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

[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 8.**

Comments

Re: 138. 衡門 - Heng Men

[superborb]

Baike: The xing is unusually not at the beginning of the poem, but before the discussion.

The "cross pieces of wood" means the house is simple/crude. Normally 衡 means to weigh/measure, but baike says this is 横 (homonym) which means horizontal. One source says it means the city gates

"my fountain": this may be the name of a spring in Chen country, but could just be a general name instead of a specific reference.

"hunger": often in the Shijing, the word hunger means sexual desire. One source says in ancient times, sexual desire was often called hunger, as a set idiom. [A cross cultural idiom if so lol]

The He is the Yellow River

The interpretation Baike spends the most time explicating is indeed that of a love poem, basically saying that a humble life is a joy. [The following I'm not sure if I'm reading 100% correctly since it's very dense] It also says some historical interpretations are to help/encourage the monarch; a hermit happy by themself; men and women having meetings for sex.