A grab bag of thoughts

[tarigwaemir]

Haste Street on the Feast of the Annunciation

A numbered list (with no particular organization):

1. Took an hour-long coffee break today and passed by a Korean percussion group practicing in the shade of the trees behind the biology buildings.

2. Cody's Books is opening again in downtown Berkeley. I passed by the store today while coming home from lab and noticed that they're having all sorts of "15% Off" days (15% off if you bring your Cal ID, 15% off if your birthday is in April, etc.) for their opening week. I'm so excited! I foresee many months of impulse book-buying in the future. (I gave up buying books as one of my Lenten resolutions; it's the only one I've managed to keep, since it only required restraint rather than motivation, but now I'm more than ready to go off and start buying more books than I can actually read.)

3. What to buy with my $25 iTunes Music Store gift certificate (courtesy of the department for my minimal participation in this year's recruitment weekends)? Not a rhetorical question.

4. Posted a bunch of interesting book-related links over at bibliophages here.

5. SF Symphony has opened subscriptions to its next season, and the concert list is awfully interesting. Concerts I want to go to:

• September 4, 6, 7: Ligeti Lontano, Poulenc Concerto for Two Pianos, Prokofiev Symphony no. 5
  
• October 23, 24, 25: Richard Strauss Don Juan, Ravel Tzigane, Saint-Saëns Introduction and Rondo capriccioso, Schmidt Symphony no. 4*
  
• November 19, 21, 22: Mahler Symphony of a Thousand
  
• December 4, 5, 6: Wagner Overture and Venusberg Music from Tannhäuser, Wagner Suite from Die Meistersinger, Chopin Piano Concerto no. 1**
  
• February 13, 14, 15: Debussy Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Stravinsky Symphony in C, Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherezade
  
• March 5, 6, 7: Gabrieli Choral works, Ligeti Requiem, Ravel Piano Concerto in G maj, Lizst Tasso: Lament and Triumph
  
• April 10, 11: Higdon blue cathedral, Mozart Piano Concerto no. 4, Fauré Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy Ibéria from Images
  
• everything in the Schubert/Berg festival

* Not because I particularly want to listen to any of these pieces, but because the performer will be Joshua Bell. Actually, I'm not even a fan of Joshua Bell, but I remember one of my high school classmates used to be in love with him.

** I'm also not a fan of Wagner, but Lang Lang will be perfoming. He's a pianist who is acclaimed for his technique but criticized for his, uh, overly liberal interpretations, and I'm kind of curious to see what he'll do to Wagner and Chopin.

6. Anyone know where to procure a copy of Adobe Encore? I ask on behalf of angelyrique.

7. Found following poem by Cao Zhi in a book that, uh, devotes about two paragraphs to the Three Kingdoms period but quotes the following:

I climb to the ridge of Pei Mang Mountain
And look down on the city of Lo-yang.
In Lo-yang how still it is!
Palaces and houses all burnt to ashes.
Walls and fences all broken and gaping,
Thorns and brambles shooting up to the sky.
I do not see the old old-men
I only see the new young men.
I turn aside, for the straight road is lost.
The fields are overgrown and will never be
       Ploughed again.
I have been away such a long time
That I do not know which street is which.
How sad and ugly the empty moors are!
A thousand miles without the smoke of a chimney.
I think of the house I lived in all those years:
       I am heart-tied and cannot speak.

-- Cao Zhi, trans. Arthur Waley

Cao Zhi being Cao Cao's son. Posted for those of you who are fond of Wei. ^_^

Of course, I have no basis for judging the accuracy of the translation, but isn't that last line wonderful? "Heart-tied"--the precision of the phrase! Unfortunately, the past forty minutes searching on Google has not revealed the Chinese title of the poem, so all I can say is that the English title that accompanied the translation was "The Ruins of Lo-yang" (Luoyang being the pinyin version).

Hm, I did uncover an article on JSTOR saying that the translation isn't Waley's but actually that of George W. Kent. (Edit: Oops, rereading the article, it just said that Kent retranslated Cao Zhi poems that had already been translated by Waley.) Also, another article that provides the name of the anthology in which the poem was preserved but using Wade-Giles romanization without any characters...okay, never mind, I need to go to sleep.

Yours &c.

Comments

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Oooh, thanks for the poem translation.

http://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E9%80%81%E6%87%89%E6%B0%8F%E8%A9%A9%E4%BA%8C%E9%A6%96

This is the poem in Chinese. The title is 送應氏.

[love_archived]

Thanks for the link to the original! The translation is prettier in parts (especially heart-tied).

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Heh, I don't read Chinese (found it by searching in Japanese to find Japanese translations), but I wish I did. I wonder why the translator renamed it?

[love_archived]

The original title (to my horrible, barely-passed-Chinese-lit brain) talks about seeing someone (應氏, or someone whose name is 應) off. Alas, the translation only covers part one (之一); part two was not translated. The first part seems to detail a place he passed (Lo-yang), and the second part talks more about his feelings missing a friend.

ETA: http://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E6%98%AD%E6%98%8E%E6%96%87%E9%81%B8/%E5%8D%B720#.E9.80.81.E6.87.89.E6.B0.8F.E8.A9.A9.E4.BA.8C.E9.A6.96 has some very nice notes about it! The Waley translation is not exact. Now comes the part where we start wondering how true a translation should stay to the original, before it becomes something else and not a translation!

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Oooh, quite interesting. Thanks for the information! I wonder who that friend is. I should have looked closer at the Japanese notes.

Hmm, somehow that doesn't surprise me...

[love_archived]

I'm wondering that myself. It doesn't tell us, unfortunately, and the Chinese notes don't mention it either. I wonder if it's a fellow scholar, or someone who disappears from history and is only immortalized in this poem's title.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

【応氏】応氏は河南汝南の人。兄は応瑒（おうとう/？～２１７年）、弟は応璩（おうきょ/１９０～２５２年）。兄応瑒は平原侯庶子として、曹植に仕えていたが、五官将文学（曹丕の属官）に転任することになった。２１１年、馬超征伐に向かった曹操に従い、曹植は洛陽入りしていたが、曹丕は鄴の守備をまかされていた。曹植のもとを去って、都に引き返す応瑒を送別するに当ってこの作品を作った。　

According to a Japanese site: He was someone from Runan (?) in Henan. He achieved some kind of rank and worked for Cao Zhi, but then was transferred to Cao Pi's department. In 211, Cao Cao went to attack Ma Chao, and ordered Cao Zhi to go to Luoyang, while Cao Pi watched over... some other place, so his friend had to stay with Cao Pi while Cao Zhi went to Luoyang.

Interestingly, the Japanese page interprets the part as being "I think about the house I lived in" as "the house you lived in," though I don't really understand why.

[love_archived]

The original Chinese text doesn't say _whose_ house. You have to guess. ^_^

*giggling* You know, we're piecing this together from SO MANY SOURCES and so many languages.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Hahah, yes. I think Waley (if that was him who translated it) kind of removed the "farewell aspect" by changing the title of the poem and interpreting it as Cao Zhi's house. (Although his friend was from Henan, his father was an official, say the notes, so he probably used to live in Luoyang before it was all burned down by Dong Zhuo). If you interpret it as the friend's house, I think it makes more sense as a farewell poem, especially in the context of the next stanza.

[love_archived]

Oh, that makes sense. I don't think I approve of what Waley did. ... though he did make the poem very pretty. But if someone mistranslated me like that I'd turn over in my grave.

Man, I never learned this much in my literature classes. Had my classes been like this, I would have paid more attention and found them more interesting! ♥

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

It does seem to be mostly accurate... But I think removing the second stanza does uh, rather alter things. I wonder why he got rid of it? Because it's not about Luoyang?

Oh man, I was never much skilled at interpreting poetry, but translation has always interested me.

[love_archived]

The text may be accurate, but the feelings! The implications! The "read between the lines"! Waley's translation reads like a sad "look what's happened because of war" poem. But did Cao Zhi really mean to write that? He got rid of the mentions of saying goodbye to someone--WHY? T_T

In translation, I believe in adhering to the spirit of the law. Being accurate is important, but if there is ambiguity, go for the intended meaning, or use your favorite meaning but add footnotes to explain that it's ambiguous and it could be interpreted other ways. I don't like this "drop all mention of someone else" so that we have to go to the source to find it.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and the metaphor of them being like a 比翼鳥 in the second stanza as well. XD I just think it is a rather bizarre decision. It's pretty clear it's a farewell poem from the title alone, anyhow. Although it might not be clear from the first part, if he translated the second part it would be perfectly clear.

[love_archived]

Oh well. Second-guessing others leads us nowhere. Too bad we can't ask Waley.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

To concur, the yomikudashi in the link (the middle column) is ambiguous about the house too. (But, context, as it is a farewell poem, would have it be the "you"'s house.)

The second poem's explicit about the farewell aspect, though. So if Waley was making a poem about desolation (which seems the sort of thing he'd do, deliberately or not--his translation style was very lose, involving reading a thing and then re-creating the meaning by memory, at least for Classical Japanese), that'd be a reason to leave off or separate the second part.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Huh... but isn't that considered something that one should not do nowadays? Was Waley's rendition of Genji similarly loose, in terms of respecting the intention of the author?

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

I don't know about all translators, but I and those I know use the original as a reference a lot when translating. XD Of course, we read through first for gist. Unless really rushed for deadline, and then we do it on the fly. Admittedly, his memory seems to have been pretty good, if what I'd heard is accurate.

His Genji is very poetic... and has some odd interpolations. Like furniture for ladies in waiting to climb up on (Yugao chapter... if I'm remembering correctly).

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

I guess to me it comes off as fudging things, really. Can't be helped, perhaps, in the translation of poetry, but one wishes for a note, at least.

[troisroyaumes]

Ah, one of the JSTOR articles I found talked about the two parts of the poem...now it all makes sense. Alas, I can make no sense of the notes...can you give a rough assessment of where the translation becomes looser?

[love_archived]

Where it becomes looser? O_o Er, okay. I'm going to fail HORRIBLY, because ... it's dense and difficult. Let me look at the original and this one to compare the two.

ETA: Here, have a VERY literal (and badly-done) translation to compare the two. Where his translation was already the best, I just copied it in.

步登北芒阪
Walk up the North Mang Ridge of the Lo-yang Mountain Range (北芒 = 洛陽北芒嶺)

遙望洛陽山
gaze from afar at Lo-yang Mountain

洛陽何寂寞
How still Lo-yang is!

宮室盡燒焚
palace and houses all burnt to ashes

垣牆皆頓擗
Walls and fences all broken and gaping

荊棘上參天
Thorns and brambles shooting up to the sky.

不見舊耆老，但睹新少年
I do not see the old old-men, only the new young men.

側足無行徑
there is no place to put one's feet
(the notes in the "explanation" page seem to imply that this is because pottery shards litter the ground, but I am VERY unclear on this. I wish explanatory pages would try for clear and easy-to-understand language, instead of further obsfucation.)

荒疇不復田
fallow 疇 and infertile fields -OR- fallow 疇 will not reconstitute fields
(this sentence can be read a few different ways, depending on whether you see 不復 as an adjective/modifier, or as a verb. I lean towards verb, because it needs to match the symmetry of what went before, and the previous "側足無行徑" is structured so as to want a verb, IMHO. 疇 is the word for the square block of water-hemmed-by-land that you use to plant in, usually rice. At least, I think so. I could be wrong, and it could be a well, but I doubt that.)

遊子久不歸
wandering sons do not come home -OR- wandering sons have not returned in a long time (depending on interpretation, though the latter is slightly more likely because of the following bit)

不識陌與阡
do not know streets and sideways/paths

中野何蕭條
How forlorn/faded/shrunken the moors are
(disclaimer: I will accept Waley's translation of 中野 = moor, because I have never seen a moor.)

千里無人煙
There is no smoke (人煙 = sign of civilization) for a thousand miles.

念我平常居
thinking of my ordinary home

氣結不能言
breath/circulation knots, cannot speak
(the explanation says 悲與親友別，氣結不能言, which suggests that he experiences the knotted-up feelings because he's saying goodbye to a wonderful friend, not because he's viewing the desolation of Lo-yang. I leave it up to you which you prefer to believe.)


PHEW. All done.

[troisroyaumes]

AI YOU ARE AMAZING! <3333333333

[love_archived]

*^_^* No, just an insomniac. ♥ My literal translation is VERY BAD. VERY VERY VERY BAD.

[troisroyaumes]

Ah, I'm so disappointed that "heart-tied" isn't in the original. Which are the character(s) that correspond to that particular phrase?

[love_archived]

氣結, from the last bit. ^_^

[troisroyaumes]

기결 is the Korean reading...I guess the "tied" meaning is still sort of there in 結? It seems pretty hard to translate though.

[love_archived]

I would probably have translated 氣結 as "my inside knots", but I must agree that "heart-tied" is so much prettier.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

All tied up in knots? (A knot in his chest? XD) Basically, though, it's his circulatory/spirit/emotional system getting all choked off, isn't it?

[tryogeru.livejournal.com]

I would have thought more along the literal lines of breath, getting all choked up whatnot. Though I guess "My breath knotted" isn't as nice sounding, even if that's probably why he couldn't talk. The heart and the lungs are pretty close anatomically...I should get points for proximity!

~~Take my breath away~~ la la la~~ la la la~~

Ah, memories of the eighties. Or any karaoke place.

[troisroyaumes]

Thank you so much! I...can't actually read it, but will amuse myself by looking up the characters and seeing what sense I can make of it. XD

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Heh, so will I. I can vaguely understand the gist from the characters, though.

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

I am heart-tied and cannot speak.

Love the poem. It reminds me of Tai D:

[troisroyaumes]

Didn't think of the association but now that you bring it up, you're right! ^_^

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Rather, I should've said I love the images in the English poem that the translation became. In my experience, translated poems usually either stop being poems at all, or become new ones.

Here's a fun book to look at, if you're interested in comparing translations of Chinese poetry: http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Ways-Looking-Wang-Wei/dp/0918825148

[troisroyaumes]

Thanks for the recommendation!

I have to admit, I don't really mind a translated poem that becomes an entirely new one as long as the new poem is still worth reading. ^_^;;

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

...new young men? That...is an interesting way to phrase it. >>

(I am so bad at reading traditional Chinese. *looks for a simplified version*)

[troisroyaumes]

Do you think "new boys" or "new youth" would have been more accurate? Though he may have been trying to convey the parallel structure in English.

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

True. It just sounds...kind of funny. ^^;;

[darcenciel.livejournal.com]

Ahhh Cao Zhi!

[troisroyaumes]

I thought you'd appreciate it! ^_^