| nisiha umiyaha [蠧魚], | Bookworm | |||
| Staatsbibliothek 11.57 (View Online) | ||||
| teku ai, | Where is its dwelling? | |||
| bithei boode, | In the studio. | |||
| jeku ai, | What is its food? | |||
| hergen bete, | The written word is helpless before it. | |||
| 5 | umiyahai gebu, | It has an insect’s name, | ||
| nisihai yangse, | but the appearance of a small fish. | |||
| somitai, | Hiding away, | |||
| hoošan tobo, | in a paper hut, | |||
| me wang [脉望] ohakū seme, | it didn’t turn out to be a maiwang, so | |||
| 10 | naranggi, | in the end, | ||
| bolgo gingge. | it’s clean and pure. | |||
Notes:
teku ai, literally, “what is its dwelling?”
hergen bete, I don’t understand what bete is doing here. According to the Qianlong dictionary, a weak or inferior person is called bete. My best guess is that this is saying the written word is weak and inferior before the bookworm.
me wang, [脉望] mài wàng. This is a legendary type of bookworm that only eats the characters for “Immortal Being” [神仙], ignoring all others. By eating these characters, it can become an immortal being, and by eating such a bookworm a scholar can take the highest placement in the examinations.
bolgo gingge, maybe it is the page that is clean and pure, after the bookworm has eaten all the characters?
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