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

Re: 171. 南有嘉魚 - Nan You Jia Yu

[forestofglory]

So the spirits here are a drink? (My first time reading through I was unhelpfully picturing ghosts because my brain is silly like that)

Re: 171. 南有嘉魚 - Nan You Jia Yu

[vorvayne]

Yeah, 酒 just means 'alcohol, generic' but often a kind of millet/sorghum spirit called Baijiu. Not here, though, since apparently something like modern baijiu wasn't invented until the Tang Dynasty, I've just found out by googling, and since we're pre-Han back here I'd take a wild guess that we're working with something wine-like.

Re: 171. 南有嘉魚 - Nan You Jia Yu

[forestofglory]

Thank you! This very helpful!