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dankodes* 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
purple, then, with what?
You know if you'd asked me how many times I thought rhinos would appear in this book, I'd probably have said 'wait, were there rhinos in Ancient China??'
Last stanza a little oblique.
Re: 234. 何草不黃 - He Cao Bu Huang
https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/1527/02whole.pdf?sequence=2
野 But neither are we rhinos or tigers, who navigate this windsweptwilderness哀我征夫 朝夕不暇 Alas for us campaigning soldiers, day and night we have no rest有芃者狐 率彼幽草 The bushy [tailed] fox, he navigates these thick plants有棧之車 行彼周道 But we have bamboo carts and trudge on the circuit road.The fox in this poem is presented without the details which I have previously discussed - namely,binome suisui or the location near a river. The fox (together with the rhinos and tigers), and its easein the thick plants of the wilderness, is juxtaposed with the situation of the campaigning soldiers inwhose voice the poem is spoken, they who are unaccustomed to the harsh surroundings. While theatmosphere of the poem is one of difficulty and arduousness, this is not a result of the fox image.Indeed, the fox and the other animals are seemingly able to transcend the difficulty of the situation.This treatment is significantly different from that found in either You Hu or Nan Shan, in which thefox imagery is inextricably linked to the human emotive atmospheres, not contrasted to it. He CaoBu Huang thus demonstrates that foxes do not, per se, necessitate a traditional anthropomorphicreading or symbolic association.
Foxes can evidently be exploited in the Shi Jing for figurative purposes, divorced from their ritualassociations, which are inscribed in particular accompanying phrases and scenes. In this poem, therole of the fox image is to act in juxtaposition with the human world, emphasising the differencebetween the situation of an animal which is naturally suited to the conditions and that of soldiers forwhom the harsh winter is foreign and unfamiliar. The figure, located from the initial couplet of thepoem, where xing imagery is usually found, is, if you will, an anti-analogy, a foil to the human world,which negates similitude. This is in direct opposition to the way in which the fox imagery operates inthe opening xing lines of You Hu and Nan Shan, where it is clear (and accepted) that the fox’ssituation has some sort of metaphorical or analogous connection to the human world (partly as aresult of its very presence in each poem’s opening lines).
[...]
This clear difference in treatment demonstrates that fox imagery in You Hu and Nan Shan isexploited for other implications, and that there must be other meaningful elements to the treatmentin those poems. As we have observed, that extra meaningful information is provided by a connectionto a ritual context - a contention that the negative evidence of He Cao Bu Huang would appear toconfirm, in that it provides a context which appears unconnected with ritual. Logically speaking,there would seem no obvious function for a ritual recalling the privations of a military campaign.The song does not display ritual echoes such as distinct repeatable physical actions, nor is its form(with five interrogative phrases in the first stanza and none in the second) evocative of repetitive andbalanced ritual diction. He Cao Bu Huang shows how an unadorned fox image in a poem without(actual or imitated) ritual resonances does not summon up the key notions of liminality or frustratedachievement. Those meanings are only accessible through connection to the imagery of foxes whichis found in the divinatory ritual tradition, and which is accompanied by a particular apparatus ofattendant detail (including the river and/or the suisui binome)
Re: 234. 何草不黃 - He Cao Bu Huang
Re: 234. 何草不黃 - He Cao Bu Huang
Re: 234. 何草不黃 - He Cao Bu Huang
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...