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

[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.

* One of our members is doing posts on the foundations and development of wuxia. Worth checking out!

**NEXT BATCH APRIL 19.**

Comments

188. 我行其野 - Wo Xing Qi Ye

[x_los]

我行其野、蔽芾其樗。
昏姻之故、言就爾居。
爾不我畜、復我邦家。

I travelled through the country,
Where the Fetid tree grew luxuriant.
Because of our affinity by marriage,
I went to reside with you.
But you do not entertain me;
And I go back to my country and clan.

我行其野、言采其蓫。
昏姻之故、言就爾宿。
爾不我畜、言歸思復。

I travelled through the country,
Gathering the sheep's-foot.
Because of our affinity by marriage,
I came to lodge with you.
But you do not entertain me;
And I will return, I will go back.

我行其野、言采其葍。
不思舊姻、求爾新特。
成不以富、亦祇以異。

I travelled through the country,
Gathering the pokeweed.
You do not think of our old affinity,
And seek to please your new relative.
If indeed you are not influenced by her riches,
You still are so by the difference [between the new and the old].

Re: 188. 我行其野 - Wo Xing Qi Ye

[x_los]

You do not think of our old affinity,
And seek to please your new relative.
If indeed you are not influenced by her riches,
You still are so by the difference [between the new and the old].

This is a really nice turn, overall this decade is substantially stronger than the last few

Re: 188. 我行其野 - Wo Xing Qi Ye

[x_los]

"We may then further specify this tentative definition: the xing is the vehicle of a trope of which the tenor is man and his actions. But is Mao’s xing, thus defined, identical with the “motif,” as Wang sees it?

Poem 188, “Wo xing qi ye 我行其野,” contains the “plant-plucking motif”:

我行其野 I walk into the fields;
言采其蓫 I pluck the pokeweed.
昏姻之故 It was as bride and wife,
言就爾宿 That I came to live with you;
爾不我畜 Now as you will not keep me,
言歸斯復 I walk, back to where I came from.

Plant-picking is frequently described in the Odes, a fact that justifies Wang’s designation “motif.” But is it a xing, as Mao understood the term? According to Wang, “plantpicking” occurs in poems describing women in distress. The plant-picking motif is thus used by the poet to make the listener, in a cognitive process better described as metonymic or synecdochic than metaphoric, associate to “women in distress,” and this link-of-association had been established long before this poem was actually composed."

Comparative Poetics in the Raw, http://130.241.151.208/digitalAssets/1700/1700640_4.-mse-comparative-poetics-in-the-raw.pdf

Re: 188. 我行其野 - Wo Xing Qi Ye

[superborb]

Baike:

"Fetid tree": Ailanthus altissima / tree of heaven [a very stinky tree]. An untalented tree, a metaphor for trusting the wrong person
"Sheep's foot": A perennial herbaceous plant, known as sheep's hoof vegetable, similar to radish, kind of slippery in texture, eating too much gives you diarrhea
"Pokeweed": A perennial climbing plant, has flowers, white roots, can be steamed and eaten, so in a year of famine used as food.

The "men superior to woman" tradition in ancient China creates this prominent motif of abandoned women literature. Baike discusses some of the historical interpretations that are all about politics...

Re: 188. 我行其野 - Wo Xing Qi Ye

[x_los]

Right, so the last two plants emphasise her distress, she's eating a stinging-nettle equivalent bc times are shitty (no sheep's foot pun intended).