It's hard to translate

This is the first of a series of posts in which the Fogies propose to deliver themselves of some hard-won opinions about translating classical Chinese. We won't claim that our way is the only good one, or even that it is better than all others. We do, however, claim that some ways of doing things have to be recognized as just pretty doggone bad, and that Chinese of all major languages is the one most afflicted with really rotten translation. It appears everyone in this group knows English well enough to translate into it, so all our examples will take classical Chinese as the source language and modern English as the target language.

We will describe the process at what we regard as a professional level, and begin by clearing off some amateur misconceptions. Chief among them is the idea that a Chinese written character has a meaning. Ernest Fenollosa (as promoted by Ezra Pound) is famous for a detailed exposition of that idea, which he enthusiastically accepted, in The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. George A. Kennedy gave that book a review fairly describable as drawing and quartering (reprinted in Selected Works of George A. Kennedy). More recently J. Marshall Unger demolished the idea in Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning. At this point let's notice that Kennedy was native-speaker bilingual in Chinese, and Unger, though he specializes in Japanese, has an expert knowledge of it. Fenollosa read it only with difficulty, while Pound--this will surprise and maybe even anger some readers--Pound did not know Chinese at all.

How can that be? He recognized hundreds of characters, could look them up in dictionaries, and published translations of Chinese texts. Pound is a fine example of a phenomenon perhaps only possible with the Chinese script (maybe the Mayan script could be misused the same way, but we haven't looked into it and don't intend to)--knowing the script without knowing the language. It's the polar opposite of illiteracy and we can't think of a word for it, so let's coin one: Pound was unkenning of Chinese.

There are many jokes that hinge on this fallacy, such as the Chinese tourist who returned from Japan to report that Japanese food was quite tasty, except for the horribly insipid soup. He had ordered meals by writing Chinese characters, which the waiters read as Japanese kanji. The character 湯 writes tang a word for "soup" in Chinese. In Japanese it writes yu a word for "hot water." One of the Fogies was astonished to see, in large black print on a box in front of a store in Japan, 天地無用. We thought it must qualify as the ultimate in nihilistic sentiments--"Heaven and earth are useless." But it wasn't tiandi wuyong, it was tenchi muyoo meaning "Don't turn this upside-down." It's printed or stenciled on shipping boxes in Japanese just as THIS SIDE UP is in English.

This post is getting long, but one more amateur error needs to be mentioned, that the meaning of a character can be intuited by analyzing its component parts. This is of course the great Pound-Fenollosa brain fart. If characters don't have meanings we can't intuit them by any means at all, and will get into trouble if we try. Pound's "translations" abound in examples, but we're too lazy to grub one out so we'll use one already mentioned by other writers. Pound translated 惟義所在 as "only that bird-hearted equity make timber and lay hold of the earth." How did he allow that "only" to slip in there? It's the sole connection with what the Chinese says, and if he'd kept it out we would see here a perfect example of unkenningness.

So, once we have all accepted that we don't read and translate characters, that we have to deal with language, we can proceed with some examples.

Fogies--A heartfelt thanks for the above. Incredibly funny about the Japanese 天地無用.

This the Japanese also use: 御邪魔 for "do not disturb," but read as Chinese it would be "don't be a demon"--which actually makes funny sense.

Regarding Pound, perhaps he should have translated 知之為知之﹐ 不知為不知﹐ 是知也. And how would you translate this adage directly and compactly? The alliteration and rhyme would be hard to capture. Crudely put it would be "If you know, you know. If you don't know, say you don't know. That's the highest knowledge."

We eagerly await your examples.

It was explained to me by my father this morning that the Japanese word idiot, baka (馬鹿-- literally horse-deer) was actually a very interesting and
well-thought out borrowing from the Chinese history。 It comes from the
story of Zhao Gao (趙高), the eunuch under Qin Shihuangdi. Zhao Gao in order
to manipulate the emperor's young son, Hu Hai (胡亥), told Hu Hai that a horse was a deer and a deer a horse. Hu Hai grew up not knowing which was which, and therefore he was considered stupid, 馬鹿. Baka is one of the first
words I learned to throw at other kids, and it sounded so crude. Didn't
realize it had so much history behind it!

Heh. That reminds me of a story my mom told me. When I was little and we traveled, my dad would point at a cow and call it a pig, then he'd point at a horse and call it a bear.

I was a very confused child.

(continued from #1)
The prepositions from and to we use about translating we also use about traveling. Analogies between the two may be instructive. The nature of a journey will vary with its purpose, from taking a casual walk to carrying serum to Nome. So how you translate will depend on why. We mentioned Pound's unkenning renditions of Chinese; in terms of journeys, we might compare those to the stroll of a fashion model at a show. At the end of the journey no progress has been made but much has been shown off. There's nothing wrong with that; many people enjoy seeing it done. But if that's your aim the Fogies can't help you.

Much, probably most, literary translation can be compared to a journey in which, having seen something interesting, you guide a friend to a place from which it is visible. Let's do a blackboard exercise, using an aphorism belleyang cited in another topic.

Before we start, note that we aren't translating from the Chinese language to the English language. We can't, because those things don't exist. Say something very simple, like "Don't talk." In Mandarin that comes out byé shuo huà. In the Fogies' rusty Cantonese it's _m hou gòng wa _à. Different as Swedish and Spanish. If we call both Chinese--and what else can we call them?--it's like calling Swedish and Spanish "European." Chinese is a large group, not of dialects, but of related foreign languages.

In the first stage of translation the translator works out what the source text means in its own terms. If the text is not in the translator's native language that needs to be done with care. In the case of classical Chinese, the last people whose native language that was died way over a thousand years ago, so it's labor for all of us. Someone whose native tongue is a modern Chinese language would have an advantage here, but there is a compensating disadvantage that just about negates it: the problem of what English-speakers learning French call faux amis Those are words that look identical but mean different things in the two languages. All modern forms of Chinese are full of faux amis for students of classical Chinese. Whether 兵 writes a word for "soldier" or one for "weapon" depends on when it was written. Every language has these trans-temporal faux amis; In English, let used to mean "interfere with." Now it means "don't interfere with."

Here's the aphorism:

成者為王﹐敗者為賊寇

When was this said? A superficial Google search traces it to the 13th C AD, in the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三國演義. But the Fogies will not attempt to treat it as 13th C language. We'll explain why in the next post.

Fogies are leaving me with cliffhangers.

Learned something interesting today:

社稷 (she ji) --In ancient times, it was literally a place the community came together to honor, make sacrifices to the god of grain. It meant "country" in the limited sense that early society knew "country. Today, if you looked up these characters individually--society and millet-- it would not add up to "country." This probably appeared in tribal society--pre-feudal society. Yes? Prior to the existence of city walls.

Today we use 國家 (guo jia)--a wall surrounding one mouth (meaning one person) with a weapon. Each man with weapon defending walled land means country. Fogies, she ji was still used during post Kangxi Qing Dynasty. When did the Chinese switch to the use of guo jia?

Translation gets little respect in academia.

>7 Fogies: Fogies--Academics may not, but those who translate know that translation is an act of creation. Gawd, what you said in >1 Fogies: is so very moving:

"Much, probably most, literary translation can be compared to a journey in which, having seen something interesting, you guide a friend to a place from which it is visible."

Fogies--I want to veer into Japanese borrowing of Chinese Hanzhi or Kanji. This happened mostly in the Tang Dynasty, correct? The common words of gratitude after a meal is:

御馳走樣deshita (gochisosamadeshita--thank you, it was delicious in Japanese)

If you look at the Chinese characters, the first character yu is a very formal word used by imperial personages. chi means to gallop and zou is "walk" yang is "manner"

So the person who has partaken of a meal is saying to the venerable host, the preparation of the meal has caused you inconvenience (you've had to gallop, walk).

I realize the all languages evolve, but since the Japanese have borrowed and retained architecture, clothing from the Tang. Could the above phrase have been used by the Chinese in the Tang Dynasty?

Question: What can linguists learn about the Chinese language in the Tang and pre-Tang eras when they study Japanese, both modern and old?

>5 Fogies: Fogies said:

Chinese is a large group, not of dialects, but of related foreign languages.

I'm stunned by this. I've explained to people that Northern Chinese physique to be as different from the Southern as the Swedes from Spanish, but I've always called the different tongues "dialect." What you say is so obvious, but I'd never thought of it or read it anywhere. Chinese is a large group of related foreign languages. Related foreign languages!!! Which makes me realize that my father married a foreigner:) My father's side of the family are Manchurians who had immigrated from Shaanxi generations ago. There is probably a mix of Turkic, Mongol, Manchu and Han blood there. My maternal side is Hakka and Fujianese who ended in Taiwan.

Non-Chinese consider the Chinese genetically homogenous, but when I read about the Turkic tribes, the Qiongnu (the Huns), the Xianbei and other nomad people who took over Northern China, intermarried, I see China, as we like to call Americans, a melting pot.

>6 belleyang: belleyang This brings up points the Fogies want to address later after laying some groundwork. But we'll briefly consider four words in that post. First, 社稷 is a commonly encountered phrase, but it is a two-word compound. The 社 is the altar of the land. It's a physical artifact made of wood, and we've even seen a text with a brief description of how it's made. The 稷 is also an altar, distinct from the 社. Sacrifices had to be made at these altars to the ancestors of the ruling family. The welfare of the people of the state depended on the blood of slaughtered animals being shed here with proper ceremony. So you can think of the 社稷 as symbolizing the state as headed by a ruler responsible for the people. Now if that ruling family is wiped out, what happens? 社稷不血食矣 "The altars no longer partake of blood." The people don't disappear; they come under control of a new ruler with his own 社稷.

The word 國 in early times referred to an individual walled city. (Nothing to do with mouths and weapons. In this character, 囗 is the radical and 或 is the phonetic element.) A city ruled a surrounding countryside, which was usually called by the same name as the city. We use the same trope when, in speaking of governments, we call England "London" or Japan "Tokyo."

A 家 is a family, the large extended Chinese family, and how it got connected with 國 is a tale that deserves another post.

>10 belleyang: belleyang I see China, as we like to call Americans, a melting pot.

Sure is. You've got to keep that in mind while trying to understand the history of China. Even the earliest history: those chariots didn't bring themselves to China 4000-some years ago. Someone rode them, and whoever that was most likely became rulers of some of the neolithic farmers. Who were they? Did some of their language merge with chthonic language as Norman French merged with Anglo-Saxon after 1066?

Fogies--Any reason why 或 (huo) is written as it is?

Wieger 71J: A primitive appanage, a post, a centre; the land 一 that a landlord defended with 戈 the weapons of his men; 囗 represents his residence, castle or town; the limits are not indicated, because there were none.

But I'm betting you already knew that traditional explanation and are asking for a less fanciful one.

MMcM: the Fogies said in >11 Fogies::

"The word 國 in early times referred to an individual walled city. (Nothing to do with mouths and weapons. In this character, 囗 is the radical and 或 is the phonetic element.)"

This is why I am asking what the 或 means. Chinese school children are taught that the kou means one mouth or person, defending the state with weapon, etc. Why do Fogies come to the conclusion that it is merely a phonetic element? Fogies must have their reasons.

>13 belleyang:, >14 MMcM:, >15 belleyang:

Knock-knock!
Who's there?
Racine
Racine who?
Fools Racine where angels fear to tread.

The Fogies don't have many principles, and we're flexible about those we do have, but one we've always found worth sticking to is this:

"Just because we don't have a good explanation for something, that doesn't require us to accept a bad explanation."

Yes, schoolchildren are taught about the mouth and the spear. They are also taught that George Washington chopped a cherry tree and said, "I cannot tell a lie." It's been a very long time since Parson Weems was regarded as a reliable source.

The Fogies do have a sort-of-plausible explanation we get from Grammata Serica Recensa but it will have to wait while we attend to our backlog of previously requested posts.

>6 belleyang: To finish our post in #11, the extended family, especially so before the Qin unification, had many of the characteristics of a sovereign state. There is evidence that the head of the family had, like the Roman paterfamilias, the power of life and death over his family members. In the struggle between hereditary and appointed officers in the individual 國 states, the central power did not always overcome that of the great 家 households. (A famous example is the state of 晋 Jin, created as a fief early in the Zhou dynasty. Two branches of the ruling family competed for power, the capital was changed from city to city, and in the process half a dozen great households acquired power that in other states belonged to the ruling family. In their internecine struggles three of them were wiped out in what amounted to war, and the other three declared themselves the sovereign states of 韓 Han, 趙 Zhao and 魏 Wei. Jin was no more.)

Since a household had to be ruled like a state, in discussing the tactics and strategy of ruling, the two entities were considered in parallel. As early as the Zuo Zhuan the phrase 國家 is to be encountered more than once. But it is two words referring to two things. They fused into a single word in Japan (see #1 in the topic Chinese & Japanese: adopted sisters) and that word was re-imported into Chinese in the 19th C.

(continued from #5)
In deciding what is and is not classical Chinese, one implicitly confronts the concept of a speech community. It is not intuitively obvious how to deal with the notion of a community of which most members died long ago. The example of Latin in Europe is not as helpful as it might seem, since for centuries after it had ceased to be anyone's native language, Latin continued to be spoken as a second language by tens of thousands of people in a way that, oddly accented as it may have seemed, would probably have been understandable to an ancient Roman. The Chinese script makes it much more difficult to do that. It's as if the sequence c-a-n-i-s that spells the Latin word for "dog" could be pronounced hund in Germany and perro in Spain. Latin would not have been an international second language, but only a reading language, as classical Chinese has been. The linguistic nexus among the languages of China has not been classical Chinese but an official language guan hua based on the language of the capital city, Beijing in recent centuries, before that variously Nanjing, Hangzhou, Kaifeng, Luoyang or Changan.

It was only the language of written documents that was based on classical Chinese, and that not always very closely. Already in the early 9th C, the great Han Yu saw it as a grave defect of the administration of the Tang dynasty that the language of its documents had departed far from that of the ancients. But it was the written language of the ancients that he wanted restored. It probably did not occur to him that their pronunciation differed from his. The only direct evidence he would have had of that would have been that some of the rimes in the Book of Odes would not have sound as rimes to his ear. Now the rimes of Han Yu sound even more unriming to us who read his poems in the guan hua of our own time. So when we read classical Chinese it's not like reading Latin so much as like trying to understand Latin spelled out in sign language. Thus when we say that the proverb we're taking as an example is in classical Chinese, we must renounce any claim that a writer of the 13th C pronounced it as Mencius would have. We can only say that the grammar and vocabulary conform to those of Mencius.

(continued from #18)
There is a tiny corner of the classical Chinese speech community in this group. The Fogies have been composing riddles consisting of little jingles in the style of a man who lived while the Roman empire was still in existence. Some of you have been understanding those jingles closely enough to what we meant by them to be able to answer the riddles correctly.

We call them jingles to emphasize the fact that, rimed verse though they are, they are not poetry. Thus we need not try to make a poetic translation. Our translations instead attempt to conform to their nature as riddles: we have tried to make them technically faithful to the Chinese originals while avoiding any phrasing that would point you in the direction of the answer. So in translating a proverb, we would aim at producing something that sounded proverb-like in English.

We begin by pointing out faux amis. The character 賊 is now used to write a word zei meaning "thief." This is what we call someone who sneaks into a house, steals things, and sneaks back out. In classical Chinese that's 盗. There's a phrase 狗盗 "sneak thief" that we think literally just means "steals like a dog" but it has a folk-etymological explanation in which the thief dons a dog's fur and crawls. The word written 賊 in classical Chinese means violent assailants, bushwhackers, maybe criminal highway robbers, maybe officially sanctioned assassins.

The people called by the word written 寇 in classical Chinese are not necessarily bandits, often a military force acting as a raiding party or forlorn hope. There is a version of the proverb that omits 賊; we prefer this version, with 賊 qualifying what kind of 寇 are meant.

The verbs: 成 means more specifically "bring an enterprise to a successful conclusion," while 敗 is "try and fail." It can refer to defeat in battle, loss in business, failure in examinations, even to food turning bad while being kept. We discussed 為 in post #4 in the topic Can anything be called "typically Chinese"?

As a general thing, the syntax of a Chinese sentence can be paralleled in an English translation, and for teaching purposes it can be useful to do it that way, but typically that method carries something idiomatic in Chinese into something unidiomatic, even clumsy, in English. Here a common Chinese idiom "One who does X brings about Y" corresponds fairly well to an English one "Do X and Y happens." So the Fogies translate 成者為王﹐敗者為賊寇 as "Win and be crowned, lose and be outlawed."

Fogies--Thank you. You've sparked my interest hugely. I am exploring tangents I'd never imagined I'd be interested in. Instead of grabbing randomly, I've decided to read and memorize, to the best of my ability, the 三子經, which youngsters are encouraged to learn by heart.

>19 Fogies: Your transation is elegant: "Win and be crowned, lose and be outlawed."

>19 Fogies: Fogies

孟嘗君﹐脫穎而去 Meng Changjun as minister of Qi during 戰國, collected a raggedy bunch of 食客, including those who could crawl like a dog (狗盗) and one who could crow like a chicken. He managed to escape capture because the one who crowed like a chicken (雞鳴) was able to mimic cock's crow at dawn. The gate guards heard the cry and opened up, allowing Meng Changjun to escape. Meng Changjun believed that each person had his own special talent, which was revealed in time, and could be useful to him.

Is this where 狗盗 comes from? Probabaly predates the adage. Fogies, I'm happy to be corrected if I have the story wrong.

>21 belleyang: belleyang

The story of how he escaped from Qin is well known, and it does contain a reference to a fur cloak, but that is a white fox cloak that is stolen, not a dog fur worn as disguise. A reference to a sneak thief wearing a dog’s skin is in Han Feizi 齊有狗盜之子與刖危子戲而相誇，盜子曰吾父之裘獨有尾． “In Qi a sneak thief’s son was playing with the son of a man whose feet had been chopped off (as a criminal punishment). They were boasting to each other and the thief’s son said, ‘My father is the only one whose fur cloak has a tail’.”

That sneak-thievery was associated with dogs is shown by a surviving fragment of the lost book 魏略 that says 譬如人家有盜狗、而善捕鼠．盜雖有小損、而完我囊貯．“It’s like a household having a thieving dog that is good at catching mice and rats. Though we may lose a bit from its thievery, still it keeps our sacks of grain in storage intact.”

I'll say more in the first post of a new topic Mythogenic Historic Personalities.

Fogies, the introductory posts of your series on the art of translation have been fascinating. But the suspense of waiting for further installments is killing me.

>23 pechmerle: Pechmerle Sorry, hadn't meant to take so long. But if life was perfectly predictable it wouldn’t be called “life;” it would be called “timetable.” We’ll be back in a few days.

There’s one more preliminary detail to be mentioned, namely “loan characters.” Then we’ll tackle some interesting examples, beginning with the quotation from Confucius that belleyang cited somewhere in this group.

Having come in late in the conversation I want to thank the Fogies for clearing up the facts about Pound's knowledge of Chinese. I have read some of his translations and compared them with others. Even though the translations did not seem wildly inaccurate I found it hard to believe that Pound had actually learned Classical Chinese. I have spent time studying mandarin and have an idea of the time that would be involved in learning the the Classical, which would be necessary for the translations. If I read any more of Pound's translations I will remember that as a translator he was a good poet.

I heard a discussion on tranlsation on BBC Radio 3, and I just want to toss this idea out there for grabs:

Is the act of tranlslation a wholly subjective act? Can it be merely a commentary on the original? Are translations merely a diluted version of the original?

Speaking of translating Chinese, the article in today's Wall Street Journal, here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117063961235897853.html?mod=mostpop

is an amusing story on Beijing's effort to clean up poor quality translations of the city's signs into English.

>27 pechmerle: here is a version of the same article that doesn't require a WSJ sub.

MMcM,thanks for adding the more convenient link.

I'd like to hear more about what you mean by wholly subjective, commentary on the original, and diluted. I don't have any background in translation, other than the little bits I do for fun so it helps me to understand what you're thinking and where I might have something to contribute.

That having been said, I think there are different translations for different purposes and so it might be that translation is all of the above depending on the translators purpose.

One of my bad habits when translating Chinese, and especially classical Chinese, is I keep all the possible definitions of each character in mind, even if I'm translating phrases. So I end up with things like

 meaning 1 meaning 4
word {meaning 2 } word { meaning 5 }
 meaning 3 meaning 6

and I'll leave it in that form because stringing 'meaning1 meaning4' gives me a different nuance than 'meaning 1 meaning 6'. (LOL! I translate classical veery slooowly.)

Which puts me in mind, there's a nice little book called Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei : how a Chinese poem is translated by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz which contains a single poem translated 19 different ways and the opinions of the authors on the strengths and weaknesses of each translation. I liked it enough to get several copies and give them as gifts.

Aagh! ASCII art!

The Weinberger/Paz volume sounds interesting. There is a useful and amusing review of it on Amazon by "Boris Bangemann."

I also bought several copies of the Weinberger book and gave it to friends. I rather liked the idea.

>30 mvrdrk: mvrdk--As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I'd heard those ideas about translations stated on a BBC Radio 3 program-- Night Waves Legends. They were discussing Chekhov ( my favorite author) and one person mentioned that to the British, Chekhov is a British author; to the Russians, Shakespeare is Russian. I've always felt Chekhov was oh, so very, very Chinese. I think TRANSLATIONS are acts of CREATION and in that sense they are subjective. I love the way you have made visual the possible range of meanings. (Yes, the Weinberger/Paz book is now on my wish list.)

Seeing the way mvrdrk made visual the possible range of readings, i thought you all might like to know i english haiku (from the japanese) by arranging up to a dozen readings in 1, 2 and 3-column clusters so each reading seems part of a poli-faceted yet singular composite-translation. The first book where i did this, Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! (1,000 ku, all about sea cucumber, 海参 in Chinese 海鼠 in Japanese) was reviewed in Modern Haiku (a top magazine) by William Higginson, who was favorably impressed by the multiple translation. While Nineteen Ways is not bad as an essay, you might find as much to chew on in the first chapter of my Fly-ku! . . . Some of the techniques i have developed might work well for short Chinese poetry as well. I'll address Pound and Waley another time. The first message i tried dissappeared when I hit some key i should not have, so i am afraid to go on! You should be able to find pictures of my composite translations at paraverse.org. And, one thing more, translation is not just creation but re-creation, and for that reason i used the word in the subtitle of my latest bk, The Fifth Season. Please pardon my 自画自賛。
敬愚

keigu, I took a look at an excerpt from Fly-ku over at Amazon. Very amusing and instructive.

I also posted what i consider good reasons for including ample Japanese in books written in English at the Japanese language site, also visited by some people in this forum (which has more interesting things for me). The same thing goes for Chinese, of course.

Also, i realize this forum is about pre-Yuan lit. but are any fans of prof crump (Songs of Xanadu, etc.)here? Just wondering . . .

>36 keigu: What kind of books? The sad fact is that not very many English books have any Spanish or French in them.

Modernist poets who "translated" Chinese poems sometimes did include the original, though often as borderline legible calligraphy.

Intrigued by the Postscript to Nineteen Ways, and with a few minutes at the public library, I had a look at "Philology in Translation Land" from Selected Works of Peter A. Boodberg. It's only just over a page long.

Weinberger doesn't do Boodberg's argument justice, probably because space didn't permit. You can get pretty much all of his precis from Boris Bangemann's Amazon review that #31 referred to above; it also quotes Boodberg's translation.

The key is prosody. 上 has to rhyme with 響 xiǎng, so it's shǎng, not shàng. shàng meant 'upon'; shǎng meant 'go up'.

Furthermore, once this is restored the tonal sequence is recognizably standard, but shifted out of order one line: the first line would be the fourth. Boodberg calls it a "rondeau effect"; that's how come the first line is repeated parenthetically in his translation.

I'm not qualified to have an opinion myself. chineselanguage.org does confirm that shǎng only means 'go up'. It lists that sense for shàng, too, as do most dictionaries. So it's not so much that the Tang sense was lost as Weinberger implies, as that the tones of the preposition and verb merged.

If it is a rondeau, then it's also like

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. ... A way a lone a last a loved a long the

in Finnegans Wake, which keigu happened to mention in the Joyce group.

I'm sure the real Sinologists here have thoughts about Boodberg's role in the great debates of the last century. But I'm just an amateur and have as much pomo interest in the history of ideas as any truth. Plus, what's not to like about snarky erudition idiosyncratically expressed?

An adjacent cedule mentioned Through a Glass Darkly; A Study of English Translations of Chinese Poetry, which looks to have been a Columbia thesis. Anybody know anything about it? (That's a popular book title, but none of the dozen works in LT is the same.)

I'm finally getting around to reading Mouse or Rat?. It's interesting to hear the author perspective on translation. I imagine belleyang has experience from that side too.

My books are poems, most translated for the first time, within prose trying to simultaneously explain the translation and essay a theme (see egs at paraverse.org or amazon). But, yes, the paucity of Japanese or Chinese in English books is no anamoly but an extension of the broader idea of keeping foreign languages out. That, in turn, is an extension of the mistaken advice for us to write in our own words, which has made most nonfiction in the USA boring. I try NOT to put into my own words whatever may be found well done, or done in a way to enliven my writing by contrast, by another.

The above, 39, was a response to 37). I thought by clicking the Post a message there it would pop in there, but it did not. Is there a threadview i have missed, so that it matters?

I am grateful to learn about Boodberg's writing.
Re Mouse/rat, I have been astounded to find a mouse drinking from the Sumida River in one Issa translation (i believe the translator's common sense failed to overcome his false belief that only a nezumi prefaced with doro was a rat). One of 20 chapters in my most recent book on haiku of the Japanese New Year Seaon (The 5th Season) is about the same nezumi whose taboo term 嫁が君yome-ga-kimi I mostly render as Princess Bride. The mouse/rat problem is no problem there, for good sense says it is mouse all the way, but in the chapter on the twelve horary signs 十二支, it was indeed a problem that could only be coped with case by case.

By the way, i would love to add short Chinese poems on individual year animals to the revised edition in a year or two, so if you have any leads . . . With Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! I tried and failed to find a single Chinese poem re sea cucumber though i bet someone must have done at least a light verse about the way donkey dongs were sometimes substituted (as there were poems about the loss of tails on farm animals to stuff cod pieces in england) -- in japan, the sea cucmber (literally sea-rat) became the (taoist) sage for (i simplify) they admired a do-nothing (無為）and i would love to find at least one person noting this china! Ah, one poet in Taiwan said he knew of no poems on trepang but he might write one -- unfortunately we lost touch and i forget his name . . .

>38 MMcM:

Ah, thanks for "So it's not so much that the Tang sense was lost as Weinberger implies, as that the tones of the preposition and verb merged."

I had wondered about that comment of Weinberger's but my knowledge is mixed with dialect, so I figured he could have been right.

Re Fogies 天地無用。Believe it or not, the Japanese linguist/humorist Gunshi Gaishi (real name toshio and was head of library at tsukuba univ) has a heading for this in his book 迷解　笑辞苑 (do the puns work - do we have the homophones?-- in chinese?) -- so even Japanese, or at least one Japanese, realize/s their usage is odd! (Found it by accident when i slipped that book into my library!)

Question: Do you know the Shiching poem where a young protagonist is thrilled to have rolled in the dew with a broad-browed clear-eyed beauty? I noticed the protagonist was female for waley and pound yet male for two japanese translators, one of whom was a celebrated bunkajin. I favored Waley and Pound for the brow+eye combi reminded me of our description of knights, my chinese anthropologist friend thought (wrongly) beauties had to be female, and Shirakawa Shizuka (whom i wrote because my chinese friend said he knew more about ancient china than any chinese do) wrote me that he was unsure, but favored a female protagonist because in the ancient 歌垣 women tended to take the lead.

Any opinion? Is it debated in China? Please ask around, for i do not have many chinese connections. note also that waley made it his first poem. i think it is to contrast with the manyoushuu which starts with a king proposing (words tantamount to proposing) to a girl (if you have seen the boring manyoushuu translations out there and made a sour face, you will love my translation in The Fifth Season -- poems for the re-creation of the world). If anyone knows a waley scholar, please see if he ever wrote about why he put that song first!

Fogies, if you are reading, I would be very grateful to have a second opinion on what you think of the Boodberg's "going up" (MMcM's #38).

I like the idea of light climbing the tree trunks, for it also makes the poem more dynamic. What is interesting is usually right in translation, but . . .

I also wonder if Chinese critics have debated the scene. Is it on one mountain with voices from somewhere aroung or is there another mountain ajacent as a japanese friend favors. It might be nice to survey chinese literatae on that. I would bet a number of different images would be found. (if you google image paraverse.org you may find various japanese drawings of a famous haiku by buson, that make ambiguity concrete. i forget how to find the page, though it is my own site.). 敬愚

難得糊塗

Okay, please help me translate this appropriately. I know what it means, but what would be the best paraphrase? Direct translation doesn't work.
MMcM, Mvrdrk, Liao, Wildbill, Pechmerle?

It's a rare person who can pretend ignorance when he is truly wise?

Why doesn't direct translation work with this one? It seems so straight forward. Unless it's part of something bigger and more complicated?

A direct translation would be: "It's rare to be foolish," which doesn't make sense nor does it speak to the bigger truth. I'm getting a better sense of it. It relates to keeping one's mouth closed when one sees a wrong, a mistake; it's a situation where it's best to pretend ignorance.

"It's a rare/wise man who can pretend ignorance."

This saying doesn't belong in the period we are discussing. It comes from the Qing artist Zhen Banqiao's brush. He was one of the Eccentrics of Yangzou.

難得糊塗

This phrase also means, "Don't take things too seriously," or in popular lingo, "Chill."

Not knowing Chinese, i do not know the idioms, but difficult-gain-glue-cover/paint suggests:

Keeping one's lips glued is hard to learn.
Ain't easy to zip up your own lips

But, not knowing the context, i am tempted to think of how difficult it is to spread glue out well not wasting any and not wrinkling the paper --who is to say the above doesn't mean the following? (I am kidding, for if 47 on what the phrase also means is the case, it is completely wrong)

Even pasting paper takes study.

How much can one expect the translation to accomplish? It's not that the lexical items fail to line up semantically, or even that there is an implied association (except that it is now a common saying). It's a paradox in Chinese already. Isn't that right? If so, explaining it away might not be an improvement.

Still, maybe "dumb" helps. Although 糊塗 doesn't have the same double meaning, it does point in a certain direction.

Here it is in (his?) calligraphy.
Here is a translation discussion from the same site.

The first Google hit was an article from the Epoch Times. But apparently that article didn't run in the English edition. (They give both the Chinese and English editions away free at the subway stop I use, since it's near a university. But Falun Gong would be way off the topic's charter.)

Is there an echo in Eccl. 3:7, עת לחשות ועת לדבר? Fans of crazy old Ezra Pound (whom the sadly absent Fogies started us off with) will remember that tempus loquendi, tempus tacendi was Malatesta's motto.

>48 keigu: Ah ha ha! I love it! That's how I piece together Japanese.

難得 as a compound means rare, not often, or difficult to gain, as in "It's rare to find true pastry crossiants in this city."

糊塗 as a compound means confused or foolish, as in "I was trying to do too many things at once and got myself throughly confused."

難得糊塗, as I've found it used in modern colloquial, is used to excuse confusion or foolish action as being a rare event, typically referencing other people. In English, I think it would be something along the lines of "even the most reliable person makes a mistake once in a while, so it's okay that he got it wrong this time."

Also as bellyang described it, it can also be said of pretending not to notice, a la keeping your mouth shut when you see some error that would be inexpedient to point out. (added - Ah ha, and in the context MMcM points out it has this latter meaning of opening an eye and shutting an eye.)

>50 mvrdrk:

"even the most reliable person makes a mistake once in a while"

猿も木から落ちる。 'Even monkeys fall from trees.'

"inexpedient to point out"

Is this reticence more expedient or noble? When faced with a 指鹿為馬 situation, for example?

'noble' I think?

>49 MMcM: MMcM, yes, it is Zheng Banqiao's calligraphy. My great grandfather owned a pair of bamboo scroll paintings by the same. My great-grandfather would air them out and display them in autumn when the chrysanthemus were in full bloom. I have always wondered what became of them after the Communists takeover. I wonder if the pair of scrolls are still intact or destroyed.

Thanks MMcM and MVRDRK, especially, for clarifying what is colloquial and what standard with 難得糊塗.

Re 50, i suspect "Even Kobo makes a slip of the brush" might be more appropo of what you describe than the monkey (or a drowning kappa).

Exiled from my books and in quarters too cramped to arrange more than what is needed for my immediate work, i can not pop out with the Piet Hein grook that says that it is wise to include enough foolishness to make it seem so.

From the description of 糊塗, the word "befuddlement" comes to mind (the etymology of the word intrigues: was this a slapstick idea of a fool?) For whatever reason, i cannot help but want a bit more, irony, perhaps -- "It takes work to slip up like that!"

Added: clicking on the links in 49 -- which were wonderful and i should have seen before writing the above -- piet hein's grook does seem close. I can think of two saying-like translations, where what is needed would lie between them, namely --

"True brilliance doesn't shine."
"It is hard to be dumb." .

>54 keigu: What is a grook?

Befuddlement is an excellent word for 糊塗! I wish fogies were here to explain how the word came to be. Chinese also uses 糊糊塗塗 for the same meaning. It always makes me think of gloppy, lumpy, indistinctly mush like substances.

I don't think the phrase includes much irony. More likely resigned tolerance.

Grooks are the aphoristic poems created by the danish mathematician/physicist?/designer piet hein, most widely known for his super-eggs (a craze of the 70's) that are ovals just squared enough to stand (found as gold or silver ice-cubes and the stockholm traffic circle, etc.). They sold millions of copies internationally and deserved to. I would bet there was a chinese translation, for sometimes owls from elsewhere can be sold in athens. All the people in the hard sciences that loved poetry loved the grooks as many would later love larson's cartoons -- if i were to sum up grooks in a word, it would be logic serving wit. I wish i could put together a compilation of the best for it would surely be a best-seller and delight many, but to do so i must first become well-known enough to make an offer to do so worthwhile to the copyright holder (his son). I would bet that there has been a Chinese translation. I think the shortest grook is "co-existence or no existence" but i forget the parsing! Another stuck in my mind is "there is one art no more no less to do all things with artlessness" which is probablt parsed into four lines. 4-6 lines is average length and they can be more involved than these exanmples indicate.

If Fogies is out there, he will surely return to relate piet hein and chinese aphorisms . . . And Belleyang, if you are near a library and have not read Piet Hein, you must find all the grook collections you can and do the same!

愚句,a word used by 宗祇, a japanese poet i love (you will find scores of his haiku (a century before "early-era haikai") in my book, Cherry Blossom Epiphany.(just want to check if the touchstones work. Ah, let me try Grooks! It worked, someone registered them.)

There is a tendency to understand everything we hear as language, especially sounds articulated by a human voice. Genuinely meaningless nonsense syllables are thus very difficult to achieve and may even be impossible. Consider “splushetty plushetty sloppetty ploppetty.” None of these is an English word but to an English speaker these non-words carry meaning. No one would ever take them as referring, for example, to majestic snow-capped mountains. But if told they referred to a child traversing rain puddles we no longer see them as nonsense but as aptly descriptive. Two-syllable coinages of this sort are common in Chinese, and are among the best proofs that we do not understand written Chinese by assembling character-meanings. The characters in these binomes do not have meanings—only their sounds have meanings, by referring us to the similar sounds of other words we use all the time and need no context to recognize. But to catch those references we need to be able to read the text in a pronunciation reasonably similar to that of its author. A poignantly amusing sight is the struggle of a sinologist who has become fairly fluent at reading narrative prose to make sense of such binomes, pronouncing them in Mandarin and groping for the meanings of the rare characters typically employed to write them.

Fogies, you continue to show us just how hard it is to truly translate.

Almost two years ago today, you wrote:

"This is the first of a series of posts in which the Fogies propose to deliver themselves of some hard-won opinions about translating classical Chinese."

My hope for the New Year is that you will again add to the fascinating ground work that you started laying then.

>58 pechmerle: It's harder than it ought to be. Have you seen the new edition of Classical Chinese Vocabulary Notes? It has some pointed remarks about how to arrive at the degree of understanding of the original text needed to translate it.

An anecdote: Here's an account of how I chased down one of the words in an essay I recently translated, the Fei Cao Shu Lun 非草書論 "Condemning Grass Writing" of Zhao Yi. I saw it mentioned years ago, but never got a printed copy of the book that contains it. Recently I found several versions as e-texts on the web.

In describing how avid some devotees are it says that even in public gatherings they ignore their fellows to practice cao shu, writing on a wall with a twig or in dirt with a finger, not stopping even when the skin is abraded, the fingernail broken and the 鰓 bleeding.

There is no point in denying that 鰓 “fish’s gill” and 顋 “human cheek” are the same word. But the specific references are distinguished in writing, and the one for the human cheek is not written with radical 195, nor is there any reason for a copyist to replace 顋 with 鰓.

And anyway, no amount of damage to a finger will make a cheek bleed.

So the problem is to find a word that means something that will bleed when a fingertip is damaged, and that is written with a graph that can be mistaken for 鰓.

Those of you who read a lot of old stuff and handwritten stuff will of course have guessed right away that the first thing that occurred to me was an erroneous substitution of 魚 for 角. But I read all the entries under radical 148 in the Kangxi dictionary and found nothing plausible.

So what other graphic elements might have been misconstrued as 魚? Well, if your primary visual orientation is to the printed character this might seem farfetched, but if you know Chinese handwriting you will recognize my next guess, 皮. And sure enough, at eleven strokes under 皮 in Kangxi I found 皮+曼. This was not a word I knew—I didn’t even have the graph in my data base inventory. But it fits the context perfectly and is a very plausible scribal error. Also, it appears to be cognate with another word the author uses in this same essay, which is weak evidence that it might have been in his vocabulary.

So who was the canny sinologist who taught me how to do that kind of analysis? It was a career military intelligence operative, George Sing, at NSA in 1959. Most sinologists can’t do it and never could.

Looks like Unicode support is only half-way there, too. U+3FF8 「㿸」 displays in some browsers, but not others. In the new PDF (which is very exciting, BTW), it looks okay but copy/pastes to 梶, cause that's what it is in Mojikyo M105. Simsun (Founder Extended) would have worked for this with the official codepoint, but I bet there are many that aren't even in it.

Sorry, didn't mean to turn this into "It's hard to transcode."

More ground work: The question the Fogies want to address in this post is how to judge accuracy of translation. Leave aside for a while the problems of a translator with poor language skill and a defective text. Assume knowledge of Standard Chinese and Standard US English at the level of a professional translator. Suppose a text consists of a pilot's description of flying at a certain altitude. He might say, "座舱盖可能有点结冰的现象". There is no doubt of what this means. The question is how to say the same thing in English, and the Fogies flatly deny that finding equivalent words is a good way to do it. Professionals translate at the level of the utterance. We need to be able to replicate this utterance in English, not as a professor would say it, or a librarian or a huaqiao college student, but a US pilot. We make that, "You might get a bit of icing on your canopy." Consider the huge discrepancies at the word level. The Chinese says "cockpit canopy". The English only says "canopy" because, after all, what other kind of canopy would ice up on a plane in flight? The English "icing" is ambiguous (in theory) since it could also refer to a smear of birthday cake. The subject of the Chinese sentence is "canopy". The English reduces it to the object of a preposition, and introduces as subject a pronoun that is nowhere to be found in the Chinese. And where is the word xianxiang "phenomenon"? Part of what we must strive to preserve in translation is the level of style. "Phenomenon" is a high-falutin word. Of course the US pilot knows it, understands it, and will use it in formal writing. The Chinese word xianxiang fits easily into everyday speech, used to refer to subjective experiences as well as laboratory results. We would not regard substituting "experience a bit of icing" for "get a bit of icing" as straying beyond stylistic limits here, especially if it is argued that it disambiguates "icing", but still the Chinese is phrased in ordinary everyday colloquial, and we aim at saying the same thing at the same level in English.

Comments anyone?

{later} Having thought it over, we now prefer "You might observe a bit of icing on your canopy," as best preserving in English the meaning of xianxiang in Chinese.

That is absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much!

In our previous post in this thread we made a brief science-fiction jump into the distant future, where we knew we could find two things our example needed, a source text of which we could confidently say, “There is no doubt of what this means,” and a word in that text with a near equivalent in the target language, that nonetheless could not be properly translated in that context. Now let’s go back home to ancient China to consider the problem of how to translate a word with no equivalent at all in the target language. We hope to show that translating at the level of the utterance is a good way to deal with such words.
Such a word is 氣 (or 气 or 気 as you prefer). It is known to many westerners with only a slight knowledge of China in its pinyin transliteration of qi (or ki in Sino-Japanese, gi in Sino-Korean) as a term much used in discussing ink painting, cuisine, folk medicine, martial arts…essentially the entire range of China-derived hobbies with which they amuse themselves. It is not translatable, but we regard transliterating it as a copout to be avoided where possible.
One thing to bear in mind as you read Classical Chinese is that to those who wrote in it and their contemporary countrymen, it was not an exotic mystery from the far east. It was their language, to them the world’s only civilized language, and they did not write in expectation of being misunderstood. It is far from unique in containing words that don’t go into English. English itself has words that are hard to translate into other English.
Consider “soul”. Can you explain its meaning in usages like soul food, The Soul of a New Machine, “Bless my soul!” or soul-searching? How do you translate Rubber Soul into Chinese, remembering to carry the pun? (Transliterating it is just as difficult, since except for the s you have a string of sounds that do not exist in Chinese.) We think that in nearly every case “soul” can be translated at the level of the utterance, but that is not easy to do.
This post is going to be long enough to have to be split into sections. We have had negative reaction to that practice from some group members, and to you we can only say, “Learn patience, young sinophiles, learn patience.”

Fascinating, as usual.

>61 Fogies:: An amatuer reaction to xianxiang is "you might see some icing." Does that maintain the colloquial tone while capturing the substance?

>63 Fogies:: I'm not opposed to transliteration once a term has become fairly (or at least somewhat) well known. Thus, seeing qi used in popular articles in the West probably tells me more than some non-expert's effort at translating the term in context.

Recently, I received an ARC copy of Jonathan Keats's The Book of the Unknown. This is composed folk tales in the Eastern European jewish tradition. In the first story, I encounter the term dybbuk. (Although I know I have seen it before, I still look it up to get an accurate definition to be sure I am understanding the story as fully as possible. It is also critical that American Heritage Dictionary includes this word, but it also includes qi.) I think I prefer the term in the original rather than an effort to translate it. I realize 'that way lies madness' if reduced to a general rule; many, many words would be better in the original and a translation would become unreadable.

>38 MMcM: Boodberg was nearly as unkenning as Pound, although with a command of thousands of characters instead of only hundreds. The Wang Wei poem is one of a genre known as 五言絕句 “five-syllable cut-off lines”, of which tens of thousands of examples have survived. Their prosody is as fixed as anything can be in Chinese literature: ab caesura cde. We can’t claim to have read anywhere near all of them, but we’ve seen enough over more than half a century that we’d be willing to bet that not a single example exists with the prosody Boodberg’s translation requires: abcd caesura e.

We have a friend from Georgia who, while living in New Jersey, advertised for a lost dog. She says she got so many phone calls from Jerseyites that she had to consciously force herself to retrieve her pronunciation “dawg” from the “dwog” it had evolved into. Wang Wei’s pronunciation differed from Boodberg’s. Which of them was the native speaker? Which was the poet? Which of them genuinely knew the word and which had to look it up in a rime book?

What does "ab caesura cde" mean?

"caseura" is an audible break, or a so-called cutting word that pauses and shifts emphasis.

For example, in Pope's famous line, "To err is human to forgive divine," one would read it aloud as "To err is human // to forgive divine"

What Fogies seem to be saying is that Boodberg's break in the last line, the prosody pause/break before "going up" is impossible, based on the clear-cut genre to which Wang Wei's poem belongs. (Here is the Amazon review -- Bangemann's halfway down the page -- that is the internet source for Boodberg's translation:
http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Ways-Looking-Wang-Wei/product-reviews/0918825148/...

>66 mvrdrk: The letters stand for syllables. A caesura is a pause in the rhythmic delivery of a line of poetry. Using made-up nonsense syllables, ab caesura cde would sound like “bing-beng, bang-bong-bung”. A seven-syllable line would have a minor caesura after the second syllable and a major one after the fourth, both leading to a prosodic focus on the last three syllables in the line.
Poems are composed in language. Language is not made by assembling bits from dictionaries; it goes the other way around. Language is not uniform. Period. It’s that simple. If you have some poems made by a small coterie who were in frequent contact, especially if they lived near each other, you may be entitled to assume they rime in a consistent dialect. But in general, poets rime by their own ears. Even in a language as relatively insulated from outside influence as Modern English, take poets like Pope, Wordsworth and Hardy: you will not find them riming consistently with each other, nor with RSP. Pope, for example, rimed “join” in Snuffy Smith’s pronunciation, jine. In some dialects oin and ine have merged; in others, not.
When you deal with the Chinese languages (note plural) bear in mind that China is a melting pot and has been for thousands of years. (The imperial family in the time of Wang Wei was of Turkic origin, for example.) The centralized administrative style, of immemorial origin in China, would require a standard language to be used at court and in major administrative centers. But, as the modern example of the French Academy shows, trying to standardize language is like trying to get cats to march in formation. The utility of standard language in a centralized regime is so high that the effort is worth making, which is why so many of the old books that have survived are word-lists: so many of them were made. One of the dynastic histories, for example, mentions a 四聲切韻 “Exact Rimes in Four Tones” by Zhou Yong around AD 450. (He was a brother of the Zhou She who coined the catch-phrase 天子聖哲 “the emperor has supernal wisdom” to illustrate the four tones of his language.) One Shen Yue wrote a 四聲譜 “Handbook of Four Tones” roughly halfway between that Qieyun and the Qieyun of Lu Fayan, published in AD 601. To take the latter as the standard pronunciation of Middle Chinese, as so many sinologists do, is a gross oversimplification, showing a misunderstanding of why these rime books were made that could be dispelled by reading Lu Fayan’s preface to his own. He complains about what he considers the false rimes of previous books and about the failure of speakers far from Chang’an to conform to the tone system of the capital. He wanted to show people the right way to do it.
We have no evidence that Wang Wei pronounced his language just as Lu Fayan did his, and common sense points the other way. But he wrote his poems in standard prosodic forms. Boodberg gets that exactly backward. If you want to know which words Wang Wei rimed with which others, read his poems.

Thank you for the explanations! There's so much I don't know. Can you recommend a good book about Chinese poetry for the layperson?

>69 mvrdrk: We’re the wrong folks to ask about such things. We pay little attention to what is written about Chinese and Japanese in other languages. A book we recall reading in grad school is The Art of Chinese Poetry. The introduction to Poems of the Late T’ang is informative. Any suggestions from other readers?

What about one in Chinese? Not that it would be easy, but that's okay, my philosophy books have been waiting 30 years for me to read them and will probably wait another 5 before I can give them real attention.

>65 Fogies:-68 Facing the possibility that this might develop into an extended subtopic, we post the Wang Wei original and the Boodberg translation here for convenient reference, noting, for the record, that regardless of whether he gets the Chinese right, Boodberg here violates most of the canons of good translation that we work to observe.
空山不見人 The empty mountain: to see no men,
但聞人語響 Barely earminded of men talking - countertones,
返景入深林 And antistrophic lights-and-shadows incoming deeper the deep-treed grove
復照青苔上 Once more to glowlight the blue-green mosses - going up (The empty mountain...)

The immediate question is whether the last syllable in the poem is a word meaning “go up”. Boodberg says it must be because it must rime in the second tone and only the word “go up” is given that tone. We dislike giving a know-it-all windbag like Boodberg any credit for anything. But Chinese literature is such a vast, vast territory that it seldom pays to be certain that any particular type of thing is not to be found there. There are many kinds of poem with five-syllable lines, and many patterns of prosody to be found in them. The well-known “seven-step poem” has interesting prosody. The first two lines are:
煮豆持作羹 Boil beans to make broth.
漉豉以爲汁 Strain the cooked beans to make sauce.
Here we have parallelism as rigid as can be found, with a cozy nook for a caesura after the second syllable. But look at the next two lines:
萁向釜下然 Beanstalks burn facing the bottom of the kettle.
豆在釜中泣 Beans weep inside the kettle.
These are readable as prose, and a caesura would be out of place in them. The last syllable of each stands alone syntactically but not prosodically. This is much more like a “music office poem” of the sort we started another topic about.

A man named Li Chong, who lived over a century before Wang Wei, wrote a four-line five-syllable poem that might possibly be interpretable in a manner parallel to how Boodberg interpreted the Wang Wei poem that started this excursus. (Cultural background: written on the day 寒食 “cold food”, when by tradition no cooking fires were lit.)
普天皆滅焰 Everywhere under the sky they’ve doused the flames.
匝地盡藏煙 All around the earth, no smoke appears.
不知何處火 I find no source for this fire
來就客心燃 that comes and burns in a traveler’s heart.
Note how neatly the last two lines fit Boodberg’s interpretation of Wang Wei’s last two lines. (Note also that 客心燃 could be understood as a three-syllable sentence “A traveler’s heart is burning”—but that is intuitively less probable.)

We still disagree with Boodberg, but for lagniappe here are some more lines from Wang Wei in which the last syllable stands alone syntactically but not prosodically:
青苔石上淨 The green moss is clean above the rocks.
細草松下軟 The fine grass is soft below the pines.

>38 MMcM: Turns out to be simple after all. Before issuing his cedule, Boodberg might have considered how implausible his rendering of the fourth line is and how unlikely it would be to hear echoes in a thick forest, and looked for words that rime with 上 in the third tone instead of the second. There is one in Qie Yun, an exact rime for shàng. The graph for it isn’t in the Unicode inventory, but you can identify it by replacing the 音 of 響 with 言. Qie Yun defines the word as 非美言也 “speech that is other than pleasing”. Qie yun gives no third tone reading for 響 nor a second tone one for 言-under-鄕, but other dictionaries say the two graphs are interchangeable.

So here’s Fogies’ translation:
In these uninhabited mountains one sees no one
Only hears the noise of voices
The reflected light penetrates the dense woods
And goes back to shine on the green moss

couple of corrections:
>74 Fogies: Thinking it over, it now seems the most likely reading of the last line of the Li Chong poem would take 客心燃 as 客心之燃 "the burning in a traveler's heart", syntactically the object of 就 "reach the destination".
>75 Fogies: Most translations we've seen assume the light is reflected from the surface of water. But 返 just means "return" in general, perhaps by reflection but perhaps simply being resumed after an absence, as for example when the sky clears and the sunlight returns.
The seeming vagueness of Chinese poetry is partly due to the poems having been written in a specific context which explains their referents. A translator does ill to make vague Chinese into more specific target language.

Fogiesama,

Just librarythinged for the first time since mid-august, partly to upload my latest, one of which includes a 'deer park' chapter -- darn! would have loved to have quoted you on boodberg and the on/up matter. And as i read 68, above and your advice to read Wang Wei to see how he rhymed made me suddenly think of how a poet could push a dialect by rhyming in a way not traditionally acceptable (or deemed improper by those with political power due to dialect/geographic or class differences).

As one who spent decades correcting translations, i must be rude and say i do not buy the following

The reflected light penetrates the dense woods
And goes back to shine on the green moss

Reflected + goes back to shine on = no, it is just not natural.

This is not to say i know what's what -- my guess is that we have light shining in to illuminate and thereby restore the green to the moss which will keep it until the morning also askance rays light it up for a while. And my experience says i am almost surely wrong, too.

At any rate, the book with it -- with great help from MMcM a year or two ago before Japanese Mad Poetry hijacked me -- is up and 100% readable at Google Books. Another chapter plays with a chinese cry-monster and the idea of a prayer for silence at night done by a third party --- Even if my Chinese is bogus, you might have some fun here. And the illus by Thomas Hood punning on "radical demonstration" in the first part of the book will have you LOLing. (if you like his punning pictures also see the "stitch in time" in the back of the book.)

敬愚

#5 --

". . . . how you translate will depend on why. We mentioned Pound's unkenning renditions of Chinese; in terms of journeys, we might compare those to the stroll of a fashion model at a show. At the end of the journey no progress has been made but much has been shown off. There's nothing wrong with that; many people enjoy seeing it done."

That reminds of an "Ascience" (a Japanese shampoo) commercial I recently watched, in which "stars" the lovely Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi (the entire series can be seen on "helloziyi.com"). She is sitting in the front row of the "audience" at a fashion show, and like everyone else is watching the models "parade". Now and then she slightly nods, and blinks.

Suddenly she notices that she is surrounded -- on both sides and behind -- by photographers, and that they are taking pictures of her.

Shortly she is invited onto the stage, in the midst of the "show". And as she mounts the stage and turns to face the audience, her wonderfully shiny hair is prominantly shown, and the audience applauds. And she bows.

And as the commercial ends, the models who were initially the center of attention, are standing at the edge of the stage and appladuing her.

Otherwise, as a native English speaker (is it the language or the person that is the native? both?) I learned quite a bit from your first post. (I learned nothing about Pound except that my despising of him is even more well-grounded than I'd known.) For decades I avoided learning Chinese because the written language is visually beautiful, and I didn't want to risk understanding it for fear that might corrupt and destroy the obvective beauty. Then within the last year, having stumbled into Chinese film, and wrestling with "English" subtitles, I had a bruised-forehead V-8 moment: I could have separated the two: I could have learned to understand and speak Chinese without also learning to read and write it. (That bruise has healed while another has developed, as I've been seriously kicking myself since that belatedly brilliant realization.)

And now I find that the written language, despite its grace and beauty, has no meaning. So it's back to the picture show, back to the beginning of the circle, exactly as models appear to do . . .

(OK, another: while finding and downloading photographs of Chinese actress Zhao Wei/Vicki Zhao Wei I found among them one simply named "Zhao Wei". On a matte light grey background were the Chinese characters for "mother" (in cheerful orange), "father" (in cheerful blue), and, between them, for "child" (in cheerful green), and this text (in the same green):

a future begins

And this announcement (in a darker grey):

WEI ZHAO (Chinese characters) was born
at 1:53 am, Dec 9th, 2009
weighting 7 lbs 1 oz
and measuring 51 cm
Feng Zhao and Xiaoli Yang

Not the same Zhao Wei, as the actress is in her thirties. But a wonderful surprise; and the character for "child" is a delight. Sorta sad that none of that has any meaning.

>68 Fogies:
A sad commentary on how little attention sinologists pay to rime books: googling "Classical Chinese" we found this web site: www.princeton.edu/~classbib/ , which is for Chinese Historiography at Princeton, one of the world's great research universities. The home page says, "All materials are under copyright: 1996 by Benjamin A. Elman. Last Major Revision: January, 2007."
This is not a casual squib put up by some undergrad and never reviewed; this is a carefully vetted, long-standing post, meant to be authoritative, by a pezzonovante on a flagship of sinology. It gives an overview of many possible sources for the historical study of texts, including rime books. It says, "Guang yun 廣 韻. Originally compiled in A. D. 601 by Lu Fayan 陸 法 言 under the title Tang yun 唐 韻."
"My God-a-bless!" What a great blob of ignorance packed into a brief remark this is. It is exactly as ludicrous as saying, "Oxford English dictionary. First compiled by Samuel Johnson under the title Webster's Dictionary."

Worse. Yours doesn't have the dynastic anachronism. So, "Webster's American Dictionary," and it's too bad he didn't title it United States Dictionary.

The dynastic anachronism is blatant, but we saw no way to analogize it succinctly. Thanks for your addendum.

>74 Fogies:,77
Looking back at this after two years, again struck by how context-free this poem is. Taking Keigu's suggestion that we consider what is likely to happen in nature, and adopting Boodberg's rendition of 復 as "once more", consider this translation, done on the assumption that the poet had been in fog for a while and then in sunlight again:

Returning brightness penetrates deep woods
And again shines on green moss

#44

難得糊塗
Where ignorance is bliss, it's folly to be wise.

I asked a friend and got the above translation and link.