I should check in 貓乘 and 貓苑 to see whether there's any early mention of it, but yeah - I'm not sure whether there's a distinction between 'catnip' and 'cat mint,' but 薄荷 seems to cover both - and "人薄荷" is in the same family, I think.
Re long titles, to be fair, he only wrote "11month 4day" for that part. If we English-speakers need "Fourth Day of the 11th Lunar Month," that's on us.
Also, can we get commentary on the character "狸"? I see (from looking it up) that "狸奴" is a well-known word for "cat", but Kroll only gives the definition "raccoon-dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides)" for 狸 (and he seems to make animal-related precision a point of pride). Was there a more general "rascally mammal"-type meaning, or were people calling their cat "li'l raccoon-dog"?
True on that title, but you gotta give me "鼠屢敗吾書，偶得狸奴，捕殺無虛日，群鼠幾空，為賦此詩" -- that one's a mouthful in any language.
You asked for commentary, and I am afraid you will get commentary:
狸 is, pace Kroll, something that I think rrrrrrreally needs to be done on a case-by-case basis. In general, this is my not-a-criticism-just-an-observation take on Kroll: accuracy and precision are wonderful things and admirable goals, but if your sources did not uniformly share your commitment to accuracy, which they most definitely did not in the case of 狸, then you're just paddling yourself up Shit Creek and congratulating yourself all the way. I really do love and admire the fussiness, but the idiom 膠柱鼓瑟 comes to mind.
That said, 狸 does generally seem to be more in the wildcat/civet/raccoon-dog range. What happens - mostly starting toward the very end of Kroll's period, and picking up in the Song - is that pet cats get called 狸奴. At some point I'm going to try to start a fight about the Sinological tendency to slavishly translate 奴 as "slave" (or better yet, "caitiff") even in cases where it clearly doesn't mean that -- in his partial version of the thing I'm translating for the next update, Wilt Idema (who knows better) calls a cat named 佛奴 "Buddha's Slave." There, as in 狸奴, and many other places, it feels a lot more like a suffix "-ling": diminutive and not *generally* positive, but not actually hitting the ear as "slave."
My brain automatically filed the word 狸奴 as "kit-ling" the first time I saw it, because my brain has a weakness for too-cute translations, but I think that rendering of it might work for giving one plausible(-ish? your guess is as good as mine) explanation for how the one turned into the other. By the time we get cat-fancying Song poets, 狸奴 feels to me like it's squarely in "kittycat" territory, without any conscious association with civets or anything of the sort, but I'm approaching from the late Ming, when 狸奴 definitely has nothing to do with any non-cat creature.
I'm here for the emotional journey of running into the word "irredentism," noting with a sigh of relief that it has a footnote, finding that the footnote doesn't tell me what it means, then going through rage, denial, grief, and dictionary.com.
Having looked it up, I agree that it is the perfect epithet for Lu You, so you'll have to be excused on the grounds of being right.
I like the translation of the first poem especially: what Lu does lexically, you convey rhythmically.
Sorry about "irredentism," but its usefulness is unfortunately not limited to the Southern Song. Glad you liked the first one - that last line is just so charming.
So 薄荷 = catnip ! And they knew what it does to cats in Song!!
I should check in 貓乘 and 貓苑 to see whether there's any early mention of it, but yeah - I'm not sure whether there's a distinction between 'catnip' and 'cat mint,' but 薄荷 seems to cover both - and "人薄荷" is in the same family, I think.
So amazing
Re long titles, to be fair, he only wrote "11month 4day" for that part. If we English-speakers need "Fourth Day of the 11th Lunar Month," that's on us.
Also, can we get commentary on the character "狸"? I see (from looking it up) that "狸奴" is a well-known word for "cat", but Kroll only gives the definition "raccoon-dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides)" for 狸 (and he seems to make animal-related precision a point of pride). Was there a more general "rascally mammal"-type meaning, or were people calling their cat "li'l raccoon-dog"?
True on that title, but you gotta give me "鼠屢敗吾書，偶得狸奴，捕殺無虛日，群鼠幾空，為賦此詩" -- that one's a mouthful in any language.
You asked for commentary, and I am afraid you will get commentary:
狸 is, pace Kroll, something that I think rrrrrrreally needs to be done on a case-by-case basis. In general, this is my not-a-criticism-just-an-observation take on Kroll: accuracy and precision are wonderful things and admirable goals, but if your sources did not uniformly share your commitment to accuracy, which they most definitely did not in the case of 狸, then you're just paddling yourself up Shit Creek and congratulating yourself all the way. I really do love and admire the fussiness, but the idiom 膠柱鼓瑟 comes to mind.
That said, 狸 does generally seem to be more in the wildcat/civet/raccoon-dog range. What happens - mostly starting toward the very end of Kroll's period, and picking up in the Song - is that pet cats get called 狸奴. At some point I'm going to try to start a fight about the Sinological tendency to slavishly translate 奴 as "slave" (or better yet, "caitiff") even in cases where it clearly doesn't mean that -- in his partial version of the thing I'm translating for the next update, Wilt Idema (who knows better) calls a cat named 佛奴 "Buddha's Slave." There, as in 狸奴, and many other places, it feels a lot more like a suffix "-ling": diminutive and not *generally* positive, but not actually hitting the ear as "slave."
My brain automatically filed the word 狸奴 as "kit-ling" the first time I saw it, because my brain has a weakness for too-cute translations, but I think that rendering of it might work for giving one plausible(-ish? your guess is as good as mine) explanation for how the one turned into the other. By the time we get cat-fancying Song poets, 狸奴 feels to me like it's squarely in "kittycat" territory, without any conscious association with civets or anything of the sort, but I'm approaching from the late Ming, when 狸奴 definitely has nothing to do with any non-cat creature.
I'm here for the emotional journey of running into the word "irredentism," noting with a sigh of relief that it has a footnote, finding that the footnote doesn't tell me what it means, then going through rage, denial, grief, and dictionary.com.
Having looked it up, I agree that it is the perfect epithet for Lu You, so you'll have to be excused on the grounds of being right.
I like the translation of the first poem especially: what Lu does lexically, you convey rhythmically.
Sorry about "irredentism," but its usefulness is unfortunately not limited to the Southern Song. Glad you liked the first one - that last line is just so charming.