flemmings | (no subject)

mvrdrk, your book came! To my experienced eye, it was delayed at the border by customs ie the wrapping paper was slit open. You'd be amazed how many drugs are shipped through under the guise of Christmas presents that look like weighty tomes. (/sarcasm)

Have just spent a pleasant hour working through I won't tell you how few pages of The Book of Poetry section, alternately reading his analysis and looking up unknown hanzi in that dictionary you gave me so long ago. No, I don't know why I do that when there's a webpage that does it for me. Orneriness. Eventually I'll stop and just read the text, though I'm beginning to see what you mean about needing a dictionary even for that. Chiasmatic, anadiplosis, metonymy... dear god. I mean yes, he explains the terms mostly, but still. Fortunately there's another webpage that will do it for you.

Even so, the Shi Jing has its headscratchy moments. The second line of

隰桑有阿
其葉有難

to me reads only as 'its leaves are difficult.' Where people get 'flourishing' or 'lovely' from that is a mystery, though of course I could supply examples of pejorative drift in English that are much more recent than the Odes' Chinese. The Old English selig, meaning holy, that gives us modern-day silly, or (not so far a jump) dysig, foolish, that became dizzy.

I foresee hours of endless fun with this one. Thank you very much!

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How clever!! Smuggling in soft cover books! Perhaps it was the shiny wrapping paper that foiled the xray machine.

The introduction gives you the web address to audio files and matching calligraphy for many of the poems. I have them all written to CD and can mail you the CD if you don't want to download them all. While I have no clue what English bits of it are saying, I figured you and paleaswater could discuss is intelligently and I could just follow along, so all three of us have copies.

I'm reading an alternate book by a British professor, summarized as "learn classical Chinese via poetry", which is quite good too so far, though I definitely disagree with chunks of it. I will post about it later - I suspect Chinese poetry is to be my lj theme of the year.

Alas that audio is wasted on my tone deaf ears. Calligraphy is fascinating but at this point is only a tempting byway that I must resolutely ignore until I have a vague notion what the printed characters mean. (I may go have a peek at the it anyway.)

The English bits make sense of a sort, though I've forgotten all the prosody I ever learned. Fortunately all I ever learned applies only to Latin verse, and he's instructive enough about Chinese forms. Though why he drags ancient Egyptian poetry in as a parallel example to a Chinese poem beats me. Partly because the two poems have no relation I can see, and partly because it seems to me he's ignoring the palpable double entendres in the Egyptian poem. Seriously, when someone addressing a lover talks about stroking a red fish, what do you *think* it means? It may mean something else in Chinese, but the ancient Egyptians were a pretty earthy lot.

Okay. I've dug out my shijing reader, which tells me (translated)

阿 - beautiful and full/abundant

阿難 aka 阿儺 aka 阿那 aka 猗那
meaning: plant growth soft and beautiful
Note that 阿難 is broken across two sequential lines of the poem
I think this says: classically used as a set phrase 有阿有難

So literally, I think we get
swamp mulberry has beauty
it's leaves have beauty

This reader/translation book should cover all of shijing, if you have any more stumpers.

Note that 阿難 is broken across two sequential lines of the poem

As if the Latin poets being clever that way wasn't bad enough...

But yeah. Pejorative drift like whoa here.

I'm going to go look up pejorative drift ...

I think it's a standard Chinese poetry technique to split multi-character words where each individual word/morpheme means the same thing across lines. I suspect it happens even in modern poetry, but since I don't read modern poetry ...

Pejorative drift is the tendency of words to change from a positive or neutral meaning to a negative one over time. Most stunningly seen with Japanese pronouns, most of which-- to judge by their forms-- began as honorifics: お前、手前、貴様. Omae, temee, kisama: hardly honorific now.