An overdue update.

Jesus, it's been a weird few months.

Even if you somehow leave out the grotesque, incompetent bevy of swindlers, Bible-thumpers, and authoritarian lickspittles that passes for the US government these days, and which is eagerly leading the charge toward a future that'll be as devoid of the aesthetics of a proper cyberpunk dystopia as it rich in the genre's inherent misery, 2017 has been a deeply weird, deeply fucked year for much of the world.

Since I last wrote, Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston and much of the Texas Gulf Coast. I was lucky to be spared, though for a few days there I spent a lot of time on the porch, sleep-deprived, rekindling my old smoking habit, watching the water creep up the steps. When the floodwaters receded, I put in some time with the Houston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, gutting houses that had been flooded and getting direct aid to folks who needed it- and still need it. This shit ain't over, and won't be for a long time. Houston DSA is still helping out, so if three months after the fact isn't too late for you to want to visit the link above and donate a few bucks, know that it'll go to those in need, which means folks that the state of Texas and/or the federal government hasn't gotten around to helping, assuming they ever do.

But even events as hellacious as Harvey, and the subsequent ruin visited upon Florida and Puerto Rico by its tempestuous siblings, are incapable of hindering the human race's drunken stumble toward extinction- though I sincerely hope we trip and fall face-first into some sort of late-species glory on the way there- and so here we are in the middle of November. Let's take stock of what your humble Corpse has been up to, and/or thinks about things.

With the first draft of the Santa Monica translation done, I'm working regularly on the Sita Valles translation. The weather here is typically schizophrenic, which is to say that it's never actually cold for more than a few days at a time. I've lived here most of my life now, and this still pisses me off. I went to the Texas Renaissance Festival this past weekend, something I haven't done since 1999, and had a great time. I've set aside the cigarette habit I was far too eager to take up again when Harvey gave me a rationalization to do so. I visited the city of Québec in September, where I ate a lot of delicious food, learned that I can read French passably (and speak it horribly), used H.P. Lovecraft's history/travelogue as a guidebook of sorts, and pondered the legacy of Europe in America.

I've read some good books, among them Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, and Philip Hoare's The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea. I continue to practice 形意拳 xingyiquan and 八卦掌 baguazhang, the two Daoist internal martial arts I started studying earlier this year. I spend a lot of time with cats, but never enough. The desire to write a novel about Macau and a book about Camilo Pessanha still floats around in my mind, ever closer to realization as ideas pile up and get written down.

Mostly, though, I'm just living. Not in the sense of getting by, but in the fullest sense of the word, replete with positive and negative aspects. The more time passes, the more I appreciate just living, and the more I understand how much that concept encompasses, especially when the world around you seems boring enough to make you scream, or when it's Accept-level balls-to-the-wall overwhelming.

All right, off to martial arts class. Catch y'all soon- hopefully not four months later soon.


微臣
史大偉

The Corpse lives.

It should be pretty evident, dear readers, that your humble Corpse has been bereft of things to say for the past couple-three months. The 千字文 / Thousand Character Classic project is as dead in the water as 李白 Li Po. When I can browbeat myself into writing heavy metal reviews, they're earmarked for Enslain magazine, though I haven't exactly been cranking those out, either.

Since I last posted, much of my time has been spent translating an 18th-century letter of complaint written by nuns of the Convent of Santa Monica in Goa. "Letter" is not really the word for a rambling and often repetitive document of 40-odd handwritten pages, mind you, but it's been a fascinating process, mainly due to the fact that working with the excellent dude who roped me into it has been fun, educational, and promising in terms of future collaboration. I've learned to read old Portuguese handwriting, delved into the lives of Catholic nuns (who were not there because their cruel parents decided to dump them at the convent door, as is so often believed), and I'm helping to make available to the world a document written by, and about, women at a time when women's voices were only fleetingly heard.

More recently, I've started translating Leonor Figueiredo's biography of Sita Valles, the Angolan communist executed after the grim events of May 27, 1977. Valles' parents were from Goa, which is why I first heard of her. Figueiredo's written a good book, and I think making it available in English will prove useful. I'll discuss this project, as well as the Santa Monica convent one, in further detail at a later date.

That's it for now, alas. I've gotta eat dinner and get to Portuguese class. Later this week, perhaps, I'll find some time to write some more. Later, folks.

The Terrible Something

If in search of what's wrong with the world today- a phrase I despise, because the slightest brush with history shows us that the past is hardly laudable, but I'll stick with it for now-  one need not turn to the grotesque buffoon in the White House and his coterie of reactionaries, bootlickers, and bipedal leeches. An examination of one's immediate surroundings and internal state will suffice to demonstrate that the world around us is currently in the grip of something terrible, and that we ourselves are microcosmic hosts of whatever that terrible something is. Best not to look too closely, lest the contours and details resolve themselves and the terrible becomes overwhelming. Yet a failure to investigate is exactly what has led us here.

The terrible something devours minds, hearts, time, and space. It lends the grinning ghouls of the ruling class masks of respectability, and tells us they are true faces, trustworthy and wholesome. It bears down upon our souls, or whatever passes for them, and allows them to collapse under the weight of their very existence. It robs us of our days, which it feeds to the ravening demiurges of the economy and "progress," and fills our nights with a dreadful silence that is unconducive to slumber. It stalks the globe, snatching corners of heaven and earth from their rightful inhabitants and uprooting the human being from its surroundings. The terrible something does not live in the world, but dwells upon it, like an extradimensional horror might a threshold.


So: what is this terrible something? Is it capitalism, currently grinding its teeth, and us between them, as it attempts to force its way through yet another crisis? Is it the rot eating away the veil of democracy with which the West covers itself? Is it a spiritual malaise, some species-wide ennui and self-loathing immune to the pathetic variety of cures we have dreamed up? Or is it an absence of some kind, a void in our social relations, our collective lack of imagination coming back to haunt us from whatever astral graveyard we banished it to? Perhaps it's something else entirely, detectable only by what it doesn't do or where it isn't.

Me, I'd venture to say that the terrible something is all of the above and then some. It has probably always been with us. Maybe it simply is us, and we've contorted ourselves into such a mockery of being human that the terrible something has manifested itself fully.  I don't know what all this means, or how it can be combated, assuming it can be combated at all. I doubt it can be, at least not in the sense of pushing back against a defined foe, but we can study ourselves, stand in solidarity with our fellow humans, and dream, as the terrible something wends its way through our lives and settles into the cracks of the cosmos. It ain't much, but it's all we've got.

Sleep - Jerusalem/Dopesmoker

After years of worshipping at the altar of the riff, I'm finally gonna see Sleep on Saturday. Sleep, dude. The dudes who wrote Jerusalem, AKA Dopesmoker, which received three different releases (so far) and all of which have commendable properties. Personally, the latest release, under the name Dopesmoker (the album's original title during recording), does a great job of highlighting the dynamic range of what skeptics, amateurs, and squares might call a boring exercise in repetition, but I still prefer Jerusalem, truncated as it is. The unity of sound lends to the religious/meditative quality that, I think, forms the backbone of the whole album.

I'd be willing to admit that my preference could be a matter of familiarity, but shit, I've spent a whole lot of time listening to this record in its various incarnations, and this ain't mere nostalgia. But it doesn't matter. All that matters is the riff, or rather the Riff, and Sleep has perfected it in our lifetime. A thousand other stoner rock or doom bands could write hour-long songs and none of them would approach the unwittingly orthodox masterpiece that is Sleep's Dopesmoker. This probably ain't the first time I've talked about this record, and I hope it won't be the last; maybe next time I'll have something more interesting to say.

Anyway, adios for now, folks. Get high, listen to Jerusalem/Dopesmoker, and act accordingly. Or don't, and just experience the music. It's your life, after all. Don't let some random dude tell you how to live it.

千字文 / O Texto de Mil Caracteres, parte 16

No espírito de Luís Gonzaga Gomes e outros sinólogos de língua portuguesa, e para praticar a minha escrita, apresento-lhes hoje o estudo do 千字文 em português.

菜重芥薑
cài zhòng jiè jiāng

"Dos vegetais, a mostarda e o gengibre são estimados."


菜 é um caracter muito conhecido pelos aficionados de comida chinesa, porque significa, além de "vegetal/vegetais," prato no sentido de "prato principal", e também cozinha, como 四川菜, cozinha de Sichuan.

重 tem duas leituras, zhòng e chóng. A primeira significa uma coisa pesada ou grave, ou que tem importância; a segunda, duplo ou repetido, e pode ser um verbo tambem- repetir ou dobrar.

Acho que o texto não trata dos grãos de mostarda, mas sim as folhas dela. Mostarda refogado com gengibre, alho, e molho de soja (ou um pouco de vinagre preto) é um prato simplicíssimo e quase perfeito; concordo com o(s) autor(es) do Texto de Mil Caracteres na sua avaliação destes legumes.

Nossa, agora estou com fome. Até breve, leitores!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 15

When I started this project, I thought that I'd post maybe three times a week and finish in a couple or so years, but now I'm not so sure. Life has a way of interrupting one's plans, but it's not as if failing to crank out brief remarks on the Thousand Character Classic on a regular basis is a cause for despair. The other things I'm doing these days - more translations from Portuguese, learning some Latin, revising my historical novel, and, most dauntingly, fixin' to start tutoring ESL to adults - are all pretty fulfilling. That said, I do enjoy parsing the ol' 千字文, and even the handful of characters I've covered have proven useful to reading other Chinese texts, so let's check out the next four characters.

果珍李奈
guŏ zhēn lĭ nài

"As for fruits, the plum and crabapple are highly prized."

I don't think I've ever eaten a crabapple, though I do have a specific childhood memory of a crabapple tree outside a public indoor pool I visited with a class or daycare program or something. (Guess it ain't that specific after all.) It's not so much the tree or its fruit that stands out in my memory as the heat and harsh light of the moment. Anyway, there's not a lot to say about these characters. Paar's edition of the 千字文 is equally silent as to the particular value of these fruits, and I'm too lazy to consult any other sources at the moment, so we'll assume that 李奈 were merely tasty, which is a fine reason to prize any comestible.

I'd like to take the opportunity to mention a couple other things that my translation brings to mind.

1/甲: I frequently use the term "classical Chinese" to translate 文言文, which is also, and more rightly, called "literary Chinese." Classical Chinese, AKA 古文, is temporally bound to the written language used up until the 漢朝 Han dynasty, whereas 文言文 is the written language used up until the early 20th century. (There's a late 20th-century writer whose name escapes me who still used it, too.) My point is that much of the Chinese I've translated on this blog isn't strictly classical Chinese, but literary Chinese- for example, the 千字文, which was compiled after the classical period, technically counts as 文言文 and not 古文. Naturally, even the term 古文 has historically narrower literary applications than that which I'm assigning it for comparative purposes, but that's beyond the scope of this note.

2/乙: Literary Chinese loves to imply things. If you were to literally translate 果珍李奈, you'd more or less get "fruit valuable plum crabapple," which at first glance is ridiculous but, with a little effort, somewhat comprehensible. Ignoring the potential for 珍 to be used as an adjective or a verb (or, to put it into more linguistic terms, that we're looking at the perennially popular Chinese topic-comment structure), it still appears to be a phrase devoid of context. Why did the author(s) of the Thousand Character Classic suddenly bring up tasty fruit? Because, in the previous two lines, they'd started delineating the names and natures of specific things. Recall the 剑 sword and 珠 pearl: now we're onto a broader class of things, 果 fruit. When 文言文 brings up a topic, especially in sequence, there's an implied "as for X" or "regarding X." I'm unable to explain the nuance of this fully, in part because I tend to forget it myself when I'm reading literary Chinese, and because there are more dimensions to it based on context, but it's an ingrained part of reading 文言文.

More later, folks! Hope this helped, or was interesting, or entertaining. Preferably all three.


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 14

珠稱夜光
zhū chēng yè guāng

"A pearl called Ye Guang."

Unlike the name of the sword in the last entry, 夜光 makes sense on its own: it means something that shines at night.

Paar says that the story of this pearl comes from a book called 搜神記, or the Record of Searching for Spirits (my translation; my phone's dictionary calls it, in a much more modern fashion, In Search of the Supernatural), published during the 兩晋 Jin dynasty (the first one(s), from the third to fifth centuries CE): "[t]he Marquis of Sui rescued a wounded snake, who in gratitude brought him a pearl that shone brightly at night."

I don't have a problem with snakes. Like a lot of things in life, as long as they're left alone and not hassled, they're usually content to reciprocate. I especially like this snippet of a tale for demonstrating that not all snakes of yore get a bum rap, like the one in the Bible, and that everyone, even presumably busy Chinese noblemen, can do right by their fellow sentient beings. Of course, the full story may end badly, but I'm gonna leave it as it is for the time being.

Until next time, folks!

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 13

Today the Thousand Character Classic gives us an oblique history lesson, and reminds us that all kinds of things can be used as names in Chinese.

劍號巨闕
jiàn hào jù què

"A sword named Juque."

Paar's edition of the 千字文 says that Juque was one of several famous- or, perhaps more accurately, legendary- swords made by 歐冶子 Ou Yezi during the Spring and Autumn period, of which more can be learned here. The characters that make up the sword's name are interesting in that one way of reading them together produces "massive flaw," which is not something I'd look for in a weapon. Another reading could be "gigantic watchtower," which to my ears may sound odd, but, unlike the other reading, at least tries to sell the would-be wielder of the sword on some sort of martial virtues.

It appears that the Juque sword makes an appearance in a famous Qing dynasty 武俠 wuxia novel titled either 忠烈俠義傳 (The Tale of Loyal and Upright Heroes) or 三俠五義 (Three Gallants and Five Righteous Ones). Based on the Wikipedia description of it, it sounds like a neat read, but one that's far beyond my skill and patience. Better to stick to the Thousand Character Classic and the occasional poem for now, I think.

Until next time, take it easy, dear readers.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 12

Today's is a brief lesson in geology and geography, fields in which your humble Corpse is no expert (though I'm pretty good at finding places on a world map).

玉出崑岡
yù chū kūn gāng

"Jade comes from the Kunlun Mountains."

The two varieties of gemstone collectively known as jade, nephrite and jadeite, come from a number of sources, not just the Kunlun Mountains. Jadeite, for example, can be collected on the beaches of Big Sur in California, which I may or may not have done. (It's unclear because I never had the greenish rocks I collected there properly identified.) China's historical and ongoing love of jade is well-known and, in my opinion, righteous, because jade is amazing. There are a number of characters for jade of different kinds: 玉， 翠， 翡， 玖, and plenty more, but that's beyond the scope of this post.

崑 is a reference to the Kunlun Mountains that run through central Asia; their western end is in Tajikistan (Chinese: 塔吉克) and their eastern/Chinese terminus is in 青海 Qinghai province. There's also a lot of mythology surrounding 崑崙山 Kunlun Mountain, which is not necessarily related spatially to the Kunlun Mountains themselves. I leave it up to you, dear reader, to delve into this mythology on your own.

岡 means "hill" or "ridge", and thus is a metonym of sorts for 山, the usual Chinese character for "mountain."

So now you've all been given the general locations of precious stones and metals in China. If a couple thousand years' exploitation hasn't utterly exhausted these sources, which it almost certainly has, you might be in luck if you go to China seeking a fortune in gold and jade. If, you know, the locals, 仙人 immortals, or the Chinese government don't mind.

Later, dudes!

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character classic, part 11

Today's characters bring good news for fortune-seekers.

金生麗水
jīn shēng lì shuĭ

"The river Li bears gold."

麗 means "beautiful" or, as Kroll puts it, "beauty that is outwardly or sensually striking." In this case, paired with 水, the character for water, it refers to the Li River in 雲南 Yunnan province.

I'm much obliged to Francis Paar for pointing this out, because like seemingly every other thing I come across reading classical Chinese, it's not something I'd have guessed on my own (though this use of 水 is fairly common). Another good example is 玉箸, which appeared in my last post. It translates literally to "jade chopsticks" - it's not the usual character for chopsticks, either! - but it's used as a stand-in for tears, as well as being the name of a form of small seal script. As a literary language, Classical Chinese has no monopoly on layered meanings, but damn if it doesn't get a prize for being especially obtuse. It's enough to make a dude want to weep jade chopsticks sometimes.

And there you have it. Paar says you can pan for gold in the Li River, so go west*, young wo/man!


微臣
史大偉


*Or east. Your choice. From the USA, it usually makes more sense to go west these days.

國際婦女節： 薛濤的"春望詞四首" / International Women's Day: Xue Tao's "Four Ways of Looking at Spring"

If I'd thought it through, I would've been better prepared to commemorate International Women's Day, which is to say I would have started work on these poems by Xue Tao a lot earlier. I hope my hasty translation does her a modicum of justice.

薛濤 Xue Tao was a Tang dynasty poet, courtesan, and, later in life, Daoist nun. Wikipedia uses the term "adept," which is probably more accurate since "nun" implies her taking on a monastic life, which doesn't seem to have been the case. A collection of her poetry, the 錦江集 or Brocade River Collection, was published in her lifetime, but apparently only part of it has survived. Her work has been translated by an inevitably more skilled hand than mine: Jeanne Larsen's Brocade River Poems: Selected Works of the Tang Dynasty Courtesan Xue Tao can be purchased here.

Xue Tao's Daoist phase strikes me as particularly interesting, and informs my translation, insofar as I opted to refrain from personalizing the poems. I think this makes for an aesthetically useful juxtaposition of the wistful romance of the poems' subject matter and the featureless nature of the Dao.

Of course, that's just me. I've included her original for anyone who reads Chinese, and I consulted Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping's version of these poems, if readers want another take on these 1200-year-old examples of poetry written by Chinese women. Enjoy!


微臣
史大偉
D.A.S.




薛濤

春望詞四首


花開不同賞，花落不同悲
欲問相思處，花開花落時

攬草結同心，將以遺知音
春愁正斷絕，春鳥複哀吟

風花日將老，佳期猶渺渺
不結同心人，空結同心草

那堪花滿枝，翻作兩相思
玉箸垂朝鏡，春風知不知




Xue Tao
"Four Ways of Looking at Spring"

1
Flowers blossom, but can't be enjoyed together
Flowers fall, but grief can't be shared
If you want to ask where love dwells
It's when flowers blossom and flowers fall

2
Gather grass and tie heart-shaped knots
Pass them on to the dearly departed
Spring sadness has just broken
Spring birds sing mournfully again

3
Blossoms on the wind, the day wanes
It's as if good times are ever more distant
If people can't bind their hearts together
It's pointless to knot grass hearts

4
How does one endure branches full of flowers?
Write a couple of love songs.
Tears fall onto the mirror
But does the spring wind know?

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 10

露結爲霜
lù jié wéi shuāng

"Dew crystallizes and becomes frost."


I'm not nearly as clever as I thought I was, but I'm certainly as lazy as I know myself to be. If I'd bothered to read any of the brief introductory material to Paar's edition of the Thousand Character Classic, I'd have seen that it includes a brief summary of the primer, broken down into themes; the first of which is "Heaven, Earth, and Man." Oh well. At least I didn't think I'd discovered something heretofore unknown about a text that's been in use for roughly 1500 years.

Anyway, today's characters continue to deal with nature. 露 skilfully encapsulates the semantic and phonetic aspects embedded in many Chinese characters: the upper part is 雨, "rain" or "precipitation," while the lower is 路, "road," but it's the pronunciation, not the meaning, that this element lends to the entire character. I think I've mentioned before, and I'm sure I'll mention again, that knowing the semantic and phonetic content of both elements is no guarantee of parsing the whole character's meaning, even if in some cases one can do so in reverse.

結 in the second tone, as it's used here, usually means "knot" or "bind," but this can be extended in a broad sense, hence "crystallize." 爲, in addition to being a common and polyvalent character, is also written a couple different ways: 为 in its simplified form, and the traditional variant 為, which I particularly like. My Firefox pop-up Chinese dictionary, the life-savingPerapera, notes that other modern meanings for 霜 include "frosting" and "skin cream." As a result, we have a humorous alternative reading of this entry's 千字文: "Syrup binds and becomes frosting."

We've reached 40/1000 characters! 加油， 看官們!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 9

雲騰致雨
yún téng zhì yŭ

"Mounting clouds bring rain."

I'm starting to notice a potential pattern among the topics addressed by the 千字文. So far (which isn't very far- today's four characters make for a total of 36 out of 1000 unique characters), readers have been treated to statements about time and nature, both terrestrial and celestial. Some of these read like simple facts: 天地玄黃, for example. (Though, as previously noted, the "yellow" earth is specific to the part of China where the Thousand Character Classic was probably compiled.) Others, like 律呂調陽, relate to philosophy, which still influences daily life in China. Given the number of characters presented in the book, I imagine the variety of topics will expand, but even at this point the armature upon which the book's value as a primer hangs is visible. Not only are you learning characters, you're learning facts about, and concepts of, the world.

Today's characters fall into this pattern. Paar translates 騰 as "ascend," but among Kroll's definitions I also found "pile up" and "accumulate." On a visual level these work much better, because one can watch clouds amass overhead and bring rain, whereas the creation of clouds (via "ascension" in the water cycle) is less immediate. 致 is used as a sort of catch-all for "cause" or "bring about," as seen in Paar's transliteration, "clouds ascend, cause rain."

More first-millennium education soon. Later, folks!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 8

Today's four characters irk me.

律吕調陽
lü4 lü3 tiáo yáng

"Yang and Yin pitch-pipes harmonize together."


First things first. I've gotten good at typing Portuguese diacritical marks, and I'm learning how to type the tone marks for 漢語拼音 Hanyu pinyin , the most common romanization system these days, but I have no clue how to add tone marks over letters like ü. That's why there are numbers next to the pinyin above. Expect this in the future, unless I get around to figuring out the double-diacritical issue.

Second, I don't like my translation of this, and I don't like Paar's, either: "The two sets of tones bring the Yang in harmony with the Yin". One of the alternate English translations he offers is just barely okay: "Music harmonizes the two principles of nature." My problem with all of these is that the first two characters, 律吕, denote two sets of pitch-pipes, the former six of which are yang 陽 and the latter six of which are yin 陰. I don't know shit about musical theory or structure, which makes the division of musical tones into yin and yang (roughly speaking, feminine/masculine, positive/negative, etc.- y'all know the symbol; this is more or less what it represents) even more meaningless to me.

But that's not what really annoys me. The final character is 陽 yang, and to me, if the pitch-pipes being discussed are going to harmonize, then 陰 yin needs to be present as well, but it's not. The yin-yang implied by 律呂 doesn't feel completed, via the verb 調, in 陽 alone. This is the first time I've seen this in the 千字文, and it probably won't be the last. My guess is that one day I'll run across a grammatical or semantic explanation for phrases such as this and all will be made clear, or as clear as classical Chinese gets (which is a somewhat unfair statement, because sometimes you can look at an old Chinese phrase and its meaning falls into place not just immediately, but beautifully).

律 appears in the modern Chinese word 律師, or "lawyer," which has stuck with me for years- when I learned it, I was dating a lawyer, and now I'm married to her.

Speaking of the 太太, I'm off to cook dinner for her. Later, folks!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 7

Today's 千字文 characters, like several of their predecessors, deal with time.

閏餘成歲
rùn yú chéng suì

"The extra intercalary month completes the year."

The Chinese traditionally used the lunar calendar, the twelve months of which don't add up to the solar year now in use. In order to make up for this, Paar tells us they added "an extra or intercalary month every 2 or 3 years (22 extra months per 60 yrs., or about 7 per 19 yrs.)" 閏 is also used for intercalary days, though I don't know how those were assigned.

歲, according to A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese is a year, measured by the movement of Jupiter. It's the character for Jupiter itself, too, but these days Jupiter is usually 木星. 木 is also used for Jupiter in classical Chinese, as one of the five visible planets and part of the 五行 wu xing system. What I typically associate 歲 with is asking someone's age: 你幾歲? I seem to remember that phrasing being only used for kids, though.

The way the characters 餘 and 歲 are written in Paar's Ch'ien Tzu Wen aren't standard, or at least don't look the same as the versions that appear when I type them here or look them up on my phone. This isn't that uncommon, but it can be confusing, and I'm never quite sure which is the preferred version.

That's all for now. 再見！


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 6

Today's line of the Thousand Character Classic reads:

秋收冬藏
qiū shōu dōng cáng

"Autumn harvest, winter storage."

Alternately, "harvest in autumn, hoard in winter."

I want to focus on the final character, 藏. It's used, with a different pronunciation, in 西藏, Xizang, the Chinese name for Tibet. Taken literally, the characters can mean "Western storehouse," which sounds like a reference to Tibet's long Buddhist history, since 藏 can also mean "Buddhist scripture" (e.g., the Chinese Tripitaka, or collection of Buddhist sutras, is 大藏經). Hence Tibet as "the western depository of Buddhist sutras."

But nope, the etymology is totally different. According to Endymion Wilkinson's monumental Chinese History: A New Manual, the Mongols divided Tibet into three areas: Tsang, U, and Ngari, and "the Zang in Xizang comes from Tsang (short for gTsangbu meaning river), the valley of the upper Yarlung river."

Incidentally, the Dalai Lama's title comes from the Mongolian language, and means "ocean lama."

There's a lesson for anyone studying Chinese- just because something sounds logical (or worse, logical and cool) doesn't mean it's at all accurate.

Later, folks!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 5

Today's characters are:

寒來暑往
hán lái shŭ wăng

"Winter cold comes, summer heat goes."


Not a whole lot to this line, really. Together, 往來 can mean "come and go," as both verbs imply movement, and we've already seen that Chinese is fond of using paired nouns or antonyms to create a new word. Actually, "word" isn't quite right; "concept" is more like it. I haven't found 寒 and 暑 used together in such a manner, but their counterparts, 冬 and 夏, are, at least in modern Chinese, where they mean, unsurprisingly, "winter and summer." 春秋, or "spring and autumn," is the more famous seasonal pair: the "Spring and Autumn Annals" supposedly written by 孔子 Confucius about the state of 魯 Lu is the first thing that comes to mind. The phrase is also, as Kroll puts it, a "synecdoche for a year."

寒 and 暑, while signifying winter and summer, can represent their effects (i.e., cold and heat) alone, so another reading of this line is "cold and heat come and go." Either way, the emphasis on cycles and transience is something I've always appreciated about Chinese thought.

再見，看官.


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 4

The fourth line of the 千字文 reads:

辰宿列張
chén xiŭ liè zhāng

"The stars are aligned, the lunar mansions arranged."

One of the many ways the Chinese traditionally used to tell time was the 地支, or "earthly branches." 辰 is the fifth earthly branch (out of a cycle of twelve, a number that made it useful for tracking months as well as hours). In this instance the character stands in for celestial bodies as a whole, per Kroll, which I've rendered as "stars".

宿 is more commonly pronounced sù, where it can mean "to stay the night," "lodging", or even "the previous day/year." In its alternate pronunciation it's used for "constellation" or "lunar mansion."

列 is used fairly straightforwardly here. 張 is something I don't recall ever using as a verb; it's much more familiar to me as a measure word for flat things, such as sheets of paper, or as one of China's most common family names.

The sidereal nature of this line allows for an alternate, if somewhat incomplete, reading, which as an H.P. Lovecraft fan came to mind almost immediately: "the stars are right." Of course, now I'm wondering what a sinicized Cthulhu mythos (the Chinese transliteration of "Cthulhu" is 克蘇魯, by the way) would look like. The Internet being what it is, I'm sure a cursory search engine query would yield several hours' worth of results, but do I have time for that right now? Eh, who am I kidding- of course I do.

Later, dudes.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 3

日月盈昃

rì yuè yíng zè

"The sun and moon wax and wane."

The third quartet of characters in the 千字文 was tricky to understand. 日 and 月 are "sun" and "moon", or "day" and "month". 盈 implies fullness, plenitude, and abundance, and 昃 signifies the period after noon, or, as both Kroll and the 遠東漢英大辭典 (Far East Chinese-English Dictionary) like to put it, when the sun is in the west. Paar calls it "the declining afternoon sun", and the key word here is "declining".

The combination of "full" and "after noon"/"declining" threw me off, though once I read Paar's translation, it made more sense. 盈 functions as a semantic opposite to 昃, even though the connection wasn't immediately clear to me. The topic, 日月, is what makes the characters comprising the comment, 盈, work together in this context.

I don't think 昃 sees much use these days, which is a shame, as I find it evocative. When broken down and reassembled into two separate characters, 仄日, it can mean "setting sun", which is cool, but not the same thing.

Later, folks.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic， part 2

Here are the next four characters of the 千字文.

宇宙洪荒
yŭ zhòu hóng huāng

"The universe is vast and desolate."

In modern Chinese 宇宙 means "universe" or "cosmos", and it was used that way in older forms of Chinese as well. On their own, however, the characters 宇 mean "roof", "eaves", or "firmament", while 宙 can signify "ridgepole", "central beam", or, get this, time itself. This latter definition is used by Paar (as "infinite time"), but not the former two. The image of time being the ridgepole holding up the celestial canopy and thereby forming the universe is pleasing in more ways than one.

洪 evokes vastness, but among its other uses are "flooding" or "overflowing", which makes sense given the character's 水 shuĭ water radical. 荒 can involve neglect, overgrowth with weeds, and desolation, but can also mean "expansive", "unrestrained", or "dissolute". (These meanings can be guessed at from the character's components, though I reckon it's easier the other way around, i.e., once you have an idea of what the character means, you can see some of that meaning in the written components.)

Aside from reinforcing the spatial and destructive aspect of 洪, the other uses of 荒 open up some neat alternative readings of this line. This, of course, is both the blessing and curse of classical Chinese: you could read 宇宙洪荒 as "the cosmos overflows with neglect", for example, and while it might not be the most logical or commonly agreed-upon reading, it wouldn't be unequivocally wrong, either.

Man, I haven't given this much thought to Chinese in a while. I'm enjoying it, and I hope you are too, 看官.

微臣
史大偉

千字文, The Thousand Character Classic

 The other day, while indulging in one of the greatest pastimes known to man, i.e., browsing the shelves of a used bookstore*, I ran across a wonderful 1963 edition of the 千字文, or Thousand Character Classic, edited by Francis W. Paar, that features the original Chinese text in several different scripts along with translations in English, French, German, and Latin. The 千字文 is probably the oldest extant primer for learning Chinese characters, and dates back to the sixth century A.D. There are versions available online, including the very same edition at Hathi Trust.

For my own edification, and hopefully that of anyone reading this, I think I'm going to try and post something about each verse of the 千字文 regularly. This version has a page for every four-character verse, which means 250 posts. We'll see how that pans out.

That said, here's the first four characters of the 千字文, AKA the Qiānzìwén or, in the old and aesthetically appealing but otherwise annoying Wade-Giles romanization system, Ch'ien Tzu Wen, along with some brief commentary by yours truly. Any statements that aren't mine are taken from the Paar edition I'm using as a source, and any other sources are noted accordingly. Let's learn Chinese like it's circa 1000 A.D.!

天地元黃
tiān dì yuán huáng

Well, this is a hell of a way to start. I transcribed the characters directly from this book, and 元, according to Paar and Kraal (in the latter's A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese), is a "taboo-substitute" for 玄, given the latter character's use in the names of 宋 Sòng and 清 Qīng emperors. I wonder how many more substitutions there'll be where the replacement character's meaning bears no resemblance to that of the character it's replacing.

So, returning the line to its original form, we have:

天地玄黃
tiān dì xuán huáng

Or, literally, "heaven earth dark yellow." Since nobody talks like that, let's say "heaven is dark and the earth is yellow." The earth is yellow in this case because much of the soil of northern China is yellow loess.

Kroll notes that 玄黃 is an analogue to 天地, since 天 is 玄 and 地 is 黄. Dark and yellow=heaven and earth.

One down, 249 to go.

微臣
史大偉


*The Portuguese word for a person or shop that deals in used books, alfarrabista, not only has a wonderful ring to it, but, according to the Dicionário Priberam, has its etymological roots in Al-Farabi, a medieval Muslim philosopher and polymath. I dig that.

Excuses in the form of books

Good God, it's been over two months since I've posted. Fortunately, I have excuses other than laziness. Two excuses, to be precise, and they're pretty good ones.

The first excuse is that I spent a good part of the autumn translating Orlando da Costa's novel O Signo da Ira from Portuguese to English. Frederick Noronha, the head of the publishing house Goa1556, asked me over the summer if I'd be interested in doing so. I said sure, why not, sounds interesting- about what you'd expect for a request with no deadline attached. Little did I know that Frederick wanted the book in time for António Costa's visit to India in early January. António Costa is Orlando da Costa's son and the Prime Minister of Portugal, and my translation of his father's book was given to him as a gift during an official meeting with Narendra Modi, India's PM.

While it's an unexpected honor to have produced something relatively high profile- not only was the book a diplomatic present, the Portuguese original has quite a reputation in the world of Goan literature- the version given to the Portuguese PM isn't as polished as I'd like, and at some point there should be a better edition coming out. That said, I'm pretty proud of what I managed to pull off, and the response so far has been positive.

My second excuse is Avante, Goeses, Avante!: The Portuguese Poetry of Laxmanrao Sardessai. I've been working on this book for a while, and it was released a couple weeks ago. It's published by Goa1556 (it was while working on this project that Frederick Noronha brought up O Signo da Ira), and I recently went to Goa to launch the book with a talk at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research and give a presentation on Sardessai's poetry at the II Simpósio Internacional: "Goa: Culturas, Línguas, e Literaturas", which was immensely gratifying to attend. At the book launch I even had the honor of meeting one of Laxmanrao's sons, Shashikant, and several of his grandchildren, as well as Sérgio Carvalho, who as a young man ("o tornatto", as Sardessai called him) had a poem dedicated to him.

It was a fantastic trip. Everyone I met was incredibly welcoming and gracious, the Goan landscape was all kinds of enchanting, and I got to speak Portuguese regularly with folks from around the world. I look forward to not only strengthening my ties to Goa and the community built around Goan Lusophone literature, but simply returning and getting to know the place better. Brief as it was, my time there opened all sorts of doors; once I know what's behind some of them, I'll let y'all know.

That's about it for now. If you're interested in getting hold of either book, let me know, or contact Goa1556 directly. I suspect they'll be available on Amazon or via other channels, especially in India, soon, but for now it's old-fashioned word of mouth and individual delivery.

Later, dudes!