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

Re: 192. 正月 - Zheng Yue

[x_los]

'Their good words are [only] from the mouth;
Their bad words are [only] from the mouth.'

Not clear on this.

What's the significance of the crow coming to rest on a house?

What does it mean that there are only twigs and great bundles of sticks in the wood?

What is the cobras and efts business?

Fish in the pond being visible and unable to enjoy themselves for it also maximally weird.

The beginning of the final stanza is confusing.

So this clearly has a historical referent that might contextualise it?

Re: 192. 正月 - Zheng Yue

[superborb]

Baike is quite light for this poem. The historical context is an official in the Zhou dynasty worried about the country and people. Baike says, without much discussion, that this is implied crit of Zhou You wang, who consults the diviners instead of dealing with reality.

"Their good words are [only] from the mouth;
Their bad words are [only] from the mouth." Buried in the discussion, Baike says this is saying how people are glib in speech and wear an ingratiating expression (an idiom), jealous and envious. I guess it's basically saying that people will use the same mouth to say both nice and vicious things?

"crow": omen about the Zhou dynasty. The whole two phrases mean the Zhou dynasty is losing the mandate of heaven

The vernacular translation of the line "There are [only] large faggots and small branches in it." is 粗细只能当柴烧 thick or thin, can only be used as firewood. I'm having trouble parsing what it says about this line in the discussion 此诗批评最高当权者亲小人, which means "this poem criticizes the villains that are the highest authorities", but does not seem to... fully connect to the line?

efts is presumably Legge's translation of lizards, which baike informs me that ancient people thought both snakes and lizards were poisonous. It's a standard poisonous animal metaphor for bad people.

I think the fish metaphor is like, there is nowhere to hide themselves? Baike doesn't say anything more about it.

"Mean-like, those have their houses;
Abjects, they will have their emoluments.": The vernacular translation is 卑鄙小人有华屋，庸劣之徒有米谷。Contemptible nasty people have splendid houses, superficial people have rice and grain.

Re: 192. 正月 - Zheng Yue

[x_los]

oh okay so 'talk out of both sides of their mouth'