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

181. 鴻雁 - Hong Yan

[x_los]

鴻雁于飛、肅肅其羽。
之子于征、劬勞于野。
爰及矜人、哀此鰥寡。

The wild geese are flying about;
Su-su goes the rustle of their wings.
[There were] those officers engaged on the commission.
Pained were we and toiled in the open fields;
All were objects of pity,
But alas for those wifeless and widows!

鴻雁于飛、集于中澤。
之子于垣、百堵皆作。
雖則劬勞、其究安宅。

The wild geese are flying about;
And they settle in the midst of the marsh.
[There were] those officers directing the rearing of the walls; -
Five thousand cubits of them arose at once.
Though there was pain and toil,
In the end we had rest in our dwellings.

鴻雁于飛、哀鳴嗷嗷。
維此哲人、謂我劬勞。
維彼愚人、謂我宣驕。

The wild geese are flying about,
And melancholy is their cry of ao-ao.
There were they, wise men,
Who recognized our pain and toil;
If they had been stupid men,
They would have said we were proclaiming our insolence.

Re: 181. 鴻雁 - Hong Yan

[x_los]

Both the significance of the xing and the import of the final stanza rather elude me with this one.

Re: 181. 鴻雁 - Hong Yan

[superborb]

Baike: this is a work of 'realism poetry', expressing "the hungry sing for food, the laborers sing for work" [I'm not sure what the last word is supposed to express; it also means matter/thing/item/affair]. The first stanza describes refugees performing forced labor, even the widowers not spared; the geese flying around represent the sigh/lament of the homeless with no place to settle down. The second stanza describes the forced labor as building the wall; the geese gather like the refugees are gathered. The final stanza expresses how the refugees' sorrow is met with ridicule by the rich; the cry of the geese is in echo of the bleakness of the refugees' lives. The poem combines bi and xing techniques.

I think Legge's translation of the second stanza contradicts Baike's reading -- Baike reads the last sentence as if they are unable to have a place to live.

The title of the poem, the swan goose, is now a byword for the suffering of refugees.

The time period is either during Zhou Li wang or Zhou Xuan wang, during the late Western Zhou Dynasty when there was a rebellion by Li wang, an invasion by the Xianyun, and drought, so a large number of people were displaced.

Mao's commentary, as always, says this praises Zhou Xuan wang, that there may be scattered and restless people, but they can work and gather safely. Others believe it is the refugees describing their misery. Others that it describes how Zhou wang sent out envoys everywhere to give emergency relief to the refugees.