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

[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).