Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

Books 869-872 of Complete Tang Poems is 谐谑, xiéxuè, banter/repartee—IOW, poems of humor and mockery. Do I want to dive deep into this? Yes—yes, I do. Duh. But for now, instead, here’s translations of a random handful that caught my eye.

I have even less standing to do this than I did the ghost poems. I can tell I’m missing wordplay and am even weaker on cultural context—and indeed, I failed to get anywhere with more than half the poems I tried. IOW, don’t make much of how three of the four are one specific genre—these were the easiest to make sense of, and Chinese humor ranges well beyond these examples.

Still, these few were fun.

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In Praise of the Hedgehog, Li or Zhu Zhenbai
Walking, he seems a shifting pin-cushion,
At rest, he’s curled like a chestnut-burr.
He can’t be bullied like us big folks:
Who dares to casually punch the guy?

( There’s three more where that came from, including two more praising animals )

Yyyyeah, there’s reasons why I didn’t do more of these. Much harder to understand, let alone render well, than even the ghost poems and children’s rhymes.

Index of Chinese translations

Subject quote from Catwings, Ursula K. Le Guin.

For Poetry Monday, another short one in another language, this time in multiple translations:

Greek Anthology 7.718, Nossis

original:
Ὦ ξεῖν᾿, εἰ τύ γε πλεῖς ποτὶ καλλίχορον Μυτιλάναν,
τὰν Σαπφὼ χαρίτων ἄνθος ἐναυσαμέναν,
εἰπεῖν, ὡς Μούσαισι φίλαν τήνᾳ τε Λοκρὶς γᾶ
τίκτεν ἴσαν ὅτι θ᾿ οἱ τοὔνομα Νοσσίς· ἴθι.

unsigned translation from Sententiae Antiquae:
Stranger, if you sail to the city of beautiful dances, Mytilene,
The city which fed Sappho, the the Graces’ flower,
Tell them that the land of Lokris bore for the Muses
A woman her equal, by the name of Nossis. Go!

uncredited translation from Locriantica:
Stranger, if you sail to Mitylene, land of beautiful dances,
to catch there the most out of Sappho’s graces,
tell that I was loved by the Muses, and that the Locrian land bore me.
My name, remember, is Nossis. Now go!

translation by Natoli, Pitts, & Hallett:
Wayfarer, if you sail to Mitylene, city of beautiful choral dances,
to draw inspiration from the bloom of Sappho’s graces,
say that the Locrian earth bore me,
dear to the Muses and to her. Having learned that my name is Nossis, go.


Flexing is old, old school (as is dissing). Nossis (fl. c. 300 BCE) was from Epizephyrian Locris, a Greek colony in southern Italy, modern Locri, and was well known enough to be named one of the “nine earthly muses” i.e. best poetesses by Antipater of Thessalonica in the late 1st century BCE (along with, yes, Sappho). A dozen of her epigrams have survived, all in the Greek Anthology. I don’t have enough Greek (or indeed any) to tell whether that “woman her equal,” missing from the other two, is a defensible reading.

---L.

Subject quote from Lethal Woman, Dove Cameron.

[Yes, more of this stuff, taking it almost exactly ⅓ of the way.]

The textual history of the Dao De Jing is complicated. It was initially passed down in several separate traditions known through a handful of incomplete texts that managed to survive the first Qin emperor’s censorship program of 212-213 BCE, which affected Daoist texts even worse than Confucian traditions. Eventually, in the 2nd century CE, a more-or-less complete reconstruction was put together by an unknown editor, which was preserved not as its own text, but rather by being embodied in two early 3rd century CE commentaries explaining it. This is the standard text I’m translating. (Note that not all texts found online match mine—there are several versions out there, incorporating various editorial emendations accreted over the millenia.)

And then there’s two complete manuscripts found 50 years ago in a tomb in Mawangdui, Hunan, which was sealed up in 168 BCE, recording a different textual tradition—with variations, as the two aren’t identical—my previously mentioned “other texts.” One of the more interesting, if not necessarily useful, differences are those of order. This covers everything from shuffling a few lines around to one huge difference: swapping the order of the two sections, putting dé before dào. Which, um, yeah, I don’t know what to make of, or not yet. I bring this up because one medium-sized change shows up in this installment: standard chapters 22-24 are Mawangdui chapters 24, 22, 23. This somewhat alters the progression of the argument, and I don’t know what to make of this either.

As of this installment, I’ve switched to rendering 德 dé as “potency” but consider it a token representing whatever final translation I land on. Still minimal comments. Is too much. Still can’t cope.

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Classic of the Way and its Potency (provisional title), chapters 20-28

( Discard learning and have no grief )

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And that is all I have for now—I haven’t even looked at the next chapter yays. It’s possible my obsessive brain will return to this, but I surely haven’t minded the break and a chance to work on other things.

Index of Chinese translations

---L.

Subject quote from Numb, Linkin Park.

[There is no excuse for this. None. There’s already waaay too many bad translations out there. I blame the first chapter on recovering from Covid and continuing it on rereading A Wizard of Earthsea.]

Originally, this was called Laozi after its supposed author. It has two sections, labeled in the most ancient complete manuscripts “dào” (way/path) and “dé” (virtue/power) after the (rather fuzzy) focus of each part, and when, during the Han Dynasty, it was raised to the status of a classic book, it was renamed Dào Dé Jīng after those labels: Classic of the Way and of Virtue.

It is old. Like, moldy ancient old, written in the Old Chinese used a thousand years before the Tang Dynasty, passed down over centuries in multiple traditions, some of them fragmentary, until it was finally standardized in a 2nd century CE recension preserved in two commentaries. This version (used as my base text) shaved off nearly every technically omittable grammatical particle from a philosophical-slash-mystical and so already hard-to-grasp text. We know the particles were dropped, rather than omitted from the start, because of those “most ancient manuscripts”: two copies found fifty years ago in a 168 BCE tomb in Mawangdui, Hunan, both of which have them. This makes the Mawangdui versions (they’re not identical) very helpful when puzzling through compressed grammar. They also have numerous other differences from the standard version—not just variant character forms, but sometimes substituting synonyms, which are useful for teasing out which meaning of a polysemous character the ancient copyists understood, as well as phrases with significantly different meanings, belonging to different textual traditions. The most important of these last I footnote as readings from “other text(s).”

My point being, it’s stupid hard to read, let alone understand. Do not assume my version has that quality the Ancients called “accuracy.”

Regarding the form, in our best reconstructed pronunciations of Old Chinese during Laozi’s supposed era, about three-quarters of the lines rhymed—so, yeah, it’s poetry. That said, I’m not even attempting meter or rhyme, or anything verse-ish beyond line breaks. Achieving coherence is difficult enough.

As far as annotations, there’s so many ambiguities and interpretations and layered commentaries here, I can’t even. Is too much. So Imma shut up as much as possible.

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Classic of the Way and of Virtue, chapters 1-9

( A way that can be described is not the constant Way. / A name that can be named is not the constant Name. )

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That’s enough, more than enough, for a first installment. [Yes, ugh, I’ve got more. Stupid obsessive brain.]

Index of Chinese translations

---L.

Subject quote from Closer, The Chainsmokers feat. Halsey.

For Poetry Monday:

“In a clear glass,” Author Unknown, tr. Thomas McAuley

In a clear glass
There is a face
Turning to it
I look and
An unknown old man
I feel I have met.

すかがみそこなるかげにむかひゐてみるときにこそしらぬおきなにあふここちすれ

masukagami / soko naru kage ni / mukai’ite / miru toki ni koso / shiranu okina ni / au kokochi ni sure


From the anthology Wakan rōeishū, book II, #733, a collection of songs in Chinese and Japanese to which the tunes all have been lost. The translator’s website is enormous, and an amazing resource for classical Japanese poetry. His translations can be almost painfully literal, apparently aimed more for the student than the casual reader, but there’s nothing else like it out there. I’ve been subscribed to wakapoetry_feed since I was translating Japanese myself.

---L.

Subject quote from The Trosachs, William Wordsworth. I hereby humbly apologize for the ambush Wordsworth, but it was just too appropriate.

Chapter 802 of Complete Tang Poems, one of nine devoted to poems by women, has five erotic poems by Zhao Luanluan, of whom they say she “was a famous courtesan of Pingkang,” an entertainment district of Tang-era Chang’an.

This is one of the more famous slip-ups of the editors who, under an imperial order of 1705, hurried to publish as quickly as possible. Thanks to a contemporary biography they apparently weren’t aware of, we know that Zhao Luanluan, courtesy name Wenyuan, actually lived during the reign of Yuan Emperor Huizong, who ruled China from 1341 till he was ousted back to the Mongolia of his ancestors by Ming revolutionaries in 1367. It was a dramatic and turbulent time, and the anthology Chronicles of Yuan Poems also preserves a four-poem set written to her husband while she was held captive by rebels. The biography itself is a tragic romantic narrative that inspired an opera, now lost, but thanks to the poems we can be pretty sure the captivity really happened.

I’ll deal with her Yuan life later, after I translate the work her captivity poems were modeled on—but before that, I wanted to find out what’s up with poems so erotic they were mistaken for a Tang courtesan’s. Because, yanno, erotic.

Before you get your hopes up too high, note that per cultural norms, simply being set in a boudoir counted as erotic, as did any physical description of a woman beyond the generic—and each poem is focused on one aspect of female anatomy. That said, there is some real spice here too. All five poems are noticeably elegant in their phrasing and imagery, with lots of implicit comparisons which I’ve sometimes made explicit for clarity, only one of which I call out in the notes.

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Cloud Hair
She tidies up her fragrant cloud that’s not yet dry from washing—
Like crow’s neck or cicada’s wing, it’s glossy, shiny, cold.
On one side she inserts aslant a golden phoenix pin,
Then makeup done, she looks up smiling at her lord and husband.

( And when her bathing’s done, her husband touches, fondles them. / The magic blossoms, as the cool seeps in, are purple grapes. )

Man, I wish we had the context for her writing these.

---L.

Index of Chinese translations

Subject quote from Someone’s Daughter, Beth Orton.

A third installment of seven-character regulated verse. In my previous dispatch, I described this set as “a bunch of random dudes milling about in the valley between Du Fu Plateau and Li Shangyin Range.” In my defense of that somewhat dismissive characterization, I note that it’s completely accurate. Topics include a complaint about being wrongfully demoted, a plea for official patronage, praise for a Daoist retreat, a dang-I-miss-ya-bro lament, a soldier’s wife missing her husband, a retired soldier missing his comrades (with bonus slice-of-riverboat-life details), imperialism from a mopey frontier administrator, reflections on an ancient battle site (visited in autumn as per regulation), a three-part elegy for a departed wife, a gaze-at-the-moon-while-thinking-of-my-scattered-family thing, and an enigmatic outcrop of Li Shangyin’s craggy id. Which is not to say these are bad poets. But they are totally random, with only one a Name Author aside from Li Shangyin himself (spoiler: Bai Juyi).

These are, as usual, revised from rougher drafts posted in my other journal (and will no doubt be revised in the future).

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( The brocade se once pointlessly had fifty strings— / Each string, each bridge, brings memories of blossoming years )

Who knows how long it’ll take to finish the last quarter of this section—after all, there’s nine more ridges of Li Shangyin Range to climb through. Regardless—onward!

---L.

Index of Chinese translations

Another follow-on from an previous translation. This is the earliest surviving literary retelling of the Mulan story, by mid-Tang scholar-official Wei Yuanfu (701-771). It adds a few details missing from the original ballad, such as why her father can’t serve, that have become canon. (If you’re interested in how the Mulan story has evolved over the centuries, this website is All About That, including source texts in translation.)

Song of Mulan, Wei Yuanfu

    Mulan is holding the shuttle and sighing.
    “I ask again, because of whom?
    I want to hear from whence these woes.”
    The feelings stirred are forced to her face.
( Father is on the army rolls, / Yet every day his strength declines )

Can’t say I’m fond of the patriotic moralizing conclusion, especially compared to the gender interrogation of the original ballad. Overall I prefer the original, folk-process gaps in the narrative and all, though I do appreciate giving her a clear motivation.

---L.

Index of Chinese translations

Subject quote from A Pragmatist’s Guide to Revolution, Kyle Tran Myhre aka Guante.

For Poetry Monday:

Wasps, Ho Xuan Huong, tr. Marilyn Chin

Where are you wandering to, little fools
Come, big sister will teach you how to write verse
Itchy little wasps sucking rotting flowers
Horny baby lambkins butting gaps in the fence


Ho Xuan Huong (1772–1822) wrote Viet vernacular poetry using Chinese characters (translator notes, Wikipedia). Many of her poems poke hard at oppressive conditions for women in her society, including polygamy (she was twice married as a second-rank wife, i.e. a concubine).

---L.

Subject quote from Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen.

My haiku + woodblock print calendar has served up a pretty good combination this month. The haiku is Bashō:

futari mishi
yuki wa kotoshi mo
furikeri ka

The snow we two once
viewed together—has it
fallen again this year?

The translator did a pretty good job of bringing across both the tone and literal sense, without padding (arguably both “two” and “together” are redundant for sense, but with both brings out the strength and dual-form-edness of futari better than either alone), while matching the 17-syllable form. Yeah, it breaks into 5-6-6 instead of 5-7-5, but knowing by experience how hard this is to pull off, I’m more than willing to give that a pass. Well done.

The picture is Spring Snow by Takahashi Hiroaki, and it … just fits. I especially like the woman’s expression as she looks back through the snow but the basket of flowers & veggies and the touches of pink make the season, and the hope it represents, perfectly clear.

---L.

Subject quote from Love Reign O'er Me, The Who.