annette squalls and storms in 2010

This year I'm hoping to read 10 books. It's a stretch, but I think I'll make it. The journey will be arduous and I might even tear my hair out, but in December 2010, I hope to look back on the year that was and say, "I conquered you."

The reason why it's gonna take me so long to read just shy of 2010 pages is because those books are going to be in foreign languages, namely Mandarin (which I am all right at) and Arabic (which I am definitely not). Maybe even some Ancient Greek (which I haven't touched for years) if I feel lucky. And YOU are going to have the exquisite pleasure of following me on my travels, because in order to make sure I understand the content, I'm going to translate many passages and keep them right here on this ol' thread of mine.

I am an amateur. Take my translations with a grain of salt. Maybe even a saltshaker.

Thus far:
"School of Fools," Tawfiq al-Hakim (complete)

Search for those exact terms to find the corresponding posts.

PS - pretend my thread has a different title - this is EXACTLY why I shouldn't create threads when drunk, because then I will HATE the title FOREVER MORE, and it will just HAUNT me EVERY TIME I look at the thread until I just start CAPITALIZING WORDS in FRUSTRATION and it will look CRAZY and WEIRD.

LE LIVRE DES MERVEILLES

(Warning: I don't know any Romance languages.)

MANDARIN

- assorted Classical writings (so this is technically Classical Chinese, not Mandarin)

- about 1/4 of Joyce's Ulysses

Well, we all know that translation inevitably re-interprets. Nowhere has this been made clearer to me than in XXXX's translation of Joyce's epic. I read about four chapters out of twenty, before, now thoroughly addled by this rendition of Dedalus' abstruse musings in surprisingly straightforward Mandarin, my will weakened and I abandoned ship like a bedraggled sailor who has just sighted the fluttering Jolly Roger approaching at top speed. The translators surely love their art, but I'm inclined to think that they may live in an alternative universe, possibly fueled by crack cocaine. Don't let my allergic reaction and the boils on my tongue scares you off! I'm sure XXXX's translation of Ulysses is quite a masterpiece in its own right. I'm just not sure I'm the one to master it.

And here's the cherry to the sundae: what was my rationale in engaging in such a bout of fevered insanity? To further understand and appreciate the darn book!!!! You can take me to the mad-house now. Some nice white walls - blank! no words! - would suit me just fine.

See message #18 for details on why I have removed the translator's names for now.

ARABIC

Thus far I haven't completed a full novel or even short story in Arabic. But I'm about halfway through a short story and in the first pages of a science fiction novella, both to be completed before the end of February. So I have high hopes! Almost everything I read in Arabic this year, including the short story and novella, will be for a class. To be honest, I usually don't see the value in formal education for the modern autodidact (blasphemy considering the $50,000 I'd be shelling out yearly for mine if my family could afford it), but this class? HAS SAVED MY LIFE. I wouldn't be anywhere near as proficient as I am today if my lovely teachers weren't working me like a bedraggled sailor on a trading ship.

(Not that I'm very proficient yet, but... you know... gratitude.)

FINAL THOUGHTS

What was that snappy phrase I thought up during my Joycean exile? Oh yeah, "translation necessitates re-interpretation." Keep that in mind when you read my tortuous renderings. And if you ever are skeptical of the quality of my comprehension (a wise attitude, considering the depth of my daily confusion), feel free to ask for a line or two of original text. I'll have it in the cabin.

Annette

Here's the first bit of Tawfiq al-Hakim's مدرسة المغفلين, which I've decided to render here as "School of Idiots." I translate somewhat literally/cumbersomely for first drafts. Consider yourself forewarned!

"School of Idiots," Tawfiq al-Hakim, #1

He leapt from his bed in the middle of the night at the hammering on the door. Still drunk from the sweetness of sleep, he decided to open it and walked into the corridor of the house that he resided in alone. In his steps he was not confident because of having just woken up. He opened the door without much thought, and then suddenly a youth enters, shouting:

--"Spare me... spare me..."

And he rushes into the lobby, the light flooding the place, and chooses a luxurious seat. Throwing himself into the chair, he pulls from his pocket a sheet of paper and begins to read from it with great volume:

--"Spare me... spare me..."

Drawing near, the owner of the house drags a chair over and asks, yawning:

--"What's the matter?"

--"The matter is very serious! It's love, it's insomnia, it's distance. Throughout the night, I've been arranging this qasida; perhaps she will sympathize and become affectionate, for I have cut my heart into pieces for her and placed these pieces into every fragmented word! Sit and listen."

The owner of the house has no alternative but to submit, for the guest is a friend who he must not upset; and given his knowledge of tact and decorum, the host feels a duty to honor his friend's wishes. So he sits reluctantly, fighting slumber, and resigns himself to patience, and struggles to cast off grogginess and to listen to the poet and his poetry in this last fragment of the night.

The guest unfolds the paper in his hand and recites...

NOTES

- "perhaps she will sympathize and become affectionate" presented problems, as well as the following paragraph (re: propriety and decorum). Couldn't think of appropriate English words that weren't so multisyllabic and Latinate.

- The last word ("recites") is interesting to me, because my impression of the Arabic انشد is that this is a word generally reserved for recitation of the Quran.

- Also interesting is the contrast between the set-up (sudden awakening from sleep, panicked boy shouting for aid) and the comedic pay-off. al-Hakim surely knew what he was doing here, especially as I seem to recall that many of al-Hakim's other works are political in nature.

What a gift you are giving us! This is wonderful.

Thank you for the compliment! If people are interested, I will try to make it easier to follow the overarching narratives through the excerpts. I think I'll be able to include the entirety of the poems and short stories like "School of Idiots" (which is only about nine pages long), but when I get to novels and novellas I might pick and choose a little more.

I doubt I'm smart enough to follow you, but I've starred you anyway! BTW, my Mandarin, so far, extends to counting to ten and saying "I can speak a little Mandarin, but I don't speak it very well." Look forward to reading about your progress.

This seems like a very interesting thread. Unfortunate you're not trying this with the languages I speak 'cause I would have enjoyed contributing but I'm cheering you on from the sidelines for sure!

>7 theaelizabet:
Any Mandarin is good Mandarin!!! It took me a LONG time to get to where I am now with Chinese, so I remember those days of counting to ten all too well... that said, I also didn't know myself or my learning style well at all back then, so I'm sure Mandarin won't take you (or your daughter, am I remembering correctly?) quite as long as it did for me. Good luck to you both!

>8 lilisin:
Lilisin, the thought alone is nice enough. In 2009 I thought I could start learning Spanish or German or French (and I'm really more interested in literature than anything else, so I usually attempt poetry and short stories pretty early in my studies, despite my teachers' disapproval), in which case maybe that would have been a language you speak? Unfortunately, I don't have the time this year to devote to a fresh language. Oh well. I'm hoping that curtailing my wanderlust will result in knowing my current languages better! We'll see in December!

Yeah I speak French, Spanish and Japanese. It's great though that you're attempting to read more fiction in your languages. It's one of the best ways you can improve.

>10 lilisin:
I'm sure! And it's fun, too. ;)

I've always wished I could read SOME Japanese. I hear a lot of good things about contemporary Japanese fiction, but I can only read the little bit that I can find in translation in my local libraries. Haruki Murakami mostly. To be honest, that's why I started learning Arabic, not the political situation. It just made me so mad that there were so many books I couldn't read!!

While I'm on the topic of wishes, @ LT at large: I also wish I could write reviews that are as interesting as all of yours are! (You'll find that mine can get bogged down in minutiae: "There's a cliche on page 49...") I'm always impressed when I read about the thoughts and connections you all have for your books. LT reviews, and particularly reviews by members of this group, are often so pithy or witty or brilliant or moving or all of the above. Cheers to another year of more great reviews!

"School of Idiots," Tawfiq al-Hakim, #2

The guest spreads the paper in his hand and recites:

--"Spare me... spare me... sleep flies from my eyes--"

Regaining consciousness, the owner of the house rubs his eyes and then says:

--"Whose eyes does sleep fly from?"

--"My eyes, of course."

--"Ah... of course."

The guest had continued in his recitation, until he cut himself off abruptly, having not found any response to his declamation and having not heard any comments on this unbored pearl of his. Now, lifting up his sight to the man hosting him for the night, the man who he had shared his masterpiece with, he finds himself staggering and his tone wavering... but not out of wonder... nor out of rapture... of course.

And so he stops reading and cries,

--"I'm sorry! You're evidently tired. Well, the best thing to do..."

Certain that sleep is the only solution to this problem, but not expecting this answer from his friend, the owner of the house leaps from his seat, like a slave freed or a prisoner released, his tongue devoted to gratitude--but then his guest continues:

--"Yes, the best thing to do is to go and pour some cold water on your head, so you can wake up, regain your energy, and listen to the rest of the qasida; for it is very long."

And here the owner of the house could no longer sustain his patience. And so he did not fulfill his proper duties as a host but instead exploded, cursing love and lovers, and poetry and prose, and qasidas happy and sad, and every inch of the world of women... and abruptly left the room. And going into his chambers, he crept onto his mattress and slept.

Regarding my own post directly above.

Honestly, I'm not very happy with this translation, but I figure I need to just post it and move on. I'm actually very happy that I started this project. Although the work I do is hardly perfect, I really think that I'm learning a lot just by going through the motions - not just about the difficulties of translation, but also about Arabic vocabulary and grammar.

Perhaps most importantly, I'm learning exactly WHAT it is that I do not yet know. For example, in the passage I attempted to translate above, the original text switched frequently between present tense and past tense. Some of this I understood as various manifestations of حال clauses, but I can't think of any explanation save stylistics (or perhaps just my own ignorance) for the sudden shift to past tense in the last paragraph. I'm glad that I now have an useful question to ask next time I see my teacher!

Your translation sounds very fluid to me. My only comment is on the word 'unbored'. I'm not sure what you meant here. Do you have time to elaborate?

Thanks for catching that! To be honest, I didn't know either. The Arabic word is خريدة, which I had never seen before, so I likely just lifted the "unbored pearl" definition straight from my dictionary. I checked Hans Wehr again just now and it looks like the word is related to the verb خرد (another word I've never seen before), meaning 'to be a virgin; to be chaste, untouched.' So maybe the phrase is idiomatic and stems from some tradition where Arabic people would bore holes in their pearls for jewelry use...? Who knows?

Either way, thank you for pointing that out to me. Probably something like "unmarred pearl" would work better (actually, that sounds kind of strange to my ear, but you get the idea).

Oh, actually that makes sense. I didn't think of the meaning of 'bored' to be 'drilled', but that would be perfect. thanks.

This is a totally brilliant thread. Annette, your language skills are enviable.

Have you read Ulysses in the original, or only in Chinese? Could you post up a tiny snippet of the translation you were reading, with a reference to the original text, if you have time?

>16 ffortsa: ffortsa, I had no real idea either, so I'm glad you made me think twice about it!

>17 tomcatMurr: Murr, DRAMA ALERT! Long story short, I just realized that I have NO idea what translation of Ulysses I read. At some point in 2009 I procured a copy of Ulysses in Chinese and read it intermittently until December, when I gave up from sheer frustration. A few days ago I decided to dig out that copy of Ulysses again and find a funny mistranslation to offer you guys, but for some reason I just couldn't find the book I was looking for. I'm about 99.99999% sure that I only have one Chinese translation of Ulysses, but the cover looks all wrong for the copy I have... and the translator is different too... and there are TWO volumes instead of one... and about 700 fewer footnotes than I remember... I think my head is too small to handle this amount of confusion!

Anyway, it doesn't really matter that much as I was planning to attempt Mt. Youlaxisi again anyway, and when I do so, I will most certainly offer up some of the text. To answer your question, I've read Ulysses in English, but I haven't looked through any commentary. Originally my hope was that reading it in Chinese would act as a commentary in and of itself, given that the translator has no choice but to settle on an interpretation before translating. I guess the venture was a success in that respect!

I love drama, especially yours.

Xing Nien Kuai le by the way!!!!!!!

hugs hugs hugs

gong xi fa tsai!!!!

Oh my god, it's already the New Year? Gong xi fa cai, nian nian you yu!!

Eat a lot of dumplings tonight!

I still haven't located MY Ulysses, but I think that this new intruder must be someone else's, as it is written in traditional characters (which take me much, much longer to read than simplified). The plot thickens...

Shall I send a pussy posse to investigate?

Yes! Please do. My current pet implausible theory is that some Chinese tourist snuck into my room and jacked the thing. There certainly have been lots and lots of Chinese and Japanese visitors in town in the last few weeks. I even spotted some uniformed elementary schoolers from Shanghai, which makes absolutely no sense to me, but there you go.

On my mind recently - how would one define the distinction between poetry and prose? Prose poetry? Prose prose? At some point the dividing line starts to feel awfully invisible...

"A specialized form of rhythmic rhymed prose, saj3, was used by the kahins, or soothsayers, to deliver their prophecies. Their utterances were 'formulated in short rhymed phrases, with rhythmical cadences and the user of an obscure, archaicizing and cabalistic vocabulary.' In the Islamic period, saj3 slowly lost its occultist associations and rhymed cadenced prose was used to create effects that were purely literary and rhetorical." (p. 29, Night and Horses and the Desert, ed. Irwin)

The Qur'an of course could also be described as 'rhymed cadenced prose' but is generally not considered literature by Muslims, given its religious status. However, I am mostly wondering about this question from a Western, non-religious perspective.

ETA: I guess I just feel like that a discussion about the distinction b/w poetry and prose could easily scale into a discussion of authorial intention, and that is just MESSY. http://www.librarything.com/topic/84882

In modern day America poetry is a succession of utterances cooed prominently by adolescents in public.

Among poets, a secret society nowadays, poetry has meter, or some would say rhythm.

Robert

Re: "cooed by adolescents in public"... I have to say that sometimes when reading literary journals I have the same thought...

Unrelated - I just wanted to update for anyone interested that I am actually 99% done with translating the last 5 pages or so of the short story; I just need to check my translations and make sure that I'm not misrepresenting any idioms too egregiously, ktl. I guess that this isn't really an update for other people, more like a note to myself to finish the darn thing.

I've spotted some errors in my attempt to translate the first two pages but won't correct all of them now. I don't think these mistakes especially interfere with the narrative (most are questions of word choice), although there is one egregious misrepresentation -

"Now, lifting up his sight to the man hosting him for the night, the man who he had shared his masterpiece with..."

This should be something like:

"Now, lifting up his sight to the man before whom he had cast his lines and scattered his verses..."

Embarrassing confusion of بيت (house) for بيت (line/verse of poetry), among other things, and I have absolutely no idea where "shared" came from. Glad I caught this.

Ok, before I post the fruits of my labor, I thought it might be fun to show why this is taking me so long, with the added benefit that, this way, my imaginary readers who hypothetically do not know Arabic can still get a glimpse of my weaknesses and where my translation might go astray.

So, without further ado:

first sentence: Arabic (excuse weird LT formatting)

وكان زوج شوشو عندئد قد تخلص من بائعات الورد ، وسار يفحص بعينيه الجمع، كانه يبحث عن أحد

first sentence: Google translate (hate it)

Husband was Shushu Andid vendors may get rid of the roses, and walked with his eyes examined plural, as if looking to everybody.

whole P: very literal translation with little clarification

And whereupon the husband of Shushu had rid himself of the vendors of roses, and he walked examining with his two eyes the crowd, like he was searching for someone. Until he had a view from above of the two of them... for when he became steps (away) from the two of them, he the other one glimpsed the two of them and he hurried towards the two of them and greeted the two of them. And he reproached him his friend the owner of the house (the friend reproached the owner of the house), reproaching quietly mixing it with joking, when he found him in his house of negligence, in that night that in it had burst forth his poetic ability... and to take revenge on him, like what he said, he did not invite him to the party of his wedding and not to the house of his bride... and here he turned to the madam saying with a quick and alacritous dialect...

whole P: clarifications

And the husband of Shushu had rid himself of the vendors of roses, and walked around scrutinizing the crowd with his eyes, as if he were looking for someone. Until he had a view from above of the two of them... when his steps became closer to them, then he glimpsed them as well (in addition to them glimpsing him) and hurried towards them and greeted them. And his friend (the poet) reproached the owner of the house quietly, partly out of humor, joking that he (the owner of the house) had been negligent in receiving him (the poet) in his house, in that night that his poetic talent had burst forth... and to take revenge on him, as he said, he (the poet) did not invite him to the wedding nor to the bride's house... and here he turned to the lady saying in dialect, cheerfully and quickly...

whole P: getting closer to some semblance of English

And by now the husband of Shushu had rid himself of the vendors of roses, and walked around scrutinizing the crowd with his eyes, as if he were looking for someone. Until he had a view from above of the two of them... and then, when he was just a few steps away, he caught sight of the pair and hurried over to greet them. And the poet reproached the owner of the house, addressing him jokingly, saying that in that night in which his poetic talent had burst forth, the owner of the house had received him in a state of negligence... and therefore, in order to take revenge on his friend, he did not invite the owner of the house to his wedding or to his bride's house... and here he turned to the lady saying in dialect, cheerfully and quickly...

edited out - needs much more correction than i have time for now

edited out - needs much more correction than i have patience for now

Ok... I am slowly returning to LT and reading through all these excellent threads (some right here in Club Read!), and I keep on coming across posts I want to respond to but which were posted months ago. And it just seems silly to derail the threads by responding there. So instead, some random things that came to mind.



I really enjoy Bada Shanren (born Zhu Da) - for me, at least, there's a certain subtle sense of loss and subversion in his paintings that I find very interesting, especially in light of what we know of his life. I'm tearing my hair out right now because I can't recall the title of the excellent book I began to read about him last year.



At some point in recent memory I translated an essay on Zhang Hongnian for an acquaintance of an acquaintance. This was possibly the hardest text I've tried to translate from Mandarin thus far (I actually had to seek help because of all the idioms/technical language/quasi-Classical grammar - although to my credit, judging from the penciled characters on the photocopy, a native speaker had tried before me with little success), and I really did not get paid enough at all for my sweat and toil, and I can't say that I'm even a huge fan of the dude's work, but. But.

All this Arabic and Mandarin has tied my tongue and stripped me of my native language, but I'll try to speak coherent English anyway. What intrigues me about Zhang Hongnian's art is what intrigues me about many of my favorite recent reads: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, VS Naipaul, Tayeb Salih, Cao Xue. For these artists, writing is inherently a political act. You are using the language, structure, flesh of your oppressor to give voice to the oppressed. For some of these authors, the struggle is evident. Naipaul and Salih address explicitly the fact that, for their cultures, the novel does not exist outside of the colonial context (I can't recall where I read Salih's assertion, but Naipaul talks about it quite a lot, ex in Literary Occasions). Heaney's consciousness of this tension seeps into the language of his poetry; just look at which of his poems echo Gaelic in sound, which poems tend towards the Latinate in their vocabulary. Can Xue is an interesting case because she personally rejects this yoke; she's clearly influenced by and has even published on Kafka and Borges, but as I know from first-hand experience, she bristles at the suggestion that her work stems in part from Western tradition. And going back to Zhang Hongnian, who inspired this tangent: here he is, a man from the mainland, painting Tibet. And to quote my translation of the essay, he isn't being "ingratiating in regards to the government, (painting Tibet as) backward, the sky gloomy, the people impoverished;" rather, he states that "Tibet's beauty is the beauty of harmony" and explicitly seeks to "render... without heavy-handed embellishments." And how has he chosen to do this "natural, bright, vivid" rendering? With Western oils and a Western touch! If that's not personal/political, I don't know what is.

The painting of the Tibetan child above, by the way, is titled "Homage to Vermeer."

I'm making my way a second time through Irwin's Night and Horses and the Desert, and it is such a good anthology, and there are so many things I want to type up for you guys, but I can only choose one for now... so here's a little Abu Uthman 'Amr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz (a mouthful!) on books. Irwin notes that al-Jahiz "used to pay the owners of bookshops to be locked up in their premises at night so that he could read the stock. It is reported that he was killed when an avalanche of books collapsed on top of him." Quite a character to say the least. Without further ado,

A book, if you consider, is something that prolongs your pleasure, sharpens your mind, loosens your tongue, lends agility to your fingers and emphasis to your words, gladdens your mind, fills your heart and enables you to win the respect of the lowly and the friendship of the mighty. You will get more knowledge out of one in a month than you could acquire from men's mouths in five years - and that at a saving in expense, in arduous research by qualified persons, in standing on the doorsteps of hack teachers, in resorting to individuals inferior to you in moral qualities and nobility of birth, and in associating with odious and stupid people.

A book obeys you by night and by day, abroad and at home; it has no need of sleep, and does not grow weary with sitting up. It is a master that does not fail you when you need him and does not stop teaching you when you stop paying him. (...) Form any kind of bond or attachment with it, and you will be able to do without everything else; you will not be driven into bad company by boredom or loneliness.

Even if its kindness to you and its benevolence towards you consisted merely in saving you from the tedium of sitting on your doorstep watching the passers-by - with all the aggravations that posture entails: civilities to be paid, other people's indiscretions, the tendency to meddle in things that do not concern you, the proximity of the common people, the need to listen to their bad Arabic and their mistaken ideas and put up with their low behaviour and their shocking ignorance - even if a book conferred no other advantage but this, it would be both salutary and profitable for its owner.

trans. D. M. Hawke, from Pellat's The Life and Works of Jahiz.

This is kinda cute.





I usually try to steer away from translations in Chinese (why not spend that energy on native literature?), but I'm thinking of giving The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao the old one-two in Chinese later this year. I enjoyed the book a lot in English and I'm very curious to see how the translators have dealt with the Spanish, slang, sci fi, etc. Especially the Spanish, as ALL the text been translated into Chinese and there don't even seem to be any footnotes beyond those Diaz intended.

Oh that would be very interesting. I've been looking forward to seeing you read your Chinese choices so I hope you start that soon.

I'm still going through my Japanese short stories. It's all I do when I get home from work! Watch some tv, and study during the commercials and then full on study when my shows are over. But I love it. Especially now that I'm over that "goodness I haven't used this in 2 years" slog, it's all going much faster and I'm learning so much and love remembering what I once knew. Plus I just found a site that'll help me go from my reader that includes furigana to an actual Japanese novel in full on Japanese a lot faster, with no translations on the opposing page and no furigana. (I don't know how much you know about Japanese so if you need me to explain what furigana is I can).

I'm very excited! :)

Japanese short stories! That sounds like a lot of fun. Are they mostly contemporary? And what site are you talking about? I don't know if this will be of any use to you, but I thought http://hiragana.jp/ was an interesting idea (adds furigana to web pages).

I haven't read much Japanese literature, but I like what I've read thus far, all in translation of course. Actually, I was flipping through The Woman in the Dunes the other day, and that inspired me to dig out some Can Xue, who also gets pretty surreal/fantastical at times. So I'll probably dig into Chinese lit sooner rather than later, especially now that my Arabic is finally starting to settle down and I don't have to spend so much time on course readings anymore.

The ones I'm working on are from a reader and it's only contemporary stuff, yeah. I'm talking about the site renshuu.org. It's pretty amazing and has a fantastic kanji dictionary on top of all the awesomeness where it's really easy to search kanji via radical.

Japanese lit is my favorite which explains why I'm trying to get my Japanese back since the main reason I studied the language in the first place was to be able to read lit. As I said before, I'm excited!

Annette, I am following your thread with huge interest and not a little trepidation.

I am totally in awe of your linguistic skills -- and enjoying your thread immensely.

renshuu.org looks really useful. I feel like people are always telling me about well-designed sites for language learning, and then I go check them out and they're Japanese-specific. Most of the contemporary Japanese textbooks I've seen look better design-wise than textbooks for other languages, too. Go figure!

Lilisin, I'm creeping through your LT library right now and looking at your Japanese lit...

I went to locate my Can Xue yesterday and was waylaid by a whole score of interesting Chinese books I bought and then promptly forgot about. I also STILL haven't gotten around to Ba Jin's Jia, so that's on the pile too. So many possibilities!! Thanks for the interest, everyone.

Yes, there has been a real boom in online tools created for Japanese learners. Basically went hand in hand with the anime boom in the US and the rest of the world.

For some reason I own several books in Japanese. I'm not sure why...

Reading time has been scarce lately but I've managed to sneak some pages here and there. In Arabic, I'm doing a close reading of Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. Somewhere on LT you can find my initial reaction to this book (in Denys Johnson-Davies' translation), from around 2008/early 09, which was essentially that Salih is a talented writer but trite. I really bristled at what I saw as just another tired, needlessly explicit reiteration of the colonialism/sexual violence trope. Since then, I've reread this book several times, and with every reading, I notice more subtlety, more complexity. And of course my interpretation of the text has completely changed as well. Anyway, I liked this book so much that, armed with my old Johnson-Davies edition as well as the original Arabic text, I decided to translate it into Chinese just for fun.

Well! I have a lot to say about that but am at a loss for words. Clearly I'm a masochist. Let's just say that Chinese is even farther from Arabic than English is. Johnson-Davies is of course a hugely talented translator and much better at what he does than I the amateur am, but when I look at his translation and at the Arabic text, I can see exactly what he's doing. Often he's able to translate pretty much word for word; at times he can even echo the grammar and punctuation of Salih's prose.

Not so for me with Chinese. The grammar is simply too distant to approximate any sort of literal translation with respect to punctuation and stylistics. In Arabic, the first line of the book goes something like (I'm quoting from memory, sorry): "I returned to my people, o gentlemen, after a long absence, seven years to be exact, throughout which I was studying in Europe." Johnson-Davies doesn't have to do much maneuvering to make this good English: he chooses, "It was, gentlemen, after a long absence - seven years, to be exact, during which time I was studying in Europe - that I returned to my people." It's a pretty simple sentence. The vocabulary is not hard. The grammar is intuitive. And if all you were doing was translating meaning, you could whip out an equivalent in a matter of seconds. But because this is a vanity project, because I am doomed to perfectionism, because I want to try and preserve something of that beauty that I see in Salih when I read him in Arabic and in English... well, you see where I'm going with this. I'll stop here before I start ranting about complex dependent clauses.

As much as I complain, I'm having a lot of fun.

Other books looked at recently - collection of short stories by Can Xue, Cao Yu's Sunrise - more on these later when I have time; it's 5:40 and I must feed the fox.

You are indeed quite the masochist.

Which books do you have in Japanese?

To be honest, I'm not totally sure. I know that I have/had three or four books in Japanese and that at least two of them are contemporary novels (don't know how good they are though, as I don't know Japanese!). But unfortunately I don't know where they are right now. I left all but about 200 of my books with my parents, and when my father moved out, he took every book in the house with him as an act of spite. Then about six months ago, by which time I had moved back in temporarily, they finalized their divorce and my father was allowed to come back to the house to move his "personal items" out for good. Because I am really paranoid and my father is really unpredictable, I ended up hiding all my possessions. The good thing is that he didn't take any more of my books. The bad thing is that it turns out that I am very good at hiding things and very bad at remembering what I hid. The other day I decided to make some risotto. I was very surprised to find my copy of Notes From Underground lurking in the arborio!!

In related news, I have not been able to track down any of my Mahfouz.

The Salih is still going sloooowly, but I'm actually quite pleased with this project. I don't write very beautifully in Chinese or very often, so I'm hoping that doing this regularly will force me to get a little better at that. Also, because the book has never been translated into Chinese before, it's actually not that hard for me to bribe literary-minded Chinese speakers to edit my terrible prose and tell me what I'm doing wrong.

I came across this totally by coincidence, but look!!

http://www.horria.org/rijal2.htm

It's Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun, online, in Arabic! I am TERRIBLE at googling things in Arabic (and Chinese too, come to think of it... no idea why), so I can never find complete texts of short stories/novels online when I want them... I spent about 45 minutes trying to track down the text for Season of Migration to the North the other day when I left my hard copy at home with absolutely no success, so you know, this is very exciting for me. Especially as I have a translation of this somewhere.

Still have not tracked down my Mahfouz. Well, I've found my English translations, but that's not what I'm looking for.

Back to work now.

Spring is here, and my attention is once more splintering... lots, lots, lots of personal projects that take far too much energy with far too little result. And very little time spent on things that I actually need to do.

I haven't read anything I especially enjoyed or otherwise feel the need to post about. I think I mentioned Cao Yu's Sunrise at some point. It's cute, but nothing to write home about. Though he does have an ear for dialogue. (I suppose he must, being a playwright and all.) There's an easily available parallel text English/Chinese version but I'm not very fond of their translation, which is sloppy to say the least. I read the Chinese text, but at times I would glance over at the English and be very surprised when I couldn't locate the lines I was pondering.

I'm currently pulling my hair out trying to track down some decent resources, ANY RESOURCES, on xiao'erjing, xiao-er-jin, xiaojing, or any other incarnations thereof. I mean... I just don't even know where to begin. I'm having a devil of a time finding any solid leads. There's some material in Japanese, or at least there should be, but a) I don't read Japanese, b) their funding seems to have been cut off in 2003. There's certainly material in Chinese, but I haven't found that yet either. I don't think there is a standardized academic term for the darn thing, which makes googling hard. I've asked some real, live, flesh-and-blood folks, but nobody's given me anything more substantial than "Such and such a northern Chinese university might have primary materials, but I don't think the people you need to talk to have access to computers." In English, I've found references to articles in obscure journals long since resigned to the dust-heap of forgotten academia, only one of which is available to me through my university's libraries... on and on. I think I have two problems here:

1. I have no background in linguistics and don't know the most efficient way to go about this research (and admittedly I was never great at research in the first place), and...

2. ... more importantly, I don't know the proper terms for this kind of thing either. I'm not sure whether there is a certain turn of phrase that I should be using for what I'm looking for, which is essentially Chinese-language texts written in xiao'erjing (Sinophone texts in Arabic script).

***** At this point, I went online to grab an example of xiaojing and somehow stumbled upon an image I had not yet seen before, which led me to the Australian National University's China Heritage Project, which looks like it may have some leads. So I'm going to stop whining for now as I clearly haven't exhausted my current line of inquiry yet. In the meantime, enjoy this image of a page from the Qur'an in Arabic, Chinese hanzi, and Chinese xiaojing.

That is quite the page of text, goodness!

I feel you though on not knowing how to do proper research. It's why I always dreaded doing research papers as an undergrad. Original topic? And primary sources? Are you kidding me?

And that's why I'm a scientist. :)

Jia yo!

I love doing research but I'm not very good at it! Oh well, with time and experience maybe?

Thanks for the cheerleading, Murr! I saw a great Taiwanese movie today, a film version of Stan Lai's An Lian Tao Hua Yuan (Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land). I had never seen any of his work before and thought his masterpiece would be a good place to start.

April 21st, 2010

Wow, I have been MIA from this goal for quite a while now! I thought I'd give a quick update, if only so that in a few months I'll be able to recall vaguely what I am doing right now. Basically, I haven't been doing as much as I would like. I don't think I have touched an English novel in literally months; my reading there is restricted essentially to emails and billboards, and I think it is starting to show in my writing, which is becoming noticeably clumsier and less grammatical. Chinese too takes a backseat to Arabic for now on the literature front... Arabic itself goes quite slowly as always, which I suppose is not a problem per se but nonetheless is mildly frustrating when you have little time to spare. I am inching my way through some fascinating short stories by Zakaria Tamer and of course the Salih is still in my

I think that's enough of an update for me. Life has been so hectic that I have been getting very little sleep lately (I think I have scraped together maybe 5 hours of sleep in the last 3 days), and so even my favorite things to do, like reading and socializing, seem to require an amount of intellectual exertion that I cannot spare. Even sleeping seems a little exhausting sometimes! Just one more week of this mess and I'll be rid of it and I can't wait!!!!

May 22nd - June-July is Arabic month, July-August is Mandarin month by necessity with some tutoring on the side. I suppose August will be dedicated to review and all the lunch meetings I have postponed until the summer. I have a pile of books in ENGLISH four feet high that I want to get to, but we'll see. Perhaps I'll take some abroad with me...

So I've been MIA from LibraryThing for quite a while - I haven't read as much in my free time as I'd like; I have a heavy courseload this semester and have been spending all my reading time trying to do the "recommended readings" because certain of my professors are a little hazy on the distinction between "required" and "recommended" - not to mention that I hate looking at the bizarre things I've left on the internet in months past - I am a little more normal than I may have seemed, really - anyway, I just wanted to share something that happened to me today, and I couldn't think of a better place to share than, well, a site called Library... Thing.

Basically, I decided that I would like to read a book. For fun! Novel idea, I know. I knew I wanted a book on cross-cultural approaches to psychology but for some reason I got distracted almost instantly and found myself hopping around by library catalog subject tags. Finally I located a book that had especially interesting-sounding tags and clicked the button to place a reserve request.

Usually my uni librarians, attuned to the time-sensitive demands of harried students, work very fast with reserve requests and will have your book in your hands within hours, but in this case the process felt slower than usual. All my other reserve books had arrived, but this one book was still missing in action...

When I finally got my hands on the book I noticed that there were several minor bumps that may or may not have given pause:

- Neither the title nor the author was listed in the library catalog (came up as random symbols).

- Neither the title nor the author is printed on the spine of the book.

- The identifying Dewey sticker is also not printed on the spine of the book. In fact, there is nothing on the spine of the book.

- The identifying sticker is printed on the back cover of the book but (judging from Google) the Dewey identification is actually incorrect for subject matter. Also, the ID number is listed incorrectly in the catalog, or at least it was when I first checked the listing.

- Nobody had ever checked out this book before in the decade plus since it was purchased. Not a huge deal but did give us brief pause when I tried to check it out, because there was nowhere to stick the receipt or put a due date stamp!

- The title listed on the front cover is only the first word of the long title (title + subtitle, really) listed on the title page. The library records (the ones that we eventually found that did have the title and author NOT in random symbols) used the latter without distinguishing between title and subtitle. Only the author's last name was listed on the cover. What I'm trying to say is, records made it seem as if the author's name and the title were both long long long, but conversely only two short words appeared on the cover.

- ... which wouldn't be a problem usually except that the book is in Arabic, not a language commonly known by random librarians at my university. Our Arabic Studies librarian is actually MIA this year!!! If someone had been trying to locate this book by title (once they got to the appropriate section of the stacks) rather than purely by the (incorrectly listed) classification number, they may have been frustrated.

I'm sure this was all very easy for the experienced librarians at my library to handle (they got it to me in one and a half days!), but I was very impressed! I was also impressed that the due date for this book is in more than a year's time. Now if only I could have that kind of due date for the textbooks I check out from the library.

很久没有看到你!!!!

woohoo she's back!!!!!!!!!

I doubt very much that you are normal, in fact. Thank god! Normal is sooooooooooo dull.

so what was the title of the book in the end that caused all the brouhaha?