User Comments - bokane

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bokane

Posted on: Shikumen vs. Hutongs and Chinese vs. Western School
October 20, 2008, 04:56 AM

A quick addition: '胡同' is not actually a Chinese word originally; it comes from the Mongolian word for a water well, which is pronounced something like "hutuk" today. The word used to be written as 衚衕 (the same characters plus 行 crossroads), giving a hint as to the meaning.

Posted on: High Maintenance Girls and the Elderly
July 31, 2008, 03:59 PM

hitokiri6993, diǎ is 嗲.

Posted on: 马丁· 路德 · 金
February 16, 2008, 11:00 AM

obitoddkenobi -- Thanks very much for the kind words. I certainly wouldn't claim erudition, but I do know enough trivia to be good on quiz nights. 信达雅 are the three great difficulties of translation -- fidelity, fluency, and elegance - as described by the great 19th-century translator Yen Fu (严复) (譯事三難:信達雅). It's become a standard way of evaluating literary translations here now, and almost any discussion of a translated work is bound to have some mention of how it measures up in each category. As you mentioned, translation of highly dense and gnomic texts like the Daode Jing is extremely difficult, and - owing to the extreme leeway one's allowed in interpreting the original Chinese - probably not entirely possible. That said, there are some excellent translations out there; Victor Mair's translation is very philologically rigorous, but pretty readable, and Robert Henricks' translation of the Mawangdui and Guodian manuscripts makes a fantastic reference text for further study. (Everybody's got their own favorite versions, of course; these two are mine.) Other Daoist texts such as the Zhuangzi -- of which I'm a big fan myself -- would likely fare better in translation, but have mostly gone overlooked. There are several good translations of Zhuangzi, but the best complete translation out there, IMO, is Victor Mair's, as it captures a lot of the sheer fun of the original; that said, Angus Graham's partial translation of the Inner Chapters and some of the Outer Chapters represents a somewhat more serious philosophical engagement with the text. Translation of poetry is a touchier matter, and I've seen a lot of disagreement in English translations of Chinese poetry as to whether the translator should be permitted to take poetic license (an extreme case being, say, Ezra Pound, who did not let his ignorance of Chinese keep him from producing translations of Confucius and the Book of Odes), or whether a more strictly literal interpretation is required (an extreme case being, say, Bernhard Karlgren's excruciating character-by-character glosses of the Odes). I was thinking of writing something on the subject for a blog (Paper Republic) that some other translators and I write; maybe I'll get around to it once I get this mountain of freelance work off my desk.

Posted on: 马丁· 路德 · 金
February 15, 2008, 08:53 PM

"真是具备你的执著和钻研精神。" Are you sure you're not just calling me a pedant? :) Regarding the translation -- I'm a big believer in the virtues of 信达雅. Maybe that could be a topic for discussion at some point...

Posted on: 马丁· 路德 · 金
February 15, 2008, 01:23 PM

Jenny (and anyone else who's interested), there's another translation of this speech in the Chinese edition of The American Reader (美国读本) -- a great book in the original English, and surprisingly well-translated in the Chinese version. I prefer that translation somewhat, as it sounds a little more graceful to me, and in some places is a little more accurate (though this may just be because it's the version I'm more familiar with). Consider the first line of the speech: "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation." In the 美国读本 translation, this becomes: 一百年以前,一位伟大的美国人──我们就站在他象征性的庇荫下──签署了解放宣言。 Whereas in the translation used here, it's 一百年前,一位伟大的美国人签署了解放黑奴宣言,今天我们就是在他的雕像前集会。 If anyone's interested in the alternate translation, there's a copy at http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/infousa/AmReader/GB/p769.htm (oddly, the US embassy has both versions, though I don't think they actually refer people to the American Reader version.)