(no subject)

[pengwern]

 today in not-great-translations of poetry from the shijing: 

手如柔荑，肤如凝脂，领如蝤蛴，齿如瓠犀，螓首蛾眉，巧笑倩兮，美目盼兮。

hands like tender sprouts
skin like solidified lard
neck like roundhead borers
teeth like gourd seeds
cicada temples moth brows
lovely smile dimpling held
beautiful gaze pupils clear 
--国风·卫风·硕人 Guo feng, wei feng, shuo ren [Odes of Wei, - uh, tol/buff lady]

ngl I feel it's probably better to go straight for the scientific names, bc then at least it sounds wacky but in a consistent way (in context, some of those are regularly seen phrases today, it's just 'neck like the crooked larvae of longhorn beetles" that's tripping me up) now that I've checked two real translations, they kept the larvae \o/  

more context: description of the wedding of noblewoman Zhuang Jiang, a princess of Qi who married to Wei, and a poet as well - she has five works in the shijing. also this passage is......one of THE classical....descriptions of beauties, given the pedigree from the book of poetry..........................................

............anyway I'm most upset about the hands like soft baby cogongrass plants. do they mean...snappable? not yet full of chlorophyll?? 

Comments

[vass]

"skin like solidified lard" is a great example of a image where I can definitely see how what that describes is beautiful but the simile would not work at all in the culture I live in. We're supposed to believe that lard is ugly and terrible and should not be admired even as a food ingredient, let alone as a texture. There's something comforting in the reminder that that is not the case in every time and place.

cicada temples moth brows

Whereas this one I lack the context to picture. Moth brows I can hazard a guess at (fluttering? Or velvety soft? Or the colour of a particular moth? Or like antennae?) but cicada temples, I have no idea and am intrigued. Like the temples of cicadas, or sharing some other property of cicadas?

in context, some of those are regularly seen phrases today, it's just 'neck like the crooked larvae of longhorn beetles" that's tripping me up

*does image search for roundheaded borers, seeking example of what a beautiful neck is supposed to look like* ...I guess? If he meant the bones? Looks more like a coccyx than a neck, but I'm no anatomist. Or entomologist.

do they mean...snappable? not yet full of chlorophyll??

I like that "not yet". Allowing for future green thumbs.

[pengwern]

I HAVE ANSWERS TO THESE \o/ (this is a translation in full: https://ctext.org/book-of-poetry/shuo-ren )

肤如凝脂 is the one I've actually seen irl outside of novels! [There's something comforting in the reminder that that is not the case in every time and place.] ;^; and it's so much more reasonable than jade. Skin shouldn't have a mohs hardness of 6-7.

cicada temples: I may have swapped out forehead for a slightly more poetic word - but it's supposed to be a broad, wide brow, like the small but square/regular headed type of cicada.

Moth brows is actually...drumroll...the antennae! (but the others honestly sound hot too. Kujen.) Eyebrows that are 'slender and long. (Wuxia novel disgression: there's a mountain named E Mei which is homonyms with this phrase, and it has a martial arts sect of historical renown. In Jin Yong novels, this became a sect for mostly women, which I suspect may be due to the resemblance.)

necks: sdjkjskdjk that's,. that's fair. (I don't know if they had herons or cormorants in the nation where this poetry is from, which you'd THINK would be a nicer comparison, but I just went down a rabbit hole on determining the exact species of the riverbirds in the first and most famous poem in the Shi Jing. The noise they make is guan guan, the picture on baidu https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%9B%8E%E9%B8%A0 is clearly seagulls of some sort, and the usual translation is an osprey. But it would be a moot point anyway! since these two poems are from different countries and they didn't have texts back then :O)

[Allowing for future green thumbs.] <3333