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

[x_los]

* I found the best option for the weekly reminder emails, via Gmail. The external service options are more involved than our purposes require. Does anyone know anything about how to arrange an Apps Script? Basically all it has to do is tell ten people, on Saturdays, to come and get their juice/poems.

Until someone knows what to do there, I'll send out manual messages weekly. If you'd like to receive these and are not getting them, please let me know.

* 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.

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

* 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.

**NEXT BATCH MARCH 1.**

Comments

Re: 131. 黃鳥 - Huang Niao

[x_los]

"The most famous example of a poem composed in response to the
historical circumstances of its time is “Yellow Bird” (Mao 131 “Huang
niao”) in the “Airs of Qin”:
Jiao-jiao cry the yellow birds, / settling on the jujube tree. / Who followed Lord Mu? / Ziju Yanxi! / Truly, this Yanxi, / the finest of a hundred men! / He draws close to the pit, / trembling, trembling in terror. /
Heaven, the azure one, / slays our good man! / If one could ransom
him, ah— / a hundred men for his life!
Jiao-jiao cry the yellow birds, / settling on the mulberry tree. / Who
followed Lord Mu? / Ziju Zhonghang! / Truly, this Zhonghang, / a
match for a hundred men! / He draws close to the pit, / trembling,
trembling in terror. / Heaven, the azure one, / slays our good man! / If
one could ransom him, ah— / a hundred men for his life!
Jiao-jiao cry the yellow birds, / settling on the caltrop bush. / Who followed Lord Mu? / Ziju Qianhu! / Truly, this Qianhu, / a guard against a
hundred men! / He draws close to the pit, / trembling, trembling in terror. / Heaven, the azure one, / slays our good man. / If one could ransom him, ah— / a hundred men for his life!

For the year 621 BCE, the Zuo Tradition narrates that at the burial of
Lord Mu of Qin, Yanxi, Zhonghang, and Qianhu followed him into the
grave as human sacrifices, whereupon “the men of the state mourned them, and on their behalf recited ‘Yellow Bird’.”51 Here we have the
single most plausible case where fu (“to present,” “to recite”) should be
taken as “to make,”, which is, quite naturally, how the Mao preface
interprets the situation. Note, however, that the “men of the state”
(guoren) are not the common folk but members of the Qin court élite.
This rare example, where the Zuo Tradition relates not only a poem’s historical context but also its act of composition, generates credibility for the general idea that early Chinese poetry could emerge in
response to specific circumstances—even though no poem from the
“Airs,” unlike the “Major Court Hymns,” contains a sustained historical narrative. The underlying dictum that “poetry expresses intent”
makes poetry symptomatic and revealing, and endows it with an unquestionable truth claim. It also encourages the identification of authorial agency, even in semi-anonymous terms such as “the men of the
state.” Yet the poetics attributed to the “Airs” frame authorship not as
autonomous or creative. A poem is not “made” by a controlling poet
but arises from history, and its truth claim rests precisely in the absence of authorial control and artful manipulation. Thus, early Chinese
aesthetic appreciation is primarily concerned with how a poem matches the world it depicts. As individual poems could, thus, be decoded—
or constituted—as symptom and omen, so could the entire body of the
Poetry. Consider the performance of dance, music, and song that the
court of Lu gave to Prince Ji Zha of Wu, who, in 544 BCE, requested
to be allowed to “observe the music of Zhou.” The Zuo Tradition provides the following account of his judgment of the different “Airs”:--"

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mkern/files/the_formation_of_the_classic_of_poetry_0.pdf