Now it can be said: I’ve been back in Philadelphia for the last few days. Those of you who read Chinese can find the details on my Chinese blog, where I have an account of how I bamboozled my parents and snuck back home; it’ll probably be a few days before I get around to writing an English version of the same.
In Philly? (Or New York – I’ll need to get a new visa at some point.) Want to get coffee or dinner? Send me an email.
I went out to a midnight double-bill at the Oriental Plaza cinema with my girlfriend last night: The Curse of the Golden Flower (满城尽带黄金甲 – I assume the title is a classical reference that I’m not getting. Joel?) – Zhang Yimou’s latest indulgence – and Wounded City (伤城 – the official English name for the movie is Confession of Pain, but balls to that), a crime flick from Lau Wai-keung, the guy who made Infernal Affairs.
I was pretty excited to see Curse of the Golden Flower, because it features two of my favorite actors – Gong Li’s breasts – along with Chow Yun-fat, Jay Chou, and Gong Li herself in supporting roles.
The movie itself, I’m sorry to say, was a disappointment: a royal family lives in a bejewelled palace, decked out in gold and silver and all fineries imaginable, and yet — wait for it! — underneath all of that, they’re really rotten to the core. Chow Yun-fat is clumsily dubbed into Mandarin to hide the fact that he can’t actually speak the language, Jay Chou is incapable of breaking his facial muscles free of the “sullen bad boy” expression they’ve settled into, and the computer graphics used for the wide shots of battle scenes are reminiscent of Tron. Not only that, but newcomers Li Man’s breasts make the mistake of attempting to upstage Gong Li’s breasts, overreaching, constricting, and lifting in a truly tortured performance.
Not everything about the movie is bad. Some of the fight scenes are fantastic – particularly those involving the assassins dispatched by Chow Yun-fat’s evil emperor, and the penultimate scene. There are a few nice visual touches hidden in the movie’s overwhelming unsubtlety, like the incrementally skewed camera angles that parallel Gong Li’s breasts’ descent into madness. And of course Gong Li’s breasts, though they were clearly phoning this one in, are, like DeNiro or Anthony Hopkins, always guaranteed to turn in a reliable performance. Actors of their stature are rare, particularly in Chinese cinema, and it’s high time that –
– OK, I’m bored with that. Anyway, they are pretty fantastic boobs, the kind that follow you around the room no matter where you go, the kind that require no Photoshopping, the kind that bards used to write epic poems about.
“Winter Wonderland” came on the radio in the cab on the way home, and inspiration struck:
On the screen, they’re hypnotic
Firm and round, quite erotic.
They’re there on her chest,
They’re simply the best,
How I love to look at Gong Li’s boobs.So I go to the movies
Just to gaze at her boobies,
And live in the hope
I might get a grope,
How I love to look at Gong Li’s boobs.
I came home to an empty house: my parents were in Ireland visiting my brother, and wouldn’t get back for another couple of days.
It had been a longer trip than usual: a six-hour layover in Narita, then a three-hour layover in Dallas that stretched out to four when the plane was delayed. By the time I arrived in Philadelphia and met my best friend Jon and his wife at the airport, I’d been awake for 50 hours, and travelling for something like 30, and was in that weird neverland state of jet-lag, soul-delay, sleep-deprivation, and utter bemusement that you get into on long flights.
Jon and Rebecca took me to the Oregon Diner to get a proper meal. Our order took a long time to arrive, and the waitress, a middle-aged, South Philly-accented woman straight out of central casting, said that she’d talk to the guys in the kitchen, but that they were (she lowered her voice) “kind of a-s-s-h-o-l-e-s, if you know what I mean.” Afterwards, Jon and Rebecca dropped me off at home, and since I couldn’t sleep, I spent a while walking around. The streets were very satisfactory – more or less just as I’d left them – and I thought: Ah. Home.
Usually going home entails a few days of reverse culture shock and gradually reconstituted memory — people are so nice to each other here! Oh, I remember now! — but the really shocking thing about this trip back was that I didn’t get that at all. One day I was in Beijing and the next I was in Philadelphia, and it was all like a movie set.
I spent the next couple of weeks taking care of business: begging my university to let me graduate, please; getting a new visa up in New York; doing the paperwork necessary to apply for Irish citizenship; making the rounds of friends and relatives; eating as much as I possibly could. All of it seemed slightly off – like the “remastered” Star Wars cut of my former life, with all of the warts airbrushed out and the color and contrast bumped up a couple of notches. People were too nice, the streets were too clean, the food was too expensive, and one afternoon when I was sitting with my mom in a gelateria at 13th and Sansom, the rain that started pelting down outside was too straight, too fast, too cinematic to be the real thing, and for a moment I thought that I could walk out into it and stay dry as a bone.
Everything about the trip was too, and in the end it all went by too quickly. I headed back to Beijing, shoved and pushed and jostled and elbowed out of the plane, waited in line at immigration, met my girlfriend in the Arrivals hall, walked out to a taxi pen that smelled of car exhaust, secondhand smoke, and despair, and a cabbie who ignored my directions and complained bitterly that he wouldn’t make enough of a fare taking me home, and I thought: Ah.
No posts this week: I’ve got about 5 different deadlines coming due, from smaller translation and editing gigs to a fairly large, rushed script translation. Will be doing stuff for an acquaintance next week as well, so there may be nothing then either. After I finish everything, I think I’m going to take a break from freelancing for a month or two, and start thinking about what exactly I’m doing here.Also, while my experiment with using bokane.org for shorter, brain-fartier pieces has been fun, I’m inclining strongly towards going back to reserving this space for longer, better pieces instead.
A couple of friends and I were chatting about Gilbert and Sullivan over the weekend, and I thought of Lord High Executioner Ko-Ko’s song “I’ve Got A Little List” from The Mikado.
The original song manages to be racist (“the banjo-serenader and the others of his race”), sexist (“the lady novelist”), and classist (“the lady from the provinces”) all at once, and so people typically come up with more contemporary lyrics when they’re staging a production. (I remember a Canadian version that sentenced to death “all children who do Rubik’s Cubes in 15 seconds flat.”)
Anyway, it occurred to me that somebody really ought to do a China-localized version, and last night my friend Jim and I sat down to come up with one:
SONG–LORD HIGH EXECUTIONER with CHORUS OF MEN.
As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list–I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed–who never would be missed!
There’s the discontent petitioners in Beijing for redress–
And those who can’t pay doctor’s fees but won’t die nonetheless–
The children who can’t go to school because we still charge fees–
The whole ungrateful peasantry; they’re so damned hard to please–
And hot-head bumpkins who on spoiling grabs for land insist–
They’d none of ‘em be missed–they’d none of ‘em be missed!
CHORUS:
He’s got ‘em on the list–he’s got ‘em on the list;
And they’ll none of ‘em be missed–they’ll none of ‘em be missed.
There’s the ones who cast aspersions on the glory of the race–
(The upstart journalist? I’ve got him on the list!)
They’re sucking up to foreigners and making us lose face,
They never would be missed–they never would be missed!
Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own;
And the lady from the provinces, who reads unfiltered sites,
And who doesn’t know from voting but would rather like some rights,
And that singular anomaly, the labor activist–
I don’t think he’d be missed–I’m sure he’d not he missed!
CHORUS:
He’s got him on the list–he’s got him on the list;
And I don’t think he’ll be missed–I’m sure he’ll not be missed!
And those nasty F*lun Gong’ers who are always on your tits
Like an irritating cyst–I’ve got them on the list!
As long as they don’t burn themselves, we’ll sell them off for bits–
They’d none of ‘em be missed–they’d none of ‘em be missed.
And apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind,
Such as–What d’ye call him–Thing’em-bob, and likewise–Never-mind,
And ‘St–’st–’st–and What’s-his-name, and also You-know-who–
The task of filling up the blanks I’d rather leave to you.
And if you look in hist’ry books, we’ve took ‘em off the list –
We did it very carefully–not one of them was missed!
CHORUS:
You may put ‘em on the list–you may take ‘em off the list;
And they’ll none of ‘em be missed–they’ll none of ‘em be missed!
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, downright clumsy in most places, occasionally flat-out wrong, and — most criminally of all, to my mind — unrhymed. Now, a number of English translations (of the Divine Comedy and other poetry) don’t rhyme, which is fair enough — English is a fairly rhyme-poor language compared to Italian. Dante’s poetry is also particularly different to translate into verse because of its interlocking terza rima structure, which John Hollander describes nicely in his Rhyme’s Reason:
The unrhymed middle line, in the tight schema
of tercets spinning out a lengthy text
(Dante gave us this form, called terza rima)Rhymes, after all, with the start of the next
Tercet, then helps set up a new unrhyme
That, sure of foot and not at all perplexed,Walks across blank space, as it did last time.
(A couplet ends this little paradigm.)
So it’s hard to keep up in English — not that that’s stopped plenty of translators, from Seamus Heaney to Robert Pinsky to Ciaran Carson to Dorothy Sayers, from giving it their best college try.
Chinese, of course, is much more rich in rhymes than English — I mean, you have to be fucking well trying not to rhyme in Chinese — and so one would expect a Chinese translator to encounter approximately zero difficulty in carrying over the rhyme scheme. And you might expect that someone going to the trouble to translate a major work of world literature would themselves have some literary inclinations, and that they might try to make their output beautiful. Unfortunately, in the case of 黄文捷 Huang Wenjie’s jive-ass translation, you would be dead wrong on all fronts.
I found this out in the context of a post I’m trying to write for my Chinese blog about stars. I’d been thinking of using the last lines of Dante’s Inferno, which go:
…salimmo sù, el primo e io secondo,
tanto ch’i’ vidi de le cose belle
che porta ‘l ciel, per un pertugio tondo.E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
This isn’t particularly hard stuff: I can make it more or less rhyme in English without even trying:
…we went on then – he first, I following,
until I saw the things of beauty Heaven bears
through a round opening.Whence came we forth, and once more saw the stars.
Compare the tin-eared Huang Wenjie’s version:
他在前，我殿后，我们一起攀登，
直到我透过一个圆洞，
看见一些美丽的东西显现在苍穹，
我们于是走出这里，重见满天繁星。
Here’s a dead literal translation for non-Sinologues:
Him in front, me behind, we climbed together
Until through a round hole
I saw some beautiful things displayed on the sky’s dome
Then we walked out of there, and again saw dense stars filling the sky.
Not different, perhaps. Not wrong. But it’s written in a completely unpoetic register: it sounds more like narration or a “what I did on my summer vacation” paper than a poem. (To me, at least. Native speakers?) Huang doesn’t even attempt to make it sound old-fashioned, or indeed give it any weight at all beyond the somewhat poetic word 苍穹 (“sky’s dome,” or more literally “azure vault”). Can I think of a better translation into Chinese? Not right now — I’m on a deadline — but for Christ’s sake, I shouldn’t have to! Does anybody know of any Chinese translations of the Commedia that don’t suck, or is Huang’s the only game in town?
[Update] My girlfriend informs me that there are two other translations, one of which – by 田德望 Tian Dewang – sounded promising. From the description she found online:
田德望先生18年译就一部《神曲》,90高龄完成国家重点工程。他视翻译《神曲》为他人生之最崇高事业,
Mr. Tian Dewang spent 18 years on each book of the Commedia, finally finishing the state-funded project at the age of 90. He considered the translation of the Commedia his life’s greatest work.
Unfortunately, Tian went and translated it into prose, not poetry, which raises the question of exactly what was taking him so damned long. Maybe his eyesight was really, really bad, or something. Here’s his opening:
在人生的中途，我发现我已经迷失了正路，走进了一座幽暗的森林，啊！要说明这座森林多么荒野、艰险、难行，是一件多么困难的事啊！只要一想起它，我就又觉得害怕。
Halfway through life, I found that I had lost the right road and gone into a darkened forest. Ah! to speak of the tangled, treacherous, hard-to-pass-through forest is such a difficult thing! Just thinking of it makes me feel scared again.
This guy is (or was) a professor at my alma mater of Beijing University, so I can assume he’s no slouch when it comes to scholarship and talent. But again, I ask — WTF? Various places online describe his version as “the most authoritative Chinese-language edition of the Commedia.”
Really? Really really? Because that’s kind of sad.
There’s also the translation of 钱稻孙 Qian Daosun, who put parts of the Inferno into a poetic style similar to the ancient 楚辞 Elegies of Chu. His opening:
方吾生之半路，恍余处乎幽林，失正轨而迷误。
道其况兮不可禁，林荒蛮以惨烈，言念及之复怖心！
which – because it’s not like I have lots of overdue projects to be working on instead – I’ll translate back into old-fashioned English as
Having trod Life’s road half-way,
I found me in a darken’d Wood
For I had lost the right Path, and was in disarray –
– To tell it e’en now bestirs the blood!
That forest savage and o’ergrown
Whose merest memory inspires dread.
Anyway, Qian seems to have the right idea. But his version’s partial and he was doing this in the 1920s or 30s, so presumably he’s long-since dead. And what few bits he did translate are apparently out of print, which means that if I want more I’ll probably have to make a trip to the National Library. Rat-bastards!
The scallions are piled high on Andingmen Nei Dajie. That’s how you know it’s fall — that, and the shortening days, where the sunlight comes in at a 20 degree angle earlier in the afternoon than it ought to. By 4:00 the buildings burn orange in it.
Beijing is not what you’d call a user-friendly city. The streets are too wide; the blocks are too long; the climate is not really the sort usually considered habitable by humans. Winter is cold, with piercing winds sweeping down from the northwest and piercing however many layers of down armor you wear against it. Spring is short and sandy – I never knew that was an actual category of weather until I installed the Firefox weather plugin. In Spring, the streets silt up with fine-grained dust swept a thousand miles south and west from the plains left denuded by the grazing policies of the last century. In other places, green is the color associated with the spring; not so here: it’s a brownish-orange, the color of loess, the color of sepia-toned Photoshop nostalgia filters and poverty.
Summer is hot and hazy. There was a time a couple of years ago when, sitting in a taxi on the second ring road, I found myself actually unable to breathe for a space of about 30 seconds. Usually it’s not that bad: usually it’s like being in a movie shower scene co-starring everyone around you (usually middle-aged men with t-shirts rolled up to their nipples). Fall is the only really good season, and it too gives way all too soon to Winter.
But there’s a period in the fall of about three or four weeks when you think to yourself that you could love this city.
The late harvest comes in, and that’s always the sign that fall is fell and it’s time to get ready for winter. The cabbages come in from the countryside on loud blue flatbed trucks, and the scallions, and the farmers with them. They sleep piled in blankets on the sidewalks, nestled in between the stacks of scallions, and they burn too in the sunset.
I just found out via Technorati pingback that my Chinese blog, 在北京找不着北, has been nominated in the “Best Chinese Blog” category in the Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards. I’m not sure who nominated me, or when — I didn’t get any notification of this — but it’s very flattering indeed. The blog is currently in last place, which I think is probably just about where it belongs: on top of the fact that I am a lousy blogger — I update my Chinese blog once a week at best, I hardly ever have time to respond to commenters, and most heinous of all, I hardly ever read other blogs (this post probably has got more links than anything else I’ve ever written) — there’s the issue of why people even bother reading me. This is made perfectly clear by the summary of my blog, which says: “A foreigner writes about his experiences in excellent Chinese.”
I mean, I don’t flatter myself into thinking that most of the people who read my Chinese blog are doing so out of any real interest in what I have to say. A simple trip through my referrer logs shows that the majority of inbound links are from blogs and bulletin boards saying things like “who’d have thought that a foreigner could learn Chinese?” and “clearly this means that China’s on the rise.” That makes me uncomfortable. It’s nice having people read my blog, and people say a lot of awfully nice things in the comments, but nobody really wants to get popular by being the talking dog. Or at least, I don’t.
Anyway, here are my voting recommendations for the Deutsche Welle awards, at least in the categories and language groups where I’m competent to be any kind of judge:
Best Weblog:
“花花世界 － 鼠尾草 (A Colorful World: Shuweicao’s blog) looks pretty good. The blog seems to consist entirely of food porn, which can only be a good thing. I like food.
Best Podcast:
The Show with Ze Frank is one of these things that I keep meaning to watch regularly, but never do. That’s not a comment on him — I’m just lousy about reading blogs with any kind of regularity, and am generally too lazy to make use of RSS readers or anything else that might normalize my blog reading habits. He’s consistently funny, which can’t be easy on a day to day basis.
Reporters Without Borders Award:
曾金燕博客 (“Zeng Jinyan’s blog” – for some reason they don’t provide a translation) is fully deserving of your support. The inimitable ESWN has a translation of one of her posts here, for non-Sinologues. (Note: for some reason, this blog doesn’t open from the mainland. I can’t imagine why. Use a proxy.)
Blogwurst Award:
I’m not really sure what the hell “Blogwurst” is supposed to mean, but anyway, Zeng Jinyan is nominated here, as well, and New York Hack looks like it could be interesting.
Best Russian Blog:
Not that I speak Russian, but Magazeta left a comment on my Chinese blog at Bullog asking me to support them, and the guy seemed pretty nice, so why not.
Best Chinese Blog:
It looks like Shuweicao, who’s also nominated for the “Best Blog” award, is going to win this one, but I’d encourage people to vote for Lao Luo, the laoda of Bullog.cn, who was kind enough to invite me to Bullog a couple months ago. I’m in there too, but like I said, I don’t want to be a talking dog, and I don’t deserve it anyway.
Blogs that didn’t get nominated:
I don’t put a whole lot of stock in this sort of thing anyway, because there are so many really enjoyable bloggers who never get mentioned. The best thing I’ve read lately is Idle Words, whose author Maciej I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with recently. Also, for a long time, I’ve really, really dug Rain’s stuff over at Hipstomp, and would encourage everyone who hasn’t read him to go over and check him out.
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 me with delight.)
Your servant’s district is in Yan’an subprefecture, where since last year there has been no rain, and the grass and trees are parched and scorched. In September and October, the people fought amongst themselves to pick and eat the peng grasses that grow between the mountains. Peng grass resembles chaff, and has a bitter and unpleasant taste. Eating it, the people were able only to delay death.
After November the peng grass was all gone, and people began to strip the bark from trees, among which only the elm’s bark was at all palatable. People made a mash of the bark, which allowed them to postpone slightly their deaths.
By the end of the year, all of the tree bark was gone, and the people began to dig up stones from the ground to eat. The stones were cold and had a repellent, fishy taste, but by eating a few people could fill their bellies. Several days afterward, their abdomens swelled and distended, and they died. Those unwilling to eat stones and die began to turn to brigandry, and those few people who had managed to save a pittance were robbed and left with nothing.
…Most pitiable were those cases like that of Ji, to the west of Ansai, where every day one or two young children would be abandoned. Some sobbed and howled; some cried out for their mothers; some ate their own filth. By the second morning, not a one of the children would remain alive, and there would again be more children abandoned. Most astonishing were those children and single travellers who would vanish without a trace upon leaving the city. Afterwards people were seen outside the city walls, burning human bones for their fires and boiling human flesh, making food from people they had known. Those men who ate men would themselves die within a few days, their eyes swollen and reddened and their bodies burning from within.
And so the dead lay in heaps, the stench filling the air and reaching to the sky. Outside the county city, several pits were dug, each large enough to hold the remains of several hundred people. When your servant went to inspect the situation, three pits had already been filled, with more needed, while several miles outside of town unknowable numbers of people went unburied.
…Some officials, bound by severe government policies, had no choice but to levy heavy taxes, and those few left in Li who had survived the famine had no choice but to flee. From this place they would flee to that place, while the people from that place fled to this place, fleeing to and robbing from one another. These robberies are what occasioned this memorial.
1: 全聚德 Quanjude makes a pretty good duck. Had never been there before.
2: 五粮液 Wuliangye is the least-objectionable baijiu I’ve ever been forced to drink. I could actually picture somebody potentially enjoying it. It tastes less like PVC and paint thinner than all other forms of baijiu, and is 104 proof.
3: My little brother, who picked up and became damnably good at the fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin, and piano in hardly any time at all, has now picked up blogging. He is a shy woodland creature, and generally not given to speaking, writing, or otherwise communicating, so go encourage him.