Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Lessons from the States, Odes Of Zheng

[x_los]

Back after the Christmas/New Year break! I'd really like to get through the Book of Odes in the next months, so we can enter into our next Tang or Song offering. I'll try to be more regulated in the poem posts accordingly. 

Some notes:

* 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.

* I believe the reminder emails have stopped, so I'll seek a new service to run that. 

When the second batch of these is up and running, 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.

* IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS WHO MIGHT LIKE TO JOIN or have other ideas, please let me know on this post.

* 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.

**NEXT BATCH FEB 1.**

Comments

90. 風雨 - Feng Yu

[x_los]

風雨淒淒、雞鳴喈喈。
既見君子、云胡不夷。

Cold are the wind and the rain,
And shrilly crows the cock.
But I have seen my husband,
And should I but feel at rest?

風雨瀟瀟、雞鳴膠膠。
既見君子、云胡不瘳。

The wind whistles and the rain patters,
While loudly crows the cock.
But I have seen my husband,
And could my ailment but be cured?

風雨如晦、雞鳴不已。
既見君子、云胡不喜。

Through the wind and rain all looks dark,
And the cock crows without ceasing.
But I have seen my husband,
And how should I not rejoice?

Re: 90. 風雨 - Feng Yu

[x_los]

The kind of tortured phrasing of the rhetorical questions makes me feel like she supposes herself obligated to be relieved and content, but isn't actually.

Re: 90. 風雨 - Feng Yu

[douqi]

This turns up in Jin Yong's Return of the Condor Heroes, where Cheng Ying, after meeting Yang Guo for the first time, sits down at her desk and writes the last line over and over again. Because the first rule of ROCH is that every attractive young woman must become smitten with Yang Guo and either (1) die for him (2) never marry because there's no one else like him or (3) lop his arm off in a futile bid to deny her feelings for him. Jin Yong plays the quote pretty straight in that scene.

There's also a possible reading of the poem where 君 is read as 'king/lord' instead of 'husband', so that it becomes sort of a King Arthur-y 'in these dark times a righteous king has arrived, how could I not be joyful'. Unfortunately, for the life of me, I cannot remember whether that's a legit alternative reading I saw somewhere, or whether it's something my brain made up.

Re: 90. 風雨 - Feng Yu

[x_los]

TY for this wuxia context it's really really interesting re: how the tradition comes to use its poetic intertexts!

Ah, yeah, I was wondering it if was just an oddity of translation rather than embedded in the og text. There's a bit a little like that in Hamlet, where driven-mad Ophelia (who knows her dad is dead) sings 'nonsense' (p fucking sensical tbh) rhymes, inc one that goes 'and will he not come again?' before correcting herself. So I think maybe I'm kinda primed to view that circumlocution as actually a denial.

You know what that REALLY sounds like is the Mao School Confucian Allegory readings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Poetry#Legacy) that were so dominant in a lot of critical reception/kinda have their parallel in scholasticism biblical 'deep reading'.

Re: 90. 風雨 - Feng Yu

[douqi]

The Ophelia point is a great one! (she says, as if she knows anything about Hamlet other than the obvious) That rhetorical flourish is in the text itself, so it's a perfectly legit reading.

So the way I'm (somewhat facetiously) reading has a name, lol. It's also applied to some Song (and maybe Tang) poems, e.g. why would a renowned general-poet be writing about a beautiful woman standing in a darkened corner? It must be an allusion to his having fallen out of imperial favour (although we know more about the authors of Song poetry so there is at least a bit of historical support for those readings).

Re: 90. 風雨 - Feng Yu

[superborb]

Baidu notes for a lot of these poems (inc this one) that ancient scholars read it as "思君子" (thinking gentleman? I don't quite know what this is supposed to mean exactly) vs modern scholars who think it's about husband/wife reunion or waiting for a lover.