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

[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.

* I recently wrote about the China History Podcast, which has a whole series on Tang Poetry, and might well be of general interest.

**NEXT BATCH APRIL 12.**

Comments

176. 菁菁者莪 - Jing Jing Zhe E

[x_los]

菁菁者莪、在彼中阿。
既見君子、樂且有儀。

Luxuriantly grows the aster-southernwood,
In the midst of that large mound.
Since we see our noble lord,
We rejoice, and he shows us all courtesy.

菁菁者莪、在彼中沚。
既見君子、我心則喜。

Luxuriantly grows the aster-southernwood,
In the midst of that islet.
Since we see our noble lord,
Our hearts are full of joy.

菁菁者莪、在彼中陵。
既見君子、錫我百朋。

Luxuriantly grows the aster-southernwood,
In the midst of that great height.
We see our noble lord,
And he gives us a hundred sets of cowries.

汎汎楊舟、載沉載浮。
既見君子、我心則休。

It floats about, - the willow boat,
Now sinking, now rising again.
Since we see our noble lord,
Our hearts are at rest.

Re: 176. 菁菁者莪 - Jing Jing Zhe E

[x_los]

The cowries are used as currency sometimes, I recall.

"aster-southernwood" what's this all about?

Re: 176. 菁菁者莪 - Jing Jing Zhe E

[ann712]

Asters are annual
Southern wood perennial

Things are good in the short and long term?

Re: 176. 菁菁者莪 - Jing Jing Zhe E

[superborb]

Baike says in the opening paragraph that there is controversy over if this is about students happy about seeing the lord, who educates them, or if this is a love poem. But then in the longer description, it says most people think it is a love poem. As you may expect, Mao's commentary said it was about education, and a later source criticizes that by saying Mao's commentary has entirely missed the poetic flavor.

Aster-southernwood is glossed by a bunch of words that are not in my dictionary as a single phrase, but google translate thinks is Artemisia edulis, Artemisia radiata; it links to https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E8%8E%AA%E8%92%BF/1117970; the gloss says it is a type of edible weed.

Cowries has an interesting gloss. So the word is 朋, which now has the sole meaning of friend, but the gloss says: "ancient people used cowries as currency, with five or ten in a string. A pair of strings would be called 朋".