Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Lessons from the States, Odes Of Gui and Odes of Cao

[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.

* In case you missed it and are interested, some people on the com are doing a Nirvana in Fire read-along here. Anyone with thoughts is welcome to chime in. 

**NEXT BATCH MARCH 15.**

Comments

曹風 - Odes Of Cao; 153. 下泉 - Xia Quan

[x_los]

冽彼下泉、浸彼苞稂。
愾我寤嘆、念彼周京。

Cold come the waters down from that spring,
And overflow the bushy wolf's-tail grass,
Ah me! I awake and sigh,
Thinking of that capital of Zhou.

冽彼下泉、浸彼苞蕭。
愾我寤嘆、念彼京周。

Cold come the waters down from that spring,
And overflow the bushy southernwood,
Ah me! I awake and sigh,
Thinking of that capital of Zhou.

冽彼下泉、浸彼苞蓍。
愾無寤歎、念彼京師。

Cold come the waters down from that spring,
And overflow the bushy divining plants,
Ah me! I awake and sigh,
Thinking of that capital-city.

芃芃黍苗、陰雨膏之。
四國有王、郇伯勞之。

Beautifully grew the fields of young millet,
Enriched by fertilizing rains.
The States had their sovereign,
And there was the chief of Xun to reward their princes.

Re: 曹風 - Odes Of Cao; 153. 下泉 - Xia Quan

[x_los]

Cold water that floods these plants and renders them hard to work with/useless reminds the poet of how shitty the situation is in this capital (their own?).

In contrast, in this other capital, gentle rain nourished the plants: the natural order (kingship, the water cycle) was as it should be, and the sovereign 'made it rain'. Idk why that should be better than inundation as a metaphor for rewards? But here we are.

Re: 曹風 - Odes Of Cao; 153. 下泉 - Xia Quan

[superborb]

Baike: Cao country officials sadly observing the decline of the Zhou dynasty, as states bully weaker ones, and so they miss the stable situation of when the Zhou first held power.

People are apparently in conflict over if the last stanza (and its sudden departure from the structure of the first three) is done well or not. The first three stanzas follow a common Shijing sentence structure, where only the last word of the first sentence and the last two of the second differ. Then the last stanza is structurally different. I think the doubts are for if this last stanza belongs in this poem at all?