“i’m the black widow with a bad stinger / and i’ll make you scream like a bad singer”

[larryhammer]

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.

Comments

[sartorias]

I find Pleco a godsend.

[larryhammer]

Between the dictionary itself, the OCR, the reader, and the flashcards, I use it all the time. (Yeah, some of those are paid features ... ) It is even better than Imiwa, the Japanese equivalent.

[sartorias]

I'm too tech-stupid to figure out the flashcards, but yeah, I use all the other features. I figure they are more than worth what I paid.

[larryhammer]

Ditto.

[sovay]

at least one mistake in. Every. Single. One. Not just difference of interpretation or other judgement calls -- something Outright Wrong.

Is it all the same kind of mistake?

[larryhammer]

Short answer: no.

Slightly longer: Some are pretty clearly the result of Bynner guessing incorrectly which synonyms of a word used by his native-speaker collaborator (who provided literal translations to be versified) match the senses of the original, but how this shows up varies a lot. Many, though, are simply way off the mark -- some to the point I have no idea how he understood that.

[sovay]

Some are pretty clearly the result of Bynner guessing incorrectly which synonyms of a word used by his native-speaker collaborator (who provided literal translations to be versified) match the senses of the original, but how this shows up varies a lot.

Didn't his translator-collaborator get the last word on whether the versified versions were accurate?!

[larryhammer]

I don't know. It looks like, though they started working on the translation together while both were teaching at UC Berkeley, Kiang returned to China in 1920 several years before Bynner finished.

ETA: And, actually, Bynner was at Berkeley there only a year, leaving a year before Kiang.

ETA2: Ah, Kiang did indeed vet the translations -- they collaborated by mail throughout the process, per a Burton Watson essay.

[sovay]

ETA2: Ah, Kiang did indeed vet the translations -- they collaborated by mail throughout the process, per a Burton Watson essay.

Okay, then that's even more confusing.