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: 194. 雨無正 - Yu Wu Zheng

[criminal_negligee]

I'm not quite clear on this either. Maybe the second-to-last is saying that being an official is a zero-sum game? If you give the Emperor "bad" advice that he can't use, the Emperor will dislike you, and/or you suck at your job. If you give the Emperor "good" or useful advice, however, your friends will resent you[r success].

As for the last, I'm not sure. Maybe the gist of it is "I helped you in the past, but now you won't help me in my time of need." ?

Re: 194. 雨無正 - Yu Wu Zheng

[superborb]

The context for the last stanza is (from Baike) this is during the end of the Zhou dynasty during Zhou You wang's rule, when the Western Zhou fell and the capital was moved to the east (the establishment of the Eastern Zhou dynasty), thus, the speaker is trying to convince the nobles to move to the new capital. However, they refuse under the excuse that they have no houses there, fleeing [the pressure?] in the face of national crisis, so the speaker can only weep blood.

Also, the king is Bad and Evil so the second to last stanza is lamenting that if the minister is righteous, he'll offend the king, but if he's taking the crooked path, his friends will be offended.