(no subject)

[pengwern]

gonna mumble here where no-one will judge

1) every so often I think of the ballerinas in harrison bergeron and how they danced utterly shacked....anyway, continuous updates to the jjw x c list of prohibited topics

2) is it just me (someone who last read english poetry from the tenth grade brit lit textbook anthology) or are a greater proportion of poems in chinese (read in scattershot as warranted when people quote them in fic or it becomes a game item, ie every five seconds) kind of.....like moodboards/tumblr aesthetic posts (affectionate)

take this half hour translation of an approximately festive if belated 青玉案·元夕 by  辛弃疾 〔宋代〕 东风夜放花千树，更吹落、星如雨。宝马雕车香满路。凤箫声动，玉壶光转，一夜鱼龙舞。
蛾儿雪柳黄金缕，笑语盈盈暗香去。众里寻他千百度，蓦然回首，那人却在，灯火阑珊处。New Year's Eve by (xin qiji whom I met through in those time travel agency webnovels getting people who tell him 'wow your parents must have really liked (famous poet and warrior of the song dynasty) xin qiji!')

East wind at night lights a thousand trees in bloom, the more falls, like starry rain. Fine steeds and carved carriages in the wide scented streets. Phoenix pipes sounding to and fro, jade vessel turning light, a night of dancing dragons and fish.

Beauties go gaily by, in willowy finery of gold and snow, in hazes of scent. In the crowd she is sought thousands, hundreds of times ---  when suddenly looking back, there that one stands, where the lantern fires dim.

anyway that was terrible but I set a time limit. this is /so/ strongly visual @-@ the bobbing weaving lanterns in the shape of dragons and fishies, the moon with a jade teapot's gleam, hfdsahsdhsdfhhf why I'm so into it QWQ

...my conclusion is, looking at taobao and the embroidered coats, my main emotion remains OH NO 

(handshake meme image of "embroidery that caters to my every desire" "intricate deadly ten-toothed court intrigue" being unified by "unexpected and untapped veins in happily reachable nooks"

Comments

[sovay]

the moon with a jade teapot's gleam

That's a wonderful image.

I am not even on the edges of this community, but I understand why you think of "Harrison Bergeron."

[pengwern]

:< things from so long ago as six, seven years ago....when I was just starting to read, and there had been giant purges already, and now compare what's left today to just 2019 T___T

But \o/ 玉壶光转 is literally 'jade pot light turn(ing)". The jade vessel = the moon. I may have been imprecise in my understanding of the action going on here - the sources online seem to be the identical one, and they decipher it as 'the moon, this jade vessel's light is wheeling across the sky as the night wears on', as opposed to my initial thought of the silvery moonlight being bounced from surface to surface in a moonlit scene (given that the lantern festival, just a few days ago, is going to always be on the full moon). So it's probably not like the gregorian new year's disco drop ball! Maybe.

...I don't actually know what I'm doing though - the existence of courses on translation/my utter lack of them hasn't stopped me from picking up some game lore descriptions and running with them. as I might not be particularly competent, but at least I'm not quite as bad at translating these people who can't proofread ___@ they switched someone's name from transliteration to translation from sentence to sentence within the same story n@

[sovay]

as opposed to my initial thought of the silvery moonlight being bounced from surface to surface in a moonlit scene (given that the lantern festival, just a few days ago, is going to always be on the full moon)

I like your image, too. You should use it for something. The interacting reflections of lanterns and the moon are a beautiful weave of their own.

they switched someone's name from transliteration to translation from sentence to sentence within the same story

You are much better than that!

[vass]

I'm really impressed with that as a translation done in just half an hour.

I can't judge if Chinese poetry is more likely to be heavily visual/aesthetic, but I'd definitely say there's a lot of English poetry that is heavily visual/aesthetic. (Whether any of it was in your tenth grade anthology, of course, I don't know.) (And I might be missing your point.)

Here's the beginning of Keats' 'To Autumn':

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core..."

Or here's the last few lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'The Windhover':

"No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion."

And here's a bit of Robert Frost's 'Death of the Hired Man':

"Part of a moon was falling down the west,
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw it
And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand
Among the harp-like morning-glory strings,
Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,
As if she played unheard some tenderness
That wrought on him beside her in the night."

[pengwern]

/o\ NO believe me the majority of this particular one was easy - the vocabulary in it has direct equivalents, compared to some other poems, and apparently chinese and english both have SVO? so I could replicate the original fairly closely. (One thing is that bc the gendered he/she third person pronouns were introduced only last century, in the second line the 'her' which follows from the 'beauty*' is actually using 他him, which cause some slight confusion before looking it up.)

*蛾儿 which,,, is the character for moth,,,,,,....there's bound to be a reason but I'm too sleepy and will blame it on kujen.

You aren't missing my point at all \o/ I do want to noodle away at whatever struck me about these, even if I don't remember the lit terms (and dreamwidth feels like a better place for making broad statements that I won't have to be as worried about defending successfully as tumblr _@ 'dissecting the poet with inexpert tools' should happen in a non-PVP zone QAQ)

These are all lovely poems - the last is new to me, and I should read more Hopkins at some point! And funny you should mention to autumn -- in that same class, I had an extraordinarily pleasant experience with it one day, when I spent the whole class period leaning against the window, absorbing the golden fall afternoon rays, memorizing and sinking into that poem (...ignoring whatever we were actually doing,,,,)
(test attempt at the rest: 'where are the songs of spring? aye, where are they. (something something,) thou hast thy music too. ...something, and with treble soft, the swallow twitters from the garden croft. and something something the sky. ...)
...right, swallows don't twitter, which is very nice for everyone involved. it is really very similar!

Of course, I have only a very small subset of each group on my mind rn - for english my mind went to Shakespeare sonnets, and I should emphasize my complete lack of knowledge about ...linguistics and stuff......plus all my knowledge of chinese poetry composition comes from meritocracy exam webnovels, bc I think it was possibly always an exam topic (brief pause for horrified shrieking) and so you get advice on how to compose a few acceptable verses, which makes me wonder if there is an established form (writing about scenes/views 写景）that, being taught through the centuries, serves to ....solidify? what I had noticed....constructing an inchoate mood/vibe and making their point through description of a scene alone.

Maybe it's often the lack of any first person, or any individual at all sometimes? Or the poems where you could easily transform it to film (animated or otherwise) because it just lingers on very concrete items/scenery, and and it's the associations with them that's expected to do all the heavy lifting.

...did I have a point. My point is, having leveled up my language skills, I'm just so pleasantly surprised to find that like...these classics actually do spark joy? XDDD the feeling of being successfully recced to (a reccee?) Some classic works are a slog to get through, but here there's new quotes imprinting easily like a knife through the warm butter of my mind --

[sovay]

but I'd definitely say there's a lot of English poetry that is heavily visual/aesthetic.

The entire Imagist movement was basically this, too. H.D.'s "Oread" was both the first poem of hers and the first Imagist poem I ever read.