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

[x_los]

This is the last book in Lessons from the States! After this, we get into some fairly different material:

Minor odes of the kingdom (about 7 weeks)
Greater odes of the kingdom (3 weeks)
Odes of the temple and the altar (4 weeks)

And then we'll be talking about what we want to do next. But seriously, working through all the Lessons from the States is itself a milestone: one building-block of your Classical Education achieved.

* 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 22.**

Comments

Re: 158. 伐柯 - Fa Ke

[superborb]

Baike:

"And forthwith the vessels are arranged in rows.": this is the way that food vessels would be presented during festive celebrations.

This era is when traditional Chinese wedding customs were developed, including that of the matchmaker.

"斧" (fu3) axe is also a pun, it sounds like "夫" (fu1) husband.

The first line of the second stanza "伐柯伐柯、其则不远" is now used to represent a harmonious and principled relationship, and "伐柯" means to act as a matchmaker.

Re: 158. 伐柯 - Fa Ke

[x_los]

"In hewing an axe-handle, in hewing an axe-handle,
The pattern is not far off."

I'm guessing that is not--a /great/ translation, quite, bc that doesn't seem to either express or allude to the nugget of the chengyu, quite.

Re: 158. 伐柯 - Fa Ke

[superborb]

I just looked up 伐柯 directly in mdbg and it says "(cf Book of Songs) How to fashion an ax handle? You need an ax / fig. to follow a principle / fig. to act as matchmaker". The first fig. meaning seems to refer to the second stanza instead of the first, but it only refers to the first stanza, interestingly.

The first line of the second stanza might be (from Baike's vernacular): "Chopping an axe handle, chopping an axe handle, these rules and regulations come to the front"