History

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The Original Million Man March

Portrait of General Cao Cao

One of the things I think about frequently is the classical Chinese novel, The Romance of Three Kingdoms.  In English, the word romance used to mean “historical novel.”  At some point this meaning of the word got lost and now a “romance novel” almost exclusively implies something with a bodice being ripped on the cover.  This, in turn, usually provokes a chuckle from my friends from China when I tell them that I’ve read <i>The Romance of Three Kingdoms</i>, after a short discussion about what the word “romance” is supposed to mean in the translated title.  Because I’ve gotten tired of explaining it, I now usually refer to the book by a more literal translation of the title, “Three Kingdom Story.”  Or sometimes I try to pronounce the Chinese title, 三国演义 (sānguó yǎnyì), though my tones are bad and I’m usually quite embarassed to try speaking out loud.

Because I think about it a lot, it’s going to be something I write about frequently.  Today, I was noodling over the career of General Cao Cao.  (For the record, he did not create General Tso’s chicken, despite the fact that the name Tso and Cao sometimes get transliterated using the same roman letters. General Tso’s chicken was invented by this guy’s wife. But I digress.)  Specifically, I was thinking about the size of the army he pulled together in his effort to unite China after the fall of the Han Dynasty.

Click to continue reading “The Original Million Man March”

17Feb2009 | Ramon Arjona | Comments Off | Continued
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Swerving Not From The Right Path

One of the things that has bothered me for a long time about Ezra Pound’s translation of the Book of Odes is the way he treats one specific line.  It bothers me a lot.  It occaisionally makes me stay awake at night, wondering what the hell leads a person to such a weird translation.

You see, there’s a bit that Pound takes out of the context of the Odes and instead pins at the back of his translation.  He renders it in English as "have no twisty thoughts."  And it bothers me because, well, it’s just kind of strange .  I’ve seen the same text rendered in English as "swerving not from the right path", which I think comes closest in literal meaning to the Ode in question.  I’ve seen it translated as "unswerving mindfulness" and also as "no evil thoughts."

There’s a lot that goes into translation, and even a translation that seems incorrect or just plain wrong might have some merit.  But Pound goes beyond just trying to impose his agenda, or maybe his perspective, on the words.  He pins the words at the end, like some kind of coda…like somebody playing "duh duh DUH!" just a little off-key on the piano.  And that’s what drives me bats.  Because either he thinks that he’s so smart that only he can interpret the Odes for a Western audience, or because he thinks he can do better than the traditional poems, or–and this is what I think is really the case–because he doesn’t give a crap about the Odes at all.  I suspect that really what he wanted is to use the Odes as a vehicle for his own literary theory, and especially for his own very odd view of the Chinese language.

You see, Pound went a little nuts faced with the idea that maybe language isn’t perfect–the whole dichotomy between the sign and the signified bothered him.  In written Chinese, he thought he’d found a language where the word and the thing were somehow the "same".  Which is why in his later Cantos you find Chinese characters peppered everywhere, incomprehensibly.  Now, we know that really there’s nothing magic about written Chinese, and that it doesn’t contain any miracle solution to the problem of postmodernity.  But Pound clung to it, in my opinion, like a life-raft.  And this, I think, is why his translation of the Odes bugs me so much: he wants so desperately to be something that it’s not, and in the end he just sort of screws it up.  And in the end it makes me feel a little sad, and a little embarassed, and more than a little put off by what I view as a peculiar, linguistic perversion.

15Feb2009 | Ramon Arjona | Comments Off | Continued