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Entry tags:
Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Minor Odes of the Kingdom, Decade of Du Ren Shi
* 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 17.**
This is the last chapter in the Minor Odes! After this we move to the Greater Odes (three weeks) and the Odes of the Temple and the Altar (four weeks). Then, a whole new set of 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 17.**
This is the last chapter in the Minor Odes! After this we move to the Greater Odes (three weeks) and the Odes of the Temple and the Altar (four weeks). Then, a whole new set of poems!
Re: 234. 何草不黃 - He Cao Bu Huang
Anyway as far as I can tell from my adventures reading Japanese manga and Chinese up until now, because of how names in hanzi/kanji work, you kindof...have to make a deliberate choice to either have or not have a meaningful name. Like if the character's name is v generic that is also a choice, there's no way to not have it mean SOMETHING even if it's only 'wow those characters are so boring'*. It looks like in ancient China, names were Important and usually - I'm imagining here from well off people who could, you know, read - chosen for both luck/aspirations and poetry reasons. There's the Family Poem thing where each generation gets 1 character from a (short) poem in their given name....actually I've met someone who was literally named that way (cantonese speaker) so, yeah. Poetry in names, still a thing it seems.
But anyway, hunxi-guilai has done a lot of discussion on tumblr about the names in MDZS. Mo Xuanyu's is pretty clear: 莫 ‘[there is] no one', 玄羽 'black wings'. Which probably means more to you if you know the associated poetry but it's pretty evocative by itself, no?
*see e.g. SV's Shen Jiu, whose given name means 'nine'. Like they couldn't be bothered to name him properly...