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: 187. 黃鳥 - Huang Niao

[forestofglory]

What is being translated as "Maize"? It can't possible be Zea mays! Seem like an odd translation choice.

Re: 187. 黃鳥 - Huang Niao

[criminal_negligee]

I'm not completely sure, but in that line "無啄我粱" I think it's the final character, 粱, being translated as "maize." I looked it up on wiktionary and got these definitions -

1. good varieties of millet; millet in general
2. exquisite staple food

So it seems your instinct is right. Maybe it was just an aesthetic choice to contrast with the last stanza? Or another possibility is that a suggested English translation for "粱" was the word "corn," which just refers to any local staple crop for most of the world, but which is equated with 'maize' in North America and Australia/NZ. So it went 粱 -> "corn" (unspecified) -> "maize" (US/CAN/AUS/NZ).

Re: 187. 黃鳥 - Huang Niao

[forestofglory]

Thank you!

I guess someone could have been trying to translate "corn" and not very aware of basic culinary history. Clearly not someone who has to deal with people yelling about potatoes in fantasy. (Corn and potatoes are both new world foods that wouldn't have existed in China at the time the poem was written)