Thursday, December 23, 2021

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 17

Well, here we are again, perusing the pages of the 千字文 Thousand Character Classic. I don't know if I'll stick with this project—after all, it's been nearly five years since I last touched it, and there are 233 more entries to get through—but I felt compelled to pull the book off the shelf and give it another go. What I really want to do is translate 白居易 Bai Juyi's 長恨歌 "Song of Everlasting Regret," but it's a really long poem by Chinese standards, and I'll need to work on it for a while before posting a draft here.

On to the next four of the thousand characters.

鹹河淡

Hǎi xián hé dàn

“The sea is salty, the river fresh."

Well, that's pretty straightforward. Looks like we may be in for a few lines of the description of nature, but I haven't read past the next four characters, so who knows?

鹹淡, the characters that mean "salty" and "fresh", together mean "brackish."

That's it for now; I gotta get the hang of this again. Happy Yule, dear readers.

微臣

史大偉