for the Book of Odes, imo.

Comments

Re: 60. 芄蘭 - Wan Lan

[x_los]

"Caigua, also called slipper gourd or kaywa, is a very unpretentious old vegetable plant. The small but very numerous fruits can be harvested when they are the size of olives and are often pickled or eaten raw. You can also let them grow until they are about the size of short cucumbers. Caigua is used in salads, as vegetables or as stuffed gourd"

"Though he carries a spike at his girdle,
He does not know us." why are these related?

"How easy and conceited is his manner,
With the ends of his girdle hanging down as they do!" is he... sagging? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagging_(fashion)) Socially, not literally.

So some cocky kid, prickly as this gourd, is here packing archery heat/sagging, and someone wrote He Ain't Shit, Tho, the poem?

Re: 60. 芄蘭 - Wan Lan

[superborb]

Basically yeah, this boy is immature and pretending to be all grown up.

Baidu says the interpretation is that the female poet and the boy were once friends, but suddenly the boy is wearing adult clothing and now behaves differently.