Poetry in Translation

I wrote this post a few days ago while sick in bed. I have a lot of things to write about - but you'll have to wait for an update update, I guess!

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I originally thought that I would convince Tom to write this week's update, but we had an unfortunate turn of events: I have the flu. So he's going to teach my class this morning (aw), and I figure while I lie here in bed I should type up an update.

Getting sick in a foreign country is both a bummer and an interesting adventure. Riding the bus was a horrible experience, but I was surprised to find that thermometers cost 3 kuai (about 40 cents)! Also, my students were shocked that you can put a thermometer under your tongue - they use the armpit method here. A Chinese home remedy is to boil fresh ginger with brown sugar, which actually seems to have helped. (If you want to try it, I'd suggest going with molasses - the brown sugar here is really, really dark.)

I texted Kyla after a nap when my fever was climbing to ask at what temperature I should start to be concerned, as my thermometer was in Celsius and my temperature was already at 39. Turns out that's over 102. So, she sent Tom running out for a miracle fever drug that, according to her, only takes an hour before your fever is totally gone. He didn't notice until he got home that this miracle drug was nothing more than Ibuprofen, which we already had plenty of here. Strange, though: it comes in granule form, which you mix with water. Maybe it helps with faster delivery or something, but it's kind of gross.

Aside from that, nothing new here. I bought an electronic dictionary the other day - actually, Kyla bought it for me online, so she has it at her dorm and I'm going to pick it up on Monday - and it's really cool. The best part is that you can write on the screen with a stylus to look up characters, which is a big help if you don't know how they're pronounced (in a book dictionary you look characters up by separating them into parts, and it's time consuming).

[The following section discusses Chinese poetry in some detail. Two warnings: 1) If you are not interested in Chinese poetry, please skip! 2) Chinese poetry is a topic in which I am primarily self-educated. Just a caveat.]

We also bought a book of Tang Dynasty poems in Chinese and English recently. Unfortunately, the English translations are nothing short of horrid. The poor translator, a Dr. Xu Yuanchong of Peking University (the doctorate and the fact he teaches at the best school in China led me to believe the poems would be good), just doesn't understand English poetry. To demonstrate, let me quote a passage from the introduction of the book. Here, Xu is comparing a literal word-for-word translation, a free verse version (presumably by Arthur Waley, a prominent and well-respected translator of Chinese poetry), and his "poetical" version. I will spare you the agony of the actual poems - here is his explanation:

"If we compare these versions, we may say the second is faithful to the original so far as words are concerned, and the third is balanced as the first so far as lines are concerned. If we compare their diction, [in Waley's poem] we find 'range' is a geographic term and 'curve' a geometric one, and they are not so beautiful as 'bar' and 'gird' [in Xu's translation], for the one may be found in Keats' verse 'while barred clouds bloom the soft dying day.' And the other may remind us of Edmund Waller's poem On a Girdle."

Well, okay. Chinese poetry works like this - the art is in alluding to other masters' poems. Of course, English poetry has this feature too, but because Chinese poems are so succinct, it is sufficient to quote one or two words from another poem. But come on, Dr. Xu! that's like saying that the word "frost" is "poetical" because it reminds us of Robert Frost's poems.

If this weren't bad enough, Xu's understanding of "poeticalness" goes no further, so rhymes are almost always a simple ABAB or AABB scheme and based on spelling, not sound, and he pays no attention to meter or more complex rhymes, including assonance and alliteration. The result is something that sounds like a bored, talentless, 17 year old Victorian dandy's journal of "poetry."

All is not lost, however! While the English poems are painful, the Chinese ones are complete with pinyin for every character (roman letters that tell you how to pronounce the characters) and fairly detailed footnotes. Very informative!

So hey, if any hack with a Ph. D. teaching at Peking University can translate poems, then, well, so can I! As I'm house-bound with the flu, in lieu of movies or magazines, my sick-bed is flanked by my dictionaries, books of poems, and footnotes, and if my poems aren't perfect, at least they're better than Dr. Xu's. (Aw, poor Dr. Xu!)