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

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!

If you would like not to be on the list and there isn't an unsubscribe option in the email itself, please just respond 'unsubscribe' or something and I'll take you off the reminder roster.

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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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

So this is a poem about a actual lady upon her marriage: Zhuang Jiang (paintings here: https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%BA%84%E5%A7%9C) of the Qi state, upon marriage to Wei state's Zhuang gong. She was a poet -- some of the other poems in Bei Feng are hypothesized to have been written by her. Her Baidu article is hilariously longer than her husband's lol. Suitable bc her husband had a violent temper and was indifferent to her (bc of childlessness?), rude. She was also known as Jiang Ruoxi (her father's surname was Jiang), and called Zhuang Jiang post marriage (? having trouble parsing the last bit, bc everyone has a zillion names).

Translations from Baidu as always, in the format of Legge's descriptor: Baidu's gloss
Grass: buds of cogon grass, used as thatching material
Ointment: congealed fat, means her skin is glossy and lustrous
Grub: larva of the longhorn beetle, means her neck is long and white
Melon seeds: bottle gourd seeds, means her teeth are white and arranged orderly
Cicada: small like a cicada, with a broad and square head. The forehead is ample and wide
Moth: [actually, 蛾眉, which is lit. moth eyebrow means fig. a beautiful woman] silkworm antenna, slender and curved; this indicates the eyebrows are slender and curved.

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

Re: 57. 碩人 - Shuo Ren