Alberto Estima de Oliveira — O Diálogo do Silêncio / The Dialogue of Silence 10

10

vazio de estuário

o rio dissolve-se
nos detritos.


-----


10

devoid of an estuary

the river dissolves
into detritus.

Alberto Estima de Oliveira — O Diálogo do Silêncio / The Dialogue of Silence 9

"Canoe" doesn't seem like the right word in this poem or the one preceding it, but I can't think of a better fit. The boat I picture in these poems is more of a flat-bottomed rowboat, but I don't know if I like that any more than "canoe."

9

filtrado
de silêncio
escoa-se
o corpo
de madrugada

...
nas mãos
flutuam
as canoas da noite


-----

9

filtered
through silence
the body
of dawn
drains away

...
in its hands
float
the night's canoes

Yule MMXXII: notes, best albums, etc.

Greetings from the depths of an arctic blast that's left most of Texas suffering below freezing temperatures since yesterday. It's brutal, but so far it's not as bad as the great freeze of 2021.

I got a notice yesterday that a post I wrote seventeen fucking years ago about Iron Maiden has been marked "sensitive content" by Google. What the hell is that? Is some bored asshole reporting ancient blog posts for kicks? Did the algorithm have a stroke? Whatever. The internet sucks.

Here are some of the best albums that came out this year, in no particular order.

thisquietarmy x Away, Machine Consciousness, Phase III — The Singularity, Phase I and The Singularity, Phase II have been in constant rotation here since they came out. This offering is a little different, but not that much. Absolutely awesome stuff that I still haven't found a way to write about to my satisfaction.

XweaponX, Weapon X Demo — I heard about this from, I think, Spencer Ackerman's Forever Wars newsletter, or something along those lines. "Weapon X Intro" is killer. The straight edge militancy doesn't do much for me, but it doesn't bother me, either.

Binker and Moses, Feeding the Machine — B&M add interesting electronic elements and tape loops to their absolutely bitchin' free(-ish) jazz. Phenomenonally cool; in some ways this album is the more earthbound, jazz-genetic cousin to the work thisquietarmy and Away are doing together. (Maybe I'll explore that idea in a future entry.)

Dressed in Streams, Vande Mataram — I still think DiS' older material is better, but this trippy black metal reworking of India's national song is a hell of a listening experience.

Megan McDuffee, In A Weary World — You may know her from her work on the River City Girls soundtrack, but Megan McDuffee is a really versatile artist. This reminds me in some ways of Carbon Based Lifeforms. It's a great late night album, and also a great driving album, so you should listen to it while driving at night.

Acid Witch, Rot Among Us — It's a new Acid Witch record, and therefore it rules. That's all you need to know.

Temple of Void, Summoning the Slayer — I've been into this band since I found their first LP at Vinal Edge and bought it because it looked cool. In lesser hands, mid-paced death/doom could get boring, but Temple of Void continually sharpens their sound without sacrificing heaviness.

Carpenter Brut, Leather Terror — Maybe my most-played album this year. I saw them in L.A. in August with my brother, and it was a fantastic show. "The Widow Maker" video is a lesson in the trauma high school can leave behind.

Allagash, Dark Future — This popped up on Youtube a few years ago in demo form; I still have the link bookmarked, though it doesn't work anymore. I've written about Allagash before, so no need to retread that ground. Solid alien thrash, as always.

Cailleach Calling, Dreams of Fragmentation — This is what I would have listened to had I done any driving around Tokyo at night last month. Hypnotic, almost futuristic black metal that's also appropriate for a frigid day like today, since the Cailleach is a Celtic goddess of winter.

Cavurn, Undead in Bellingham — Their 2017 demo was the kind of shit you play in the background of a particularly grim D&D dungeon crawl. This album proves that they can replicate it live. I hope they keep recording.

Boulevards, Electric Cowboy: Born in Carolina Mud — The funk never takes the same shape twice on Boulevards albums, which means every new record is a treat. This one has a distinctly soulful '70s vibe.

Inexorum, Equinox Vigil — You know this will be good if it involves members of Obsequiae. Heartfelt, technically impressive, plenty of good riffs; all around heavy metal at its best.

I hope your Yule/Christmas/etc. treats you well, car@ leitor/a. Stay warm, stay safe, don't cross picket lines, and take care of your fellow sentient beings, human or otherwise.

DAS

Alberto Estima de Oliveira — O Diálogo do Silêncio / The Dialogue of Silence 8

So much for writing from Japan. I went, but I didn't feel like blogging.

-----

8

uma canoa velha
juntou-se
à muralha
na praia grande

baloiçava lentamente
embalando
um par de remos
e uma panela cheia
de lágrimas

mais tarde
uma lancha rápida
passou-lhe um cabo
levou-a.


-----

8

An old canoe
up against
the wall
on the Praia Grande

rocked slowly
cradling
a pair of oars
and a pot full
of tears

later
a speedboat
tossed it a line
led it away

Alberto Estima de Oliveira — O Diálogo do Silêncio / The Dialogue of Silence 7

Nossa, mais um poema traiçoeiro, incrivelmente difícil de traduzir para inglês.

I can see in my mind's eye what this poem's describing: two overlapping images, one of a DMZ-like area and one of either 南灣 Lago Nam Van or 西灣 Lago Sai Van in Macau. It's unlikely that it's what Estima de Oliveira had in mind, but it's an intriguing juxtaposition, and it's this ability to conjure up reader/listener-specific pictures and emotions that keeps me coming back to poetry, especially poetry in translation.

Both of these lakes were once open to the Pearl River Delta as part of the 大灣 Baía da Praia Grande before being closed off in the early '90s, when the bay was infilled to provide land for new development. I never had the good fortune to see the Praia Grande in its original state, but vestiges of its pedestrian curvature and its attendant charms remain, especially along Avenda da República. You can't look out to sea from there, only Sai Van, but it's still a very pleasant stroll.

My next post be written from Japan. It's absolutely incredible that I can even write that sentence.

Até, caro leitor/a.


DAS

-----

7

entre luzes
um lago metálico

é mar de barro

    daqui
    o arame farpado
    
    do outro

    o outro lado.

 

-----

7

between the lights
a metallic lake

is a sea of mud

    on this side
    barbed wire

    on the other

    the other side.

 

 

"A career with the spaceship pays good, and the benefits kill too."

Your humble corpse has recently taken a job as a union organizer. I don't talk much about personal shit here anymore, unlike my early (and prolific) days of blogging. I've been content with this blog being a translation/occasional metal review outlet for the past decade or so, but now I'm excited about helping working folks build power, and I want to talk about that, too.

Keen eyes might recognize this post's title as coming from a YTCracker song. That dude's interest in cryptocurrency is dumb as fuck (crypto is a scam, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you shit, and by shit I mean their worthless crypto investments), but goddamn, he still spits quality nerdcore rhymes, and "Bitcoin Baron" is a banger even if it's an anthem for suckers. Just assume that the titular spaceship in this post is a union job, and you're good.

Don't buy cryptocurrency. Unionize your job. Stick with your friends and coworkers. Don't let your boss convince you that they're on your side.

Stay awake. Coffee, energy drinks, or expired Surge all do the trick. Just don't let your boss, or someone else's, tell you that you owe them shit, because you don't. They exist because of your work, not the other way around. You're the one sitting up late in a computer lab, server room, or data center, making sure shit happens; your boss can't do what you're doing. You know that even more than I do. I wish I'd had a union when I was a labbie, or a call center chump. We all deserve better lives.

If you want to organize a union where you work, hit me up, or contact the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.

If you want to give all this shit some thought, please do. I've been known to kick back. You should, too. That's where the good thinking is at.

DAS

Alberto Estima de Oliveira — O Diálogo do Silêncio / The Dialogue of Silence 6

For such short poems, these are hard to translate. I'm not very happy with my last two translations.

I almost left "lorcha" in the English version, because it's not necessarily clear that "junk" refers to the kind of Chinese ship. Now you know.


6

sob a lorcha
deslizam lágrimas

    caminhos da foz
    
    páginas
    líquidas
    de rocha.


-----

6

tears slip
beneath the junk

    on their way to the estuary

    liquid
    pages
    of stone

Alberto Estima de Oliveira — O Diálogo do Silêncio / The Dialogue of Silence 5

5

solta-se o voo

     gaivota

na tarde
     branca
     manhã

deslizante
junto ao mar.


-----

5

flying free

    seagull

in the afternoon
    white
    morning

gliding
along the sea.

Alberto Estima de Oliveira — O Diálogo do Silêncio / The Dialogue of Silence 4

4

tinha o silêncio
nas asas
quando tocou
meu destino
voava desamparada
sem navio
onde abordar

pobre gaivota
sem jeito
sem fraga
onde morar

tanto voou
sem descanso
que em água
se transformou
diluindo-se
no mar.


-----

4

there was silence
in its wings
when my destiny
called
it flew helplessly
without a ship
to board

poor seagull
awkward
without a crag
to dwell upon

it flew so long
without rest
that it turned
into water
diluting itself
into the sea.

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 54

形端表正

xíng duān biǎo zhēng

"proper form manifests uprightness"


形, translated here as "form," typically refers to something's physical form. I'm most familiar with it as part of 形意拳 xingyiquan, one of the Chinese martial arts I practice. It's usually called "form and intent boxing" in English.

端 commonly refers to the tip or genesis of something, like a bud on a branch, but also means "correct." Kroll's dictionary lists 端坐, to sit upright, as an example.

正 or "uprightness" is moral uprightness, of course. This line isn't simply about good posture, though it's about that, too.


微臣
史大偉

Alberto Estima de Oliveira — O Diálogo do Silêncio / The Dialogue of Silence 3

3

chegámos numa altura difícil
ao local do encontro

não havia sombras
as árvores estavam sem folhas

o outono
chegara

na praia baixa
não havia rocha
que servisse de abrigo

tinha saído do mar
tu descido da
montanha

o encontro
é quase sempre
nestas circunstâncias

utilizo estas palavras
sem muito sentido
para podermos começar
qualquer conversa
antes que chegue a noite

   então
   que pensas
   não dizes nada?

   sempre a mesma
   pergunta

   o silêncio
   foi sempre a mesma
   resposta

começámos então
o diálogo do silêncio

   dum lado
   o mar
   falava por mim
   murmurando coisas

   do outro
   a montanha
   sustenando
   a música dos vales

conversa longa pela noite adentro
gerações e gerações
de marés e ventos


-----

3

we reached a difficult point
at the meeting place

there were no shadows
the trees were leafless

autumn
had arrived

on the low beach
there were no rocks
to serve as shelter

i came out of the sea
you came down the
mountain

our meetings
are almost always
under these circumstances

i use these pointless
words
so we can start
a conversation
before night falls

    well
    what do you think
    won't you say something?

    always the same
    question

    always the same
    reply
    silence

we then began
the dialogue of silence

    on one side
    the sea
    spoke for me
    murmuring things

    on the other
    the mountain
    sustaining
    the music of the valleys

talking long into the night
lifetimes and lifetimes
of tides and winds

Alberto Estima de Oliveira — O Diálogo do Silêncio / The Dialogue of Silence 2

There's a lot going on on my end, caro/a leitor/a, so translations are going to be even more infrequent than usual. Or perhaps more frequent, as I try to distract myself from other things.

I urge you to listen to O Diálogo do Silêncio in spoken form, accompanied by violin, as a supplement to reading the text itself. The poems aren't read by the poet, but that doesn't stop them from being a pleasure to hear.

This is the only prose poem in the book, my copy of which started to fall apart this evening. I guess it's to be expected since it's a nearly 35-year-old paperback, but it's a sad occasion nonetheless, especially given that, like so many books published in the final 10-15 years of Portuguese rule in Macau, only 1,000 copies were printed, and who knows how many still exist.

My copy is inscribed, if I'm reading the author's handwriting properly, "ao encontro com Martin,/ afectuosamente/ Alberto/ Macau 5/1/96". It's not the first time I've purchased a book about Macau secondhand only to discover it's inscribed, o que é um verdadeiro mimo.

I hope you enjoy the poem. I definitely feel like I'm missing something here, but sei lá.

DAS

-----

navegava-se na arrogância das diferenças pela emaranhada teia de ruelas que constituía o centro da pequena cidade quase flutuante. misturavam-se os cheiros das especiarias com o hálito morno dos detritos. fervilhava a vida nos contornos das faces opacas e nas paredes roídas pelo tempo. tudo se movia convulsionando as veias deste pequeno corpo, largos e esquinas de tendas de "min", pato assado, frutos e vestuário. macau, 10 horas de uma manhã húmida de um julho espesso. caíu a noite absorvendo o dia.

o sono emergia das janelas veladas. no asfalto vivia-se ainda o chiar dos pneus e sob as árvores da praia grande mantinha-se a troca amorosa das carícias, restos das escassas horas do trabalho imposto. o tufão passou ao largo, somente as águas castanhas do delta do rio das pérolas se mostraram impacientes, ondulando em pequenas cristas, balançando as panelas de caldo suspensas nos juncos ancorados.

tudo se passa em termos inconsequentes, sem margens. o lodo e a muralha habitam a noite concretamente. a cidade ilumina-se num carrossel de cores, liquidando o lixo e a miséria. não há espaços. nova vida se inicia nas ruelas e esquinas procurando no prazer a solidão dos neons embriagados. os olhos escondidos na penumbra das fábricas surgem agora na aposta possível no sorriso passivo e terno duma jovem que passa.

esconde-se a cidade na noite curta reduzindo o tempo. macau nasce dos restos da lua multiplicando as células nos ventres tensos, nas mãos hábeis, nos corpos lívidos.

secam-se-me os lábios de falar a noite.
e o poema vem, bardo, das entranhas.


-----

arrogant in your difference, you made your way through the tangled web of alleys that made up the center of the small, almost floating, city. the smell of spices mingled with the warm breath of garbage. life teemed in the contours of opaque faces and in walls eaten away by time. everything was moving, the veins of this small body throbbing, squares and corners with shops selling noodles, roasted duck, fruit, and clothing. macau, 10 o'clock on a humid morning in a thick july. night fell, absorbing the day.

sleep emerged from covered windows. the squeal of tires still lived on the asphalt and under the trees along the praia grande there was still the amorous exchange of caresses, the remains of a few hours of imposed work. the typhoon passed offshore, only the brown waters of the pearl river delta showing themselves restless, waves forming small crests, swinging the pots of soup hanging aboard anchored junks.

everything happens in inconsequential terms, unframed. mud and ramparts concretely abide in the night. the city is lit in a carousel of colors, wiping away the garbage and misery. there are no spaces. new life begins in alleys and on corners, seeking in pleasure the solitude of drunken neon. eyes hidden in the shadow of factories now look up at the potential wager in the gentle, passive smile of a young woman who passes by.

the city hides in the brief night, slowing the tempo. macau is born from the remains of the moon, cells multiplying in taut bellies, in skilled hands, in livid bodies.

my lips go dry speaking the night.
and the poem comes, bard, from the guts.

Alberto Estima de Oliveira — O Diálogo do Silêncio / The Dialogue of Silence 1

I don't recall where I heard of the Portuguese poet Alberto Estima de Oliveira (1934-2008), but I'd wager that it was while reading about Macau, where he lived for 20 years. I bought two volumes of his work, O Diálogo do Silêncio and O Rosto, online last, and loved both of them. I haven't translated much Portuguese lately, and these poems are conveniently short, so here you go, caro leitor. Apologies for being a little rusty.

DAS

-----

1

 

nada do que temo

é a ruga

que me ensombra

a fronte

essa a sinto

no limiar do

espanto

-----

1


the wrinkle

that darkens

my brow

is not what i fear

i sense it 

on the threshold of

surprise

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 53

德建名立
dé jiàn míng lì

"A name built on established virtue"

Or, if you want to continue with the exhortatory style, "build a name on established virtue." Either way, sounds like a slogan you'd see attached to a 20th century manufacturing company.

On an unrelated note, I recommend Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan's latest album, Districts, Roads, Open Space. It's not necessarily an ideal soundtrack for reading classical Chinese, but then again, it's not not an ideal soundtrack for reading classical Chinese.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 52

克念作聖

kè niàn zuō shèng

"If one is capable of reflection, one can act like a sage"

Man, am I falling behind on this project, and this blog in general. Oof. Anyway, this line comes from the 書經 Classic of Documents, according to Paar. 克念 can also be read as "control one's thoughts." I think it's safe to say that anyone worthy of being considered a sage is capable of reflection and can control their thinking, even if you go beyond the Confucian definitions of what constitutes sagacity.


微臣

史大偉

莊子與髑髏 / Zhuangzi and the Skull

During the most recent lesson in my classical Chinese course (of which I cannot speak highly enough: you should sign up for the next one here), we discussed this passage from the 外篇 "outer chapters" of 莊子 Zhuangzi. I really liked the style of it, and not only because I'm a sucker for talking skulls: I found the image of Zhuangzi prodding a skull with his horsewhip, then using the skull as a pillow, quite entertaining. (The bit about the skull furrowing its brow is pretty hilarious, too.) My translation follows the original. Enjoy.

 莊子之楚，見空髑髏，髐然有形，撽以馬捶，因而問之曰：夫子貪生失理，而為此乎？將子有亡國之事，斧鉞之誅，而為此乎？將子有不善之行，愧遺父母妻子之醜，而為此乎？將子有凍餒之患，而為此乎？將子之春秋故及此乎？於是語卒，援髑髏枕而臥。夜半，髑髏見夢曰：子之談者似辯士。視子所言，皆生人之累也，死則無此矣。子欲聞死之說乎？莊子曰：然。髑髏曰：死，無君於上，無臣於下，亦無四時之事，從然以天地為春秋，雖南面王樂，不能過也。莊子不信，曰：吾使司命復生子形，為子骨肉肌膚，反子父母妻子、閭里、知識，子欲之乎？髑髏深矉蹙頞曰：吾安能棄南面王樂而復為人間之勞乎？

Zhuangzi was on his way to Chu when he saw an empty skull, bleached but intact. Prodding it with his horsewhip, he asked the skull, "So, were you so greedy for life that you lost all sense of reason, and ended up like this? Or did you end up like this because you were sentenced to death by the axe for serving a defeated kingdom? Or was your conduct terrible, and you ashamedly abandoned your disgraced parents, wife, and sons and ended up like this? Or did you end up like this after suffering cold and hunger? Did you end up like this after your years ran out?"

After saying this, Zhuangzi picked up the skull and, using it as a pillow, went to sleep.

At midnight, the skull appeared to him in a dream, saying: "You talk like an eloquent man. Examining your words, though, they're all about the burdens of the living. The dead, on the other hand, don't have such problems. Would you like to hear me talk about death?"

"Naturally," Zhuangzi said.

"In death," the skull said, "there are no masters above, and no servants below. The concerns of the four seasons don't exist, either. The years pass without constraint in heaven and earth. Even a king facing south from his throne wouldn't have it better."

Zhuangzi didn't believe the skull. "If I could have the Master of Fate return you to your living form, make you flesh and bone again, return your parents, wife, and sons to you, put you back in your village among your acquaintances, you wouldn't want that?"

The skull furrowed its brow and said, "Why would I give up the joys of a king and return to the toils of the human world?"


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 51

景行維賢

jǐng xíng wéi xián 

"admire the actions only of the worthy"


Damn, it's been over a month since my last entry. Things have been hectic, but not that hectic.

The only thing I find interesting about this line is the use of 景, which typically means "sunlight" or "scenery," but here means "look up to" or "admire," which makes sense, seeing as how one often has to  look up to admire the sunshine.


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 50

詩贊羔羊

shī zàn gāo yáng

"The Classic of Poetry praises lambs"


Lambs are cute, sure, but Paar notes that this is a reference to the following lines from the Classic of Poetry (AKA the Book of Odes):

羔羊之皮、素絲五緎。
委蛇委蛇、自公退食。

"The skins of lambs and sheep, their five seams white;
Unhurried, they withdraw from public to dine."

This is still somewhat unhelpful, but Paar explains that the lambskins in question are lambskin clothes worn by officials, and the white thereof signifies their spotless character. Thrilling stuff, huh?

微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 49

 墨悲絲染

mò bēi sī rǎn

"Mozi was saddened by dyed silk"


墨子 Mozi is one of China's philosophical heavyweights, though his ideas (which I'm not all that familiar with, sadly, though I did recently get a Chinese-language book on Mohist thought that will inevitably take me forever to read) were ultimately overshadowed by Confucianism.

It's safe to say that Mozi wasn't literally upset by the sight of dyed silk. Paar describes it as Mozi being "reminded of how a good man could be corrupted in the company of evil associates." 

On an unrelated note, while these four characters are individually quite pleasing to the eye, I especially like the appearance of the line as a whole, mainly due to how the upper and lower elements of each character fall into place.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 48

器欲難量

qì yù nán liáng 

"seek to be immeasurably capable"

This one threw me off from the get-go, since I know 器 as "tool" or "instrument." Turns out it also means "capacity" or "capability," which stems from another use of the character as "vessel"—i.e., something capable of holding things.

What I translated as "immeasurably capable" is actually "hard to measure." Same difference, I reckon.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 47

 信使可複

xìn shǐ kě fù

"make pledges that can be kept"

 

信 has a number of meanings, most of them involving trust, faithfulness, etc. You can see it in the character's two components: a man 人 (which often takes the form 亻 when used as a component) standing by his word 言. That assessment, which is bit too gimmicky for me most of the time, at least works here without being too much of a stretch.

In modern Mandarin, 信 most commonly means "letter," as in those things few people write to one another anymore. I, however, am a letter-writer, so if you're interested in handwritten correspondence, send me an email.

複 here means "to repeat," which makes sense but sounds weird in English in this context.

微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 46

靡恃己長

mí shì jǐ cháng 

"do not rely on one's own merits"

Just as one shouldn't talk too much shit about others, one shouldn't think too much of oneself, no matter how skilled or talented one might be. 

The characters used for "shortcomings" (短) and "merits"(長) mean, among other things, "short" and "long," respectively. When used together in modern Chinese, 長短 can mean "length," as well as "right and wrong" or "good and evil." The use of two antonymous characters to express the concept that connects them is pretty common in Chinese.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 45

罔談彼短

wǎng tán bǐ duǎn 

"do not discuss the shortcomings of others"

 

This line directly corresponds to the following one, so I'll write that one up in a minute. I'm relying on my own skills and usual Chinese reading tools at the moment, since I'm still in isolation and my 千字文 materials are in the other room (where my wife could get them for me, but I don't want to bother her since she's got things to do).

While it can be cathartic to talk shit about someone else's failings, and in some cases is a completely necessary step towards resolving problems involving or caused by that person, the Thousand Character Classic wisely warns against it. Focusing on another's shortcomings allows you to ignore your own, and to deflect any blame that might rightfully fall on you. Besides, it's just shitty and unconstructive to snipe at people all the time. 

微臣
史大偉

The Plague, At Last

Early on in the pandemic, I told myself that it was only a matter of time until I got COVID-19: not if, but when. And behold! The time has come.

I woke up feeling sore and congested in the middle of the night a couple days ago, and on a hunch took a COVID test, which came back resoundingly positive. I have since spent my time quarantined in our guest bedroom, and will be here for several more days. Physically, I think the worst is over, and it hasn't been all that bad in the first place, thanks to vaccinations and what I hope is a fairly robust immune system. Any discomfort at this point is due mostly to spending far more time sitting or lying down than I'm used to, and to congestion, though I still have little energy or motivation. (I'm surrounded by books and want to read none of them.)

I quite smoking about three months into the pandemic. My habit had dwindled down to a few cigarettes a day by then, and most of those were purely routine nicotine addiction maintenance, so along with the concerns caused by COVID's penchant for pulmonary damage, it wasn't too hard to stop completely. It's now been two years and two days since I had a cigarette or used tobacco in any form, and I'm grateful that I didn't get COVID any sooner. I've got over 20 years of lung damage to cope with, and I sure as shit don't need that compounded.

I'm not proud to admit that I've been lax these last few months about COVID protocols, primarily mask-wearing, so I bear a good deal of responsibility for my current state. Things seemed to be getting better—or rather, not getting any worse, at least among the vaccinated population—and restrictions were lifted at work and elsewhere, so I got complacent. I'm less concerned about how this has affected me than I am about how my behavior has impacted others, so from now on I'll be more cautious.

All right, time to get some rest. I had to stop writing in order to repair the bed frame, which collapsed under me, and I did not have the energy for manhandling mattresses and box springs in a tight space, not to mention hammering nails. I am, as seems to be the case every five minutes since I got sick, exhausted.

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 44

得能莫忘

dé néng mò wàng

"If you gain an ability, do not ignore it"

Paar, in my edition of the 千字文, parenthetically notes that the ability (or as he puts it, "capacity") is "for virtue": should you develop the capacity for virtue, don't neglect it. There's nothing in the line that immediately points to "virtue" as an underlying object of discussion, other than that the character most frequently associated with virtue, 德, is pronounced the same way and in the same tone. Not that this would've necessarily been the case when the Thousand Character Classic was assembled, since spoken Chinese has, like all languages, changed a great deal over time; nevertheless, you could replace 得 with 德 in this line and it'd still make sense.

Whether or not one's newly-acquired ability or capacity is for virtue or something else entirely, this is another good bit of practical wisdom that takes little effort—literally—to ignore. How many of us have been told we have a real knack for something, especially something we worked hard to get good at, only to turn our attention elsewhere and let our skills atrophy? 

If you couldn't tell already, I'm pretty much always up for talking shit about Confucian moralizing, and moralizing in general, but I guess I've reached the point in life when watching someone piss away talent, or the stronger points of their character, for no good reason bothers me more than it would have in the past. I still don't think that anyone should be pressured into doing something they don't want to do—just because you're good at, say, painting doesn't mean you're obligated to paint—but it can be a bummer to see potential get squandered, even if it's that person's right to squander it.

微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 43

知過必改

zhī guò bì gǎi

"If one knows one's errors, one must correct them"

You don't generally see 過 used as "fault" or "error" or "shortcoming" in modern Chinese, where it's typically a marker of a past event, or used in phrases like 過生日, "to celebrate a birthday."

This line offers unquestionably solid advice, and like a lot of good advice, it's easily ignored. All of us are aware of our shortcomings, but it's a lot easier to live with them than to deal with them. 

It's not only a personal admonition; it can be applied to institutions as well. I can imagine civil servants in imperial China referencing this line to comment upon the inefficiencies of a particular department, for example, or chiding subordinates with it (which I guess turns it back into a personal admonition).

You don't even have to go back in history to apply it on a bigger scale. America is fully aware of its errors, yet makes no effort to correct them. It's apparently easier to let kids get murdered than to stop teenagers from buying firearms, or to make cops do something other than stand around and demand respect from civilians. What happened in Uvalde the other day is proof of that. 

微臣
史大偉

Warhorse/Tleilax

My laptop, which I've had for less than a year and a half, pulled some weird shit on me today: the enter, spacebar, and backspace keys all suddenly stopped working. Since I have a numerical keypad, the enter and backspace keys can be compensated for, but there's no making up for a missing spacebar. Sure, there's the online keyboard that Ubuntu provides, but that shit sucks.

Enter Tleilax, my old Thinkpad T410. This tireless motherfucker was my daily driver for almost a whole decade of personal computing. I got it in 2011: it was the first computer I'd ever bought, after 30 years of family computers and hand-me-downs. Over the course of 9.5 years, I wrote a novel on it, translated a bunch of shit, accumulated a ton of good music (and deleted at least as much, alas), learned how to use Ubuntu (albeit at a purely luser level), plastered the case in archaeologically valuable layers of stickers, learned the value of mechanical keys (still not sure these are old-school mechanical, but compared to the chiclet trash on modern Thinkpads, it might as well be an IBM keyboard from 1990), and generally had a blast. Its busted corners are held together with gaffer tape. Several fingertips' worth of dead skin cells are encrusted on the keys. Memory chips are still recovering from relentless sessions of Hotline Miami. There are probably interesting textfile fragments and other things loitering in the file system.

Tleilax continues to be a warhorse. It doesn't run for shit on battery power, it can't handle websites made after 2015, it lags even on terminal applications, and it weighs a comparative ton, but goddamn, am I glad to have it around. Keep your old hardware, folks: not only will it save your ass when your ass needs saving, you might be doing a solid for a future generation, too. And odds are the speakers will be a lot better than your current machine. That's the case with this Thinkpad for sure.

Hail Tleilax. Hail old computers. Hail continuity with the past without sacrificing the future. Hail reuse.


Tleilax Resurrection: The Soundtrack (all taken from the Tleilax hard drive)

Mc Lars/YTCracker - The Digital Gangster LP
Perturbator - Sexualizer EP
NY Vice - Smooth Steering
Redbait - Cages
Dieter Geisler + Randy Reynolds - Ultraness
Kitty - D.A.I.S.Y. rage
Bretwaldas of Heathen Doom - Bones In the Ground
Devin Viber - Glitchhikers OST
Crom - Hot Sumerian Nights
Bloodstar - Chorus
Jessie Frye - Kiss Me In the Rain
Pet UFO - My Name is Esther Cohen
Wheels Within Wheels - Wheels Within Wheels/Merkaba split

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 42

 男效才良

nán xiào cái liáng

"men, imitate the talented and good"


Apologies for my recent lack of writing. Time's been moving strangely, and it feels as if I've got a thousand things on my plate, none of which are getting done. What's even weirder is that when I stop to think about what those things might be, I can't identify a single one. 

Anyway, not a lot to say about this line, other than how it compares against the one before it. Women are supposed to be chaste and virtuous, which is achieved less by what they do than what they don't, whereas men are urged to actively emulate their society's role models. The passive/active dichotomy here could be seen as a reflective of 陰陽 yin and yang, but I don't think that's really the case. This is just women being told to behave one way and men another, and the women get the short end of the stick. Sounds pretty fuckin' familiar, doesn't it?

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 41

女慕貞潔

nǚ mù zhēn jié

"women, cherish your chastity and probity"

Another way of translating this is "women should cherish their chastity and probity," but that doesn't change the fact that here we have another edict of control. Throughout Chinese history, most women (or girls, since the Thousand Character Classic was presumably most often read by children) were not in a position to read this line, so it's primarily meant for boys. (Gotta teach 'em early who stands where in society.) When read alongside the next line, the sexism of this one is even more appalling.

貞潔 these days usually just means "chastity," but I opted for a longer description, because the "chastity and probity" referred to here were often expected of widows, to the degree that the virtuous widow became a cult figure of sorts in later dynasties. I'd like to know how much of this was just an elite thing, or whether it was widespread throughout society.

微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 40

豈敢毀傷

qǐ gǎn huǐ shāng

"How could one dare to harm it?"

"How dare you do as you see fit with your body? Your parents gave you that flesh! You have to look after it, or you'll be a disgrace to your family." - Confucian strawman, c. 500 CE

My days of heedless self-destruction are pretty much over, and I've come to appreciate the value of taking care of oneself ("take refuge in clean living," as Grails might say, though my living ain't exactly fully clean), but I still think folks have a right to bodily autonomy. This autonomy can manifest in some incredibly selfish or misguided ways that I don't agree with at all—anti-vaxxer bullshit, for example—but when the alternative is letting tradition, gerontocracy, and hollow moralizing dictate terms, I gotta side with allowing people do what they want with their future corpses. Of course, it's not that simple: human beings, while capable of rational behavior that benefits self and other, are not actually all that rational, and make decisions about themselves based on all kinds of faulty premises. Those decisions, regardless of the logic behind them, impact others, and expressions of autonomy (e.g., the aforementioned anti-vax nonsense) wind up fucking over a lot of people.

I'd be more amenable to Confucian arguments about self-care if they weren't oriented towards maintaining a conservative, patriarchal social order. I'm about to start delving into other Chinese philosophical schools, so I hope to encounter something that provides an ethical framework as devoid of supernatural elements as Confucianism, but without the tired-ass hierarchy.

This line is the one I meant when, in the post on line 37, I said the 孝經 Classic of Filial Piety would turn up again.

豈 is a great character that marks a statement as not only rhetorical, but implies that it couldn't be otherwise at all. Whenever I see the character, I can't help but see two distinct elements, 山 and 豆: a mountain atop a bean, or maybe a hill of beans, neither of which is a meaningful reading at all. And that, 看倌, is why I am not a linguist or paleographer, but just some dude who's into classical Chinese.

微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 39

恭惟鞠養

gōng wei jū yǎng

"respect and be considerate of what was raised and nurtured"

In the last post I remarked on reading the Thousand Character Classic as poetry, not because it's a poem per se, but because it's not written in standard prose. It's quite condensed, and pretty much devoid of particles and other grammatical markers that might otherwise help the reader figure out what it's getting at. In a way, it's less of a hassle (I wouldn't say easier, that's for sure), since you don't need to parse lines the same way. Of course, since this is a text designed to teach people how to read 1,000 discrete characters, it wouldn't make sense to include a bunch of duplicate characters—there may be a narrative to parts of the 千字文, but it's not what matters.

This line continues the theme of taking care of oneself out of filial piety: your parents raised you and took care of you, so the right thing to do is to treat your body as a precious gift. Not the worst idea in principle, but it can certainly serve to reinforce the kind of unyielding obedience that I find unappealing.


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 38

四大五常

sì dà wǔ cháng

"four greats and five constants"


Chinese cosmology typically holds that there are five elements: 水，土，金，木，火 water, earth, metal, wood, and fire. Calling them "elements" is misleading, though, as they're thought of more as processes or phases, not building blocks of the physical universe. The 四大 Four Greats referred to in this line of the Thousand Character Classic are the four elements we typically think of when we hear the term: water, earth, fire, and air. The presence of this concept in China is most likely due the influence of Buddhism.

The 五常 Five Constants can refer to the primary five Confucian virtues: 仁，義，禮，智，信 benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and sincerity, but also the Five Phases (五行) mentioned above. This double reading is undoubtedly intentional, but the line as a whole makes me wonder why there's a reference to an imported cosmological notion in the first place.

Looking back to the previous line, we can read it in conjunction with this one: "Presumably, this body and hair [exists] among the Four Great Elements and Five Constant Virtues [or Five Phases]." Paar pulls that "exists" seemingly out of thin air, but it makes the lines work together. If you were to look at the lines as part of a poem, you could probably drop the connecting phrase in English, but it's hard to argue that it doesn't make it easier to read.


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 37

蓋此身髮

gài cǐ shēn fà

"Presumably, this body and hair"

This one is cryptic, but thankfully, Francis Paar (the editor of the edition of the 千字文 that I'm consulting) notes that this is a reference to a line from the 孝經 Classic of Filial Piety: 身體髪膚受之父母不敢毀傷 "Body, hair, and skin were received from our father and mother, and we dare not destroy or harm them." This is, I assume, one reason that long hair was prevalent in China for centuries, a style I approve of since I'm a longhair myself, even if the Confucian rationale leaves me cold. This passage from the 孝經 shows up again a few lines later.

蓋 is a strange particle that Kroll says "on the one hand indicates a measure of uncertainty and on the other expresses a measure of confidence in the statement," which is why I followed his lead and used "presumably" in my translation.

The following few lines all work together to form a longer statement, so this one isn't just weird and isolated.


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 36

 賴及萬方

lài jí wàn fāng

"Benefits reached all regions"

Another pretty obvious one here: the rulers of old have quite a reach. 萬 means "ten thousand" and is often used to signify a large number of things, hence "all" here.

My copy of the 千字文 says that 賴 is used as an equivalent to 利, which can mean "advantage" or "profit," but Kroll's dictionary has a similar meaning attached to 賴 and doesn't mark it as a substitute character.

The next line gets a little more interesting and ties into what follows it, and both will require more effort than this entry, so I'll write those up soon and post them.


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 35

化被草木 

huā bèi cǎo mù

"the transformations extended to grasses and trees"

What transformations? Who or what wrought them?

Turns out the narrative regarding those old sage-kings that started a while back has simply kept going after all, and there wasn't just a shift in focus. Those legendary rulers were apparently so good at what they did (or didn't do, as the case may be, since 無為 seems to be their thing) that not just humans but grasses and trees, singing birds and horses in the fields, were all brought around to their way of thinking. Remarkable indeed!

被 is a marker of the passive voice in modern Chinese, and can be used the same in classical Chinese under certain circumstances, but here it's used as "reach" or "extend to."

草木 "Grasses and trees" being subject to the influence of kings reminded me of the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of 本覺, or "original enlightenment," which holds that not only sentient beings, but all things, including inanimate objects like grasses and trees (which aren't inanimate at all, but whatever) inherently possess and express Buddha-nature. And speaking of Buddhism, when I was looking up various uses of 化, I ran across a reference to 化胡, the legend that Laozi, the mythical founder of Daoism, went to India to convert "barbarians" to Daoism, and either converted the Buddha or became the Buddha.  Pretty wild, man, not least because it seems pretty non-Daoist to proselytize.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 34

白駒食場

bái jū shí cháng

"the white colt grazing in the field"

There's no reason for me not to post several of these Thousand Character Classic notes a week, at least when they're this basic. The only thing I have to say about this line is that I originally translated it as "the white colt eating in the field" since 食 means "to eat." But my copy of the 千字文 uses "graze," which makes sense, since that's what horses do. I don't think I've ever seen one just eat a bunch of hay and call it quits until it's hungry again.

Anyway, I'm gonna write up the next line right now.


微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 33

 鳴鳳在竹

míng fèng zài zhú

"the singing feng bird in the bamboo"

 
I've said before that the mythical 鳳 feng bird is not a phoenix, even though that's how it's usually translated. Its appearance here marks what looks like another shift in focus among the verses of the 千字文; we'll soon find out what this particular series of lines has to say.

Not a whole lot to say about this one, y'all, but while looking into the not-phoenix feng I ran across another 封 feng that is far weirder. This feng, AKA 視肉 shirou or "looks like meat," is a mythological creature whose flesh regrows as fast as one can eat it. (I hope for its own sake that it's not sentient.) It makes an appearance in the 山海經 Classic of Mountains and Seas, an old Chinese gazetteer-cum-bestiary that would probably make for some cool D&D material.


微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 32

率賓歸王

shuài bīn guī wáng

"Leaders and followers alike united under the king"

 

 率 is often pronounced lü, and means "rate" or "frequency," so the usage here threw me off. I know 賓 mainly from 賓賓, a delicious brand of rice cracker that one of my coworkers often brings in to share. I typically think of it as meaning "guest," but it also means "to serve/obey," hence its use here as "follower." Classical Chinese, as I've mentioned before, often allows any class of word be used as another class, e.g., a verb here being used as a noun—"one who obeys." 

"Leaders and followers," by the way, could just as easily be swapped for "rulers and ruled," as is the case in my copy of the 千字文.

I want to mention that I recently joined an online classical Chinese course offered by Outlier Linguistics. I'm lucky enough to already own the textbook, which is apparently pretty hard to obtain at the moment, and so far I'm really digging the class. John Renfroe, the teacher, is easygoing, deeply knowledgeable, and interacts well with students. Odds are if you're reading this blog, you've got some interest in classical Chinese, so I highly recommend signing up for the next Outlier course once this one finishes in a few months.

微臣
史大偉

 

Ukraine and beyond

Like a lot of folks, I wasn't sure that Russia would actually invade Ukraine, and if they did, I figured they'd occupy the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics and call it a day. I, and all those other people, were terribly wrong. As I write this, Russia is slowly, but maybe not so surely, pounding Ukrainian cities into dust, presumably hoping to achieve its grotesque, nationalist goal of conquest before its supply lines run dry and/or its economy collapses. 

I'm no expert on anything, especially Russia, Ukraine, or Eastern Europe in general, so I'm not going to opine at length about the origins of this war. I will say that I've been incredibly disappointed by the responses offered by many American leftists, including the DSA International Committee, which is clearly caught up in some lazy-ass thinking about imperialism. I'm not even that pleased with the National Writers Union statement, but at least that emphasized that arms dealers are the real winners of this war, no matter the outcome. There are plenty of thoughtful responses from the left as well, many of them coming from Eastern Europe, so it's not shamefully rigid thinking across the board, but I bring the issue up because it's embarrassing to see people more concerned about, say, abolishing NATO than starting from a point of self-determination (and self-defense) and acknowledging agency for places like Ukraine. I don't have to be an expert on foreign affairs or Eastern Europe to understand that people and nations (whatever you may think of nation-states as a concept, or particular states) aren't pawns for imperial powers, to be pushed around a sphere of influence-shaped chessboard. They deserve to be engaged with on their own terms, and determine their own futures.

I think this is important because this war—beyond the awful suffering it's inflicting on so many—seems qualitatively different than a lot of the conflicts we've seen in the past decade or so. Not only because it threatens a wider war in Europe, and presents the first serious threat of nuclear war since I was a kid, but because a sclerotic, tottering imperial power has decided to take one last shot at glory and appears to have overplayed its hand. Sure, Russia is likely to prevail in one sense or another, but it'll come at a punishing cost. It already appears that Russia is lurching towards becoming a Chinese client state, and has clamped down hard on any internal dissent. Whether that state of affairs holds, or something happens and the Russian state is toppled (to be replaced by who knows what), there's a palpable sense that the old global order is being rearranged in ways nobody can really foresee. Russia, the United States, The European Union, China— all of these entities will keep treating their internal minorities and less powerful neighboring (and not-so-neighboring) states horribly while ignoring the climate catastrophe and pursuing untenable (supra)national agendas. The multipolar world some think is coming into being won't be much of an improvement on US hegemony, or the older bipolar world of the Cold War. And there's no coherent, flexible approach to any of this coming from the left, which means the right-wingers get to keep controlling the narrative and driving us off a cliff. Everyone—not just the left—is stuck in old modes of thinking, yours truly included, and it seems like we'll be theorizing the literal death throes of the human world using hollow language up until the very end.

But you know what? I could be utterly wrong. Hell, I probably am. Maybe this is one of those events that turns out to be a link in a long, subtle chain that leads to fundamental changes in how the world works. I'm not holding my breath for an optimistic outcome, but I'm also not ruling one out, at least in the long term. There's always the possibility of renewal and revival, because the only constant is change.

Fuck, though. It's absolutely heartbreaking to think that whatever shape the future takes, it's being forged right now in a crucible fueled by human corpses. I don't even want to think about what it'll mean if nuclear weapons are used. Humanity has never come to terms with what it unleashed at Trinity, and if nukes are used again, we may never get the chance.

Maybe I'll have more coherent thoughts soon. Maybe I'll just go back to annotating the Thousand Character Classic. Either way, I'm going to help the people of Ukraine as best I can, and try to stay as even-keeled as possible as I navigate this blood-soaked, mutant world of ours. 生死大事, indeed.

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 31

 遐迩一體

 xiá ěr yī tǐ

"those near and far treated as a whole"

This one's pretty straightforward. 體 can mean body, as in modern Chinese 身體, or per Kroll, also limb or element, or substance or essential being. Thus "one body," or "a whole." I remain dubious about imperial claims to such uniformity of treatment, but better that some effort is made towards treating all subjects of the empire as equals rather than relegating conquered peoples to second-class status, or worse.

微臣
史大偉

Links 2.18.2022: Setenta e Quatro, Texas journalism, Lina Hidalgo, Native American black metal

Olá, amigos. Time for another round of links to good shit.

Para quem lê português, o jornalismo do novo fonte Setenta e Quatro merece atenção. 

Anyone interested in getting a better look at the deeply weird, quite lovely, and insanely fucked-up state I call home should read the Texas Observer, the Texas Tribune, and the Texas Signal. 

Speaking of Texas, Lina Hidalgo has been overseeing Harris County since 2018, and has been a model of professional competence and steely resolve the whole time. For some fucking reason (cough, corruption and cronyism, cough), she has a bunch of Democratic challengers in this year's primary, which is nuts. You'd think that getting behind a young, effective immigrant woman would be a no-brainer, but apparently local Democrats would rather throw their lot in with cop unions and the unspoken preferences of officials who profit from county contracts. Lina Hidalgo is the only Harris County Commissioner who doesn't take money from contractors. That alone would be a reason to vote for her if she hadn't, you know, gotten us through the pandemic and 2021 freeze better than most officials in similar positions. (And if you're voting for Lina Hidalgo, make sure to vote for Molly Cook while you're at it.)

My brother's former bandmate recently turned me on to Black Braid, a one-man Native American black metal outfit from the Adirondacks. Naturally, this led to further research into that particular field, and the results are promising. Mutilated Tyrant and Parábola are from the Navajo Nation, while Lionoka represents the Yaqui people (and, according to the Metal Archives, runs Grey Matter Productions). Each band has its own sound, ranging from fairly orthodox black metal to longer, more ritual-tinged work, and I'm glad to see the continued growth of black metal far beyond its mostly Scandinavian roots. 

Catch y'all later.

DAS

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 30

臣伏戎羌

chén fú róng qiāng

"The western tribes were subjugated"

 

I made that remark about wars of pacification in my last post without reading this line, believe it or not. Here we have a reference to the seemingly endless conflict between the Han and, well, everyone north and west of them. 戎 Rong is a catch-all term for non-Han "barbarians" to the west, and 羌 Qiang, according to Kroll's dictionary, is an "ancient name for proto-Tibetan peoples who migrated south from the Kokonor region."

You might recognize 臣 from my sign-off in Chinese: 微臣, "your humble servant."

微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 29

 愛育黎首

ài yù lí shǒu

"they loved and nurtured the black-haired ones"

 

The "black-haired ones" are obviously the Chinese people, but who exactly the "Chinese people" are is a much larger question. Usually, what's thought of as "Chinese" is the 漢 Han ethnic group, China's largest at over 90% of the population of the People's Republic; however, there are 55 other ethnic groups in China, and even among the Han, there are myriad languages (or 方言 'topolects', as they're sometimes known, since they're not exactly dialects) associated with different Han sub-groups around the country, groups that could be considered ethnic groups in their own right.

That level of complexity aside (and it could be made even more complex by considering north/south divisions, among other things), I mention this because in modern Chinese 黎 can refer to the Hlai people of Hainan island, who constitute a distinct ethnic group; it can also mean (as it does in classical Chinese) "multitude" or "numerous," which serves more or less the same purpose as "black-haired" does here.

Ultimately, whether 黎首 deals specifically with the Han, or with all of the ethnic groups that have been folded into China through a couple thousand years of imperial expansion and assimilation, what we're supposed to take away from this line is that they were all looked after by their slack-sleeved, beneficent rulers. Never mind that that almost undoubtedly involved some wars of pacification along the way.


微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 28

垂拱平章

chuí gǒng píng zhāng

"with hanging sleeves and clasped hands, everything in order"

Another compressed image, but once I learned what was 垂-ing, or hanging, it made sense. I used "sleeves" here, but anything related to clothing would work, since the image is that of rulers unperturbed enough that they need only sit back with their hands folded over their chest and things will run smoothly. This picture of effortlessly benevolent rulers—all of whom existed in the glorious past, of course—is a constant feature in Chinese history. The development of the civil service exams and the bureaucracy indicates to me that Chinese thinking on governance and leadership wasn't entirely mired in this kind of nostalgia, even as nods to the near-perfect rulers of the past remained a necessary gesture up until the end of the imperial system. It's not much different than, say, American fetishization of the Founding Fathers; cultures and the states that emerge from them love having a golden age to pine for, since it allows existing problems (or "problems") to be ignored, or the fault of modern degeneracy, or some other group. I find this sort of conservatism ridiculously idealistic at best and deeply pernicious at worst.

平章 is an interesting phrase. Kroll mentions that, when 平 is pronounced pian instead of ping, 平章 is a phrase that means to "differentiate and mark out the merits of officials, as sage-king Yao 堯 is reputed to have done," and that 平章事 (with 平 pronounced ping again) was a title used by a certain kind of official in the 尚書省 Bureau of State Affairs during the Tang dynasty.

Interviewed!

It's not the first time I've talked to interviewers, journalists, or panels, but it's the first time I've done so and been sent a direct link to the footage by the interviewer. Who, not so incidentally, is the one and only Frederick Noronha, tireless journalist, chronicler of literally all things Goan, and head of Goa 1556, the publisher that put out my translations of O Signo da Ira, Leonor Figueiredo's bio of Sita Valles, and the collected Portuguese poems of Laxmanrao Sardessai.

The video quality's kinda weird—it was fine during the interview—but you can still hear me talk about translation, what remains of the Goan literary corpus, and other stuff. Enjoy!

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 27

坐朝問道

zuò cháo wèn dào

"Sitting in court, asking about the Way" 

Asking others, presumably one's ministers and advisors, about how to govern seems like a reasonably imperial or kingly thing to do. Better than taking only one's own counsel, at least.

道, "the Way," is the same character used for 道教 Daoism, where its meanings are no less numerous than they are in other aspects of Chinese culture. Here, the Way in question is the way of governance, which our two rulers from the previous line must have grasped fairly firmly, if their reputation is any proof. I'd be curious to know who their ministers were, since they're the ones who provided the rulers with answers. Maybe they weren't ministers at all; maybe they were wandering sages, or the rulers' friends, wives, concubines. Whoever they were, their advice left its mark.

We'll see what that advice was, or at least how it was put to use, in the next line.

微臣
史大偉

Links 1.25.2022 — Molly Cook, Weird Studies, Peace Labor May, Tokozenji, SHWEP

Hey, folks. I thought I'd post some links to people and things that have been occupying my mindspace as of late.

In no particular order:

Tokozenji is a Rinzai Zen temple in Yokohama, Japan, that offers zazen via Zoom twice a month, with instructions and brief dharma talks in Japanese and English. I've joined both January meetings, and it's a very worthwhile experience. 

Peace Labor May is a Marxist vlogger and writer from Kazakhstan whose work I discovered last month. I like her open, honest approach to things a lot. She's one of the few voices I've heard directly from Kazakhstan in the wake of the unrest there earlier this month.

I met Molly Cook at the end of December, not long after she'd filed to run in the Democratic primary against John "prisoners don't deserve air conditioning" Whitmire for Texas Senate district 15. Whitmire, who wants to be mayor of Houston, figures he'll run that campaign while also serving as state senator for the 40th year in a row. To which I say: fuck you, man, way to disregard your constituents. Molly, on the other hand, is an ER nurse, DSA member, and tireless community organizer. Read an interview with her here in the Texas Signal.

Weird Studies is a podcast about, well, weirdness. Wide-ranging, entertaining, deeply knowledgeable, and possessed of a spirit of inquiry well-suited to the many varieties of human experience, it's one of my favorite things to listen to when I'm driving, which thankfully is not that often.

The Secret History of Western Esotericism is another podcast, one I started listening to just today (or was it yesterday?). It looks to be devilishly detailed in its analysis of the history of western traditions of ritual magic, theosophy, gnosticism, occultism, alchemy, and the like over the course of roughly two millennia. Seriously, check out the episode list and tell me that's not dense as hell.

If that's not enough to keep you busy, I'll post another thrilling installment of the Thousand Character Classic project tomorrow.

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 26

 周發商湯

 zhōu fā shāng tāng

"Fa of Zhou and Tang of Shang"


This is not a line I would have immediately figured out on my own, because I didn't recognize any of the names. 周發, "Fa of Zhou", is 周武王, King Wu of Zhou, founder of the Zhou dynasty (which I have heard of!) sometime around 1046 BCE. 商湯, "Tang of Shang," is 成湯 Cheng Tang, founder of the Shang dynasty, established around 1600 BCE. The Shang dynasty was overthrown by what would become the Zhou dynasty.

Based on the previous line, these two rulers did right by their people. In the next couple of lines, we'll find out how they accomplished this. 

If you wanted to read this line for amusement alone, you could interpret 周發 as "sending in circles" and 商湯 as "business soup." Combined, these images make me think of a protracted business dinner, with dishes constantly revolving on a lazy Susan between guests.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 25

弔民伐罪

 diào mín fá zuì

"condole with the people and punish the guilty"

 

Here we have a line that's passed into regular usage as one of the many four-character set phrases known as 成語 chengyu. My pop-up online dictionary (all hail Perapera, even if it's no longer being updated) translates it as "to console the people and punish the tyrant." I don't know how 罪 ended up meaning "tyrant" here, but it's a pretty good phrase.

"Condole" is an English word you don't hear much. Sure, there's "condolences," but I don't think I've ever heard "condole" on its own. It means to lament or express sorrow in sympathy with someone, which to me comes across differently than "console" in the translation above. (Weirdly enough, the translation of 弔 alone in that same dictionary is "to condole with.")

弔 also represents a string of 100 copper coins, the kind with a hole in the middle. I usually avoid leaning too heavily on the pictographic aspect of Chinese characters, but here you can kinda see it—either the curved stroke as a string winding around and through the vertical stroke of a coin seen edgewise, or the vertical stroke is the string passing through a series of coins, also seen edgewise.

Who's condoling with the people and punishing the guilty? We're about to find out.


微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 24

有虞陶唐

yǒu yú táo táng

"You Yu and Tao Tang"

 

有虞 ("the holder of Yu") is the clan or lineage name of 帝舜 Emperor Shun, who lived over four thousand years ago and was a descendant of the Yellow Emperor. Shun was the successor of 堯 Yao, also known by his clan name of 陶唐 Tao Tang. Both of them are included in the 三皇五帝 Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors I mentioned a few posts back—basically, they're among the mythological founders of the Chinese state.

Yao abdicated his throne to Shun after ruling for more than 70 years, which makes you wonder what took him so long. Apparently, it's because his sons were useless, and didn't deserve to rule. Yao and Shun were apparently quite popular with Confucians, who found their behavior, particularly their stepping aside in favor of better men, exemplary. While 70 years on the throne seems absurdly long, when you realize there are American politicians who've been serving for over 50 years, it's not quite as far-fetched.

Yao also is the legendary inventor of the game 圍棋 weiqi, better known as Go. That's pretty cool.

More emperors and their deeds tomorrow, or later today, depending on how busy I am. 

 

微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 23

 推位讓國

 tuī wèi ràng guó

 "abdicate the throne and give up the country"

 

Once again there's an unspoken grammatical element, namely an indication of who's abdicating, which means this can be read as "those who abdicate the throne and give up the country." My copy of the 千字文 has this in the past tense, which is another of those things you have to figure out from context, since there are no particles here indicating time. So who was it that abdicated and gave up the country? We'll find out in the next line. Prepare for more references to people by names by which they're not best known! 

推 is most commonly seen these days on the doors of restaurants and other businesses in China, along with its opposite, 拉. They mean "push" and "pull," respectively. 位 here means "seat" or "position of influence," hence "throne," but it's also a polite way for counting people. Instead of 兩個人, two people, you can say 兩位人.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 22

乃服衣裳

nǎi fú yī shang

"and also clothes and garments"

So we've got writing and clothing coming into being at roughly the same time. I don't think that tracks historically, but whatever.

This line struck me as funny because three of the four characters mean "clothes," both by themselves and in conjunction with other characters. 衣服 is what's used in modern Chinese; 衣 on its own can mean "upper garment" (per Kroll's dictionary) as well as "to wear" or "to put on." 裳, when pronounced "chang," means "lower garment" or "skirt." 衣裳 means—you guessed it—"clothes," since you now have upper and lower garments.

I don't think the phrase that's run between lines 19-22 actually requires a post of its own, since I explained the grammatical framing earlier, but just so it's all in one place, here you go:

龍師火帝 鳥官人皇 始制文字 乃服衣裳

"In the time of the dragon masters and fire emperor, the bird officials and the sovereign of men, Chinese characters began to be made, and clothes began to be worn."

You'll note that I translated line 22 differently than I did before. I think it sounds better this way when considered as part of a phrase.

More tomorrow, folks!

微臣
史大偉

 

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 21

 始制文字

 shǐ zhì wén zì

 "Chinese characters began to be made"

 

Pretty straightforward, I'd say, especially as part of the phrase begun a couple lines ago. "In the time of the dragon masters, the fire emperor, the bird officials, and the sovereign of men, Chinese characters began to be made". I have nothing interesting to add, so I'll go ahead and write up the next line, which by  my reading wraps up this part.

微臣
史大偉

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 20

 鳥官人皇

niǎo* guān rén huáng 

"Bird officials and the sovereign of man"

Dragon masters, fire emperors, bird officials, and the sovereign of mankind—so many monikers and titles to learn. 

According to my edition of the 千字文, 少昊 Shao Hao, a legendary emperor, "designated his officials with the names of birds." The "sovereign of man" is 黃帝 Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor; he is the father of 少昊 Shao Hao. Huangdi is referred to here as the "sovereign of man" because each of the first three legendary emperors of China was associated with one of the 三才** Three Powers, i.e., 天 heaven, 地 earth, and 人 man. (Fu Xi and Shen Nong, discussed in the last post, are the emperors of heaven and earth, respectively.)

The Yellow Emperor is a major figure in Chinese history and mythology: the legendary ancestor of numerous emperors, inventor of Chinese medicine, symbolic center of the universe. I'd never heard of Shao Hao until I started reading about lines 19-20 of the Thousand Character Classic, but I've never been well-versed in Chinese mythology, or the part of Chinese history so shrouded in the mists of time it might as well be mythology. 

In the last post I mentioned a grammatical element connecting this line and the previous one. I'm still bad at catching unwritten contexts in classical Chinese, so I'm glad that my copy of the book situates line 19 temporally: "In the times of the dragon masters". It's not readily apparent that this should be read as starting with a "when" statement, but it makes perfect grammatical sense. (I also need to get better at reading ahead a bit to help establish context.) So,

龍師火帝  鳥官人皇

can be read "In the time of the dragon masters, the fire emperor, the bird officials, and the sovereign of men...", which in turn sets up the following lines.

Only five more lines and I'll be 10% finished! See you soon, dudes.

微臣

史大偉

*鳥 in modern Chinese is also pronounced "diao," and used as an alternate character for 屌, which  is also pronounced "diao" and means "penis" or, in Cantonese, "to fuck." Reading this line as "dick officials" seems like a not-so-subtle jab at the nature of bureaucracy, but amusing as that is, it seems unlikely.

**There's a Chinese martial arts form called 三才劍, "three powers sword." You can see a wonderfully grainy performance of it here.

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 19

 龍師火帝

lóng shī huǒ dì 

"Dragon Master and Fire Emperor"

We've seen so far that each four-character line often forms a couplet with another, and together they comment on the world in some way. The last couplet (lines 17-18) told us a little something about the natural world, and the one before that about human preferences with regards to food; with this one, we're entering mythological-historical territory again.

Here begins a longer description of the earliest days of mankind, as depicted through the Chinese lens. It runs several lines, so I'm questioning the value of breaking it (and similar future passages) into single lines. On the other hand, I'm not in a rush to get through this, nor am I prohibited from writing up summary posts of particular passages, which is what I think I'll do once I've done line-by-line readings of this section.

龍師, "dragon master," refers to 伏羲 Fu Xi, the legendary creator of the human race in Chinese mythology; according to my copy of the 千字文, he "designated his officials with the names of different colored dragons." 火帝, "fire emperor," refers to 神農 Shen Nong, the agricultural god and inventor of, among other things, acupuncture (but apparently not fire-making; that was 燧人氏 Suirenshi). Why is Shen Nong the fire emperor? Because the "first five emperors of the Legendary Period ... were each associated with one of the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water)."

You can read more in English about both of these figures on Wikipedia or elsewhere; if you want to read about them in Chinese, and in the context of the Thousand Character Classic, check out this blog. That's where I got my start, since my edition of the book is a bit thin on details. The blog, however, associated the Fire Emperor with Suirenshi, so I'm confused about the exact correspondences between one name and another.

While it's not obvious from this line, there's an unwritten grammatical element that connects it to the following lines, as we'll see shortly.

 

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 18

Happy new year, dudes! Chronos has been pretty unkind to the human race these last couple years, and I don't have a lot of hope for that changing anytime soon, alas. Still, I'm trying to cast off the seemingly omnipresent pall of dread, not only because it's exhausting to live under, but lending it more weight than it deserves ignores the incontrovertible fact that life is not a static thing, but an endless cycle of change. Locking into one groove, be it positive or negative, may be comforting in its predictability, but it's no way to really live. 

On to the 千字文.

鱗潛羽翔

lín qián yǔ xiáng

"Those with scales are submerged; those with feathers soar."

Not much to say about this one, either. We've got another typically terse observation of nature in which properties of the things being talked about—fish and birds—stand in for the things themselves: 鱗 is fish scales, and 羽 is feathers. I vacillated between the translation above and just saying "fish" and "birds," opting for the former mainly to present this explanation.

看官再見！See y'all soon.

微臣

史大偉