Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Minor Odes of the Kingdom, Decade of Baihua

[x_los]

I know this is a short week and that doing it on its own will not speed us through the Minor Odes, but given that the poems are longer in this section, Baihua's five felt too bulky to tack on to either side (to make one of those batches a kind of awkward 14-15 medium sized poems).

* 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 APRIL 5.**

Comments

170. 魚麗 - Yu Li

[x_los]

魚麗于罶、鱨鯊。
君子有酒、旨且多。

The fish pass into the basket,
Yellow-jaws and sand-blowers.
Our host has spirits,
Good and abundance of them.

魚麗于罶、魴鱧。
君子有酒、多且旨。

The fish pass into the basket,
Bream and tench.
Our host has spirits,
Abundance of them and good.

魚麗于罶、鰋鯉。
君子有酒、旨且有。

The fish pass into the basket,
Mud-fish and carp.
Our host has spirits,
Good and in quantities.

物其多矣、維其嘉矣。

The viands are abundant,
And they are admirable.

物其旨矣、維其偕矣。

The viands are excellent,
Both from the land and the sea.

物其有矣、維其時矣。

The viands are in quantities,
And all in season.

Re: 170. 魚麗 - Yu Li

[x_los]

Getting the impression these viands rock

These more attributed, courtly poems have yet to hit some of the highs of the Lessons from the States, I feel. Are they Minor in THAT sense, or some other?

Re: 170. 魚麗 - Yu Li

[superborb]

Yeah, all baike has is like, wow look at all the kinds of fish! Wine is a symbol of a good harvest! We no longer know how it was sung, but the staggered sentence pattern makes it easier to sing!

But like, this just seems very one note, a fun song to sing at a party kind of deal?

Re: 170. 魚麗 - Yu Li

[vorvayne]

Poems like this make me think we're missing a lot by not having the whole, like, accompanying drums situation and not hearing them in...English has no consistently agree terminology for which period of Chinese language is called what, so let's call it Old Chinese.

Because I can't help but feel that with the amazing weight and rhythm you get with tetrasyllabic poetry that a lot of them are going to end up being appreciated at the time for the way they sound, not quite like modern limericks but more like the 'relatable subject wittily put' kind of stuff that apparently I can't draw to mind apart from, like, thinking of various clever tumblr riffs because I'm a pleb.

I had to fucking google 'viands' but honestly it seems like the author just really liked food and good for them.

I was about to post and then I reread the bit about fish in a basket and remembered the Yijing (which I will never shut up about, apologies in advance), and also apparently 魚麗 (the poem title I mean) is usually translated "the fish enter the trap" because it's a battle formation.

In the Yijing gua 44 you have 姤, rendered in my favourite translation as "Encountering" [and the encounter is fraught, like, an enemy at court kind of deal], and because this is the Zhou dynasty here the main bit goes

姤
女壯
勿用取女

Encountering
A bold/strong woman
Do not marry her

but it makes sense because most of the rest of the gua is about the (inauspicious) wedding feast. The second line goes:

包有魚
无咎
不利賓

Fish in a bag
No fault
No advantage in receiving guests (Or, no advantage in giving the fish packet to guests, could be either)

ie keep your fish in your container, nothing good is gonna happen

and then the fourth line is

包无魚
起凶

No fish in the bag
Creates misfortune

ie you've let your fish out of the bag - basket? - and now everything's gone wrong.

[translations mine, and here you can really tell I'm not a translator lmao and I'm also riffing off my two preferred translations]

I dunno it just seemed resonant. That or it's a fun poem about feasting and drinking which, I mean, fair.

Re: 170. 魚麗 - Yu Li

[douqi]

I just want to say, as someone who was briefly obsessed with the Yijing (after reading Jin Yong's Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, predictably), this is fascinating.

Re: 170. 魚麗 - Yu Li

[x_los]

We could always reading club it at some point/in some fashion, if there's interest.

Re: 170. 魚麗 - Yu Li

[vorvayne]

The Yijing, or Jin Yong's book? Because I'd submit that trying to read the Yijing in order will have....peculiar results. It holds together less like a text and more like a web, and also, without some divination question to hold it against you're gonna be hm lost.

Nevertheless I'm enthusiastically recommending Alfred Huang's translation and commentary: it's pretty Daoist in slant, which I enjoy bc the Confucian style commentaries/translations can get....prescriptive and Weird About Gender.

If Jin Yong, tho, sign me the fuck up.

Re: 170. 魚麗 - Yu Li

[x_los]

I mean either, really. Like, people must engage with yijing in Five Classics study without set questions? idk maybe there's a standard way to do it, if just reading through isn't common.

Re: 170. 魚麗 - Yu Li

[vorvayne]

See, my brain is like, but without a question what - how would you even interpret it? I mean there must be ways people do this but I don't know them! Because they sortof, hm, don't stand alone, I'd say.

I mean maybe they just read an edition with a ton of commentary. I ordered but have not yet received a translation with extensive historical commentary that was recced to me by an academic with an interest in this area and who reads old Chinese better than I do: it's Penguin's The Essential Translation of the Ancient Chinese Oracle and Book of Wisdom, translated by John Minford.

There's apparently a bronze age reconstruction section at the end, too, although it leaves out the ten wings which are to a lot of scholars pretty necessary. Anyway, I'm going to read that cover to cover, probably. I am really interested now you mention it to find out how it reads to people not reading it for divination, since in a lot of ways it is a set of like... Oracular determinations more than it is standalone poetry. This is more obvious in Chinese since a lot of English translations vary the wording for some reason.

Okay this is clearly a post all on its own which I ought to come back to, so.

Re: 170. 魚麗 - Yu Li

[x_los]

General reference note: epub version of the translation mentioned: https://b-ok.cc/book/2473876/0b0c78