Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Minor Odes of the Kingdom, Decade of Bei Shan

[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. 

* Remember you can also look at How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context.

* 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 MAY 3.**

Comments

Re: 205. 北山 - Bei Shan

[x_los]

"Some never hear a sound," what's this mean in this context?

Medlar is a fruit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mespilus_germanica

So this guy's senior officers hate him and assign him way more work than is reasonable?

Re: 205. 北山 - Bei Shan

[superborb]

Baike glosses sound as 'to wail, to cry out in distress', and the vernacular translation is like "some people are not the least concerned with the complaints of the common people; some people industriously work without pause and are worried and anxious".

Baike additionally adds that in the Zhou dynasty, the officials were arranged in a strict hierarchy of Qing, Dafu, Shi, and many of the Shijing poems express how difficult it was to be in that lowest class of Shi. So this is all people who are in the ruling class, but the lowest tier of it.

(Baike uses the word 劳役 (forced labor) to express what they have to do, which makes me think that I've misinterpreted how strong the 'forced' part of this word is supposed to be taken as)

Also, Legge is making shit up again, it's not a medlar, it's a wolfberry??? Baike adds that its fruit is a medicine and it is nourishing.