Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Minor Odes of the Kingdom, Decade of Xiao Min

[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.

**NEXT BATCH APRIL 26.**

Comments

Re: 198. 巧言 - Qiao Yan

[x_los]

"Disorder then comes to the birth,
When the first untruth is received." so what's this mean?

"Swiftly runs the crafty hare,
But it is caught by the hound." how does this relate to the immediately-previous couplets?

"way-farers" why do two of these poems disdain way-farers?

"organ-tongues" ??

What's the last stanza doing?

Re: 198. 巧言 - Qiao Yan

[superborb]

"Disorder then comes to the birth, When the first untruth is received." From baike's vernacular translation, it seems like, "when the chaos first appeared, slander was already tolerated". I guess saying the roots of believing in slander were already there?

I think the hare part is the narrator saying that he's like the hare, trying to run from the hound/slander but he can't?

Unsure where Legge got way-farers from, the line just seems to say that rumors are circulating.

The phrase the organ-tongue comes from is the reed (of an instrument), so maybe Legge not thinking a reed was grand enough?

Baike's discussion of the final stanza says that it is specifying who is doing the slandering and specifically satirizing them.