27 June 2019

larryhammer: pen-and-ink drawing of an annoyed woman dressed as a Heian-era male courtier saying "......" (annoyed)
Postscript to these translations, with a warning.

I chose my base text because it's one of the first search hits and it has a built-in dictionary pop-up for the hanzi. This last feature could be useful for those who want to try to follow along. I no longer use that dictionary myself (Pleco is more comprehensive and lets me work offline) plus I have to convert the text to simplified characters, but absent finding a clearly better edition I'm continuing to use those texts.

But the warning: the English versions on that site are from the collection's first complete translation, The Jade Mountain by Witter Bynner with Kiang Kang-hu.* They are, er, not reliable. Which is to say, of the 40-or-so poems I've worked through myself, I've found at least one mistake in. Every. Single. One. Not just difference of interpretation or other judgement calls -- something Outright Wrong. Sometimes it's minor, but all too often it completely warps what the poem's about.

Because of its age (it's from the 1920s), Bynner's is the only readily available translation online, so unfortunately it's all over the place. But seriously -- Do Not Use.


* Or so he preferred his name spelled -- in pinyin it's Jiang Kanghu.


---L.

Subject quote from Elevate, DJ Khalil.

June 2025

S M T W T F S
1 2 34567
8 9 1011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated 16 June 2025 02:01 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios