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: 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