Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Minor Odes of the Kingdom, Decade of Sang Hu

[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 10.**

Comments

219. 青蠅 - Qing Ying

[x_los]

營營青蠅、止于樊。
豈弟君子、無信讒言。

They buzz about, the blue flies,
Lighting on the fences.
O happy and courteous sovereign,
Do not believe slanderous speeches.

營營青蠅、止于棘。
讒人罔機、交亂四國。

They buzz about, the blue flies,
Lighting on the jujube trees.
The slanderers observe no limits,
And throw the whole kingdom into confusion.

營營青蠅、止于榛。
讒人罔機、構我二人。

They buzz about, the blue flies,
Lighting on the hazel trees.
The slanderers observe no limits,
And set us two at variance.

Re: 219. 青蠅 - Qing Ying

[x_los]

So the blue flies are like slanderers in their buzzing--any reason for the different places they alight?

Re: 219. 青蠅 - Qing Ying

[superborb]

As I read this, I wonder why Legge nearly always decides not to translate onomatopoeia directly -- the 'buzz about' bit is onomatopoeia in the original.

Baike says there's some controversy over who the object of slander and the author of the poem is. Mao's commentary says it was an official satirizing Zhou You wang, so the gentleman in the poem (sovereign in the Legge tl) could be Zhou You wang. Wei Yuan thought it was written about Zhou You wang listening to Baosi (his concubine and a famous beauty) and abandoning his son.