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: 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