A couple of years back I bought a Chinese translation of Dante’s Commedia without really reading it at the bookstore — this is what you get when books are cheap. As it turns out, I really should’ve flipped through it a bit first, because the translation sucks sucks sucks like an Electrolux. It’s literal, unbeautiful, [...]
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Translations —
Category Archives: Translations
Reasons I’m glad not to be a farmer in late Ming-dynasty Shaanxi, #603
From Ma Maocai’s 1629 (崇祯二年) memorial report to the Chongzhen Emperor, 《备陈大饥疏》”A Narration of the Great Famine.” Translation mine; original text (courtesy of David) below the cut. Corrections/comments welcome, as my classical Chinese is rusty. (Some corrections made, thanks to the Foolish Old Man of the Granite Studio, whose recent post on Hua Guofeng filled [...]
Hú Shì: Don’t You Forget
Have been thinking about poetry lately. Am working on translating Rilke’s Herbsttag (Autumn Day / 秋日), one of my favorite poems, into Chinese — there are two existing translations by Feng Zhi and Bei Dao, but I don’t like either of them. In the meantime, I happened across this remarkable 胡适 poem (in, I’ll admit, [...]
Celebrity through smack-talking
I’m sure this will disappoint Prince Roy, whom I’d promised not to write about the whole stupid, boring, pointless Chinabounder thing (people unfamiliar with the whole affair should consider themselves lucky, but can click on that link if they feel like killing some brain cells), but my Chinese newspaper column this week is all about [...]
尴尬病毒 Embarrassing Ailments
I finally went about setting up a flickr account, and this was the first thing I uploaded — a poster advertising “painless, non-scarring circumcision” that’s been going up in public toilets all over the place lately. I meant to scan this and translate it for Danwei a couple of months ago, but dragged my ass [...]
i <3 china
So obviously I haven’t been updating much recently. Insert standard “I’ve been awful busy with work / side projects / taking on freelance work at insultingly low pay” boilerplate here.
One of the things that I’ve been busying myself with is my weekly column in Chinese for the 珠海特区报 Zhuhai News. They don’t seem to be [...]
du fu: “delighting in rain on a spring night”
Hey hey, amigos. Anyone still reading?
I’m not dead; I’ve just had a dead-ass six months. Time to get back in the game.
I’ll have more posts coming up later this week, but for now, in honor of the delightful summer rain that just woke me up, here’s a quick translation of Du Fu’s 春夜喜雨, “Delighting in [...]
chengdu (1)
(Translated from a Chinese entry on 出于不俗.)
Pick a city, any city, and Chinese people will tell you it has the most beautiful girls in all of China. Harbin girls, with their Manchu blood, will brave subzero temperatures to wear whatever strikes their fancy; beautiful ice queens, they are without question the most magnificent girls in [...]
ouyang xiu: third in a series
Comments yesterday were satisfactory. Keep it up.
Today’s poem is the third in a series of 10 lyrics by Ouyang Xiu to the tune of “The Mulberry-Picking Boy.” It turns out that rhyming in English is harder than I thought, but here goes:
欧阳修: 采桑子 (3)
画船载酒西湖好
急管繁弦
玉盏催传
稳泛平波任醉眠
行云却在行舟下
空水澄鲜
俯仰流连
疑是湖中别有天
Ouyang Xiu: “To the tune of ‘The Mulberry-Picking Boy’”
(3)
A painted boat carrying [...]
ouyang xiu: second in a series
So nobody at all commented on the last translation, which is just fucking lame. How much effort does it take to fire up the comment box and leave a message saying “nice translation,” or “what a shite translation,” or even something totally irrelevant like “so this one time, my cousin got a chemistry set and [...]