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

Re: 222. 采菽 - Cai Shu

[superborb]

Baike's vernacular translation of the first line is "Hurry up and pick the soybeans, hurry up and pick; fill the square basket, then fill the round", so I think it's kind of setting the scene of the next scenes are imminently happening and we have to go look?

The first stanza, is the narrator guessing what gifts the king of Zhou might give the feudal princes when they come to court.

The tree xing is (I think?) comparing to how there are feudal princes in all directions (like the spreading branches) and how they're happy and thriving (with the lush leaves)

It's interesting to have this after a bunch of insulting Zhou You wang poems. Baike says it could be about Zhou Kang wang or Zhou Xuan wang.