Word of the day

kwashiorkor

I suspect one or two of you knew this one already, but it was new to me.

More of the Chinese thing

I told monshu I'd try to input my laughably rough translations of two couplets he asked me about some days during my shift if I had time. Of course, I forgot that, when I'm at the front desk, I don't have access to my work account, so I think I'll just use LiveJournal as a stratch pad rather than mess around with mailing files. Thanks to the miracles of the Internet (and Google, it's One True Key), we now know that the first couplet is from a poem by Song Dynasty literatus Lu You and the second is the work of Su Dongpo. Attempts to find English translations, however, have not been crowned with the same success.

xiao3 lou2 yi1 ye4 ting1 chun1 yu3
"Small Tower One Evening Hear Spring Rain"

shen1 xiang4 ming2 zhao1 mai4 xing4 hua1
"Deep Alley Bright Morning Sell Apricot Flower"

A nice, straightforward spring scene. I could easily offer a more natural translation, but I think you can construct your own. In any case, monshu has a book which argues that adding too many function words to make the text flow in English destroys some of the essential ambiguity that gives Classical Chinese poetry its unique expressive power. Notice, for instance, that pronouns are completely absent. Presumably, it is the narrator who is listening to the rain in the first line (actually the second line of the poem; having the first line might mitigate some doubt as to who the speaker is--or not) and someone else in the alley selling flowers. But that's only one possible interpretation among many.

Su Dongpo's couplet is more obscure, not least of all because it has fewer concrete terms and more grammatical particles whose use I have only a middling grasp of.

ke1 jin3 yi3 wu2 qing2 yu3 gai4
"Lotus Most Excessive Not Support Rain Cover"

What does that mean? Even the largest lotus is weighed down by the rain falling on it? This is actually the version we found online; the version on the scroll monshu is bidding on is even less clear to me:

ke1 ruo4 shang1 yu2 qing2 yu3 gai4
"Lotus Like Already I Support Rain Cover"

It's different enough to make me suspect that what I've read as yu3 ("I") may actually be an odd version of wu2 ("Not"). Even so, how do you read that?

ju3 can2 you2 you3 ao4 shuang1 zhi1
"Chrysanthemum Destroy Like Have/Be Haughty Frost Branch"

I can't really say much about this except that it must be a winter scene.

Kanji Name Madness!

A while back--I think in welcomerain's journal--I mentioned a book on the market for finding transcriptions of Western names into kanji. The actual title is Write your name in kanji by Nobuo Sato--and, yes, Amazon does carry it, though they claim supplies are limited!

Sadly, "Erin" is not in it. "Lori" (or, rather, Rouri) is, however. Among the suggested transcriptions are:
Phonetic and denotative: Elegant Wax Tree
Phonetic and eulogistic: Considerate Hero Profit, Reveal Excellent Reason, Strategise Nightingale Beauty
Attention-getting: Stupid Duck Official, Wolf King Mile

(I've actually altered his translations a bit. For instance, for "Reveal Excellent Reason" he has "one who proves to be tender and wise". I'm not sure where the tenderness entres into things.)

He also provides an appendix which allows you to build your own transcription. For instance, other possibilities given for the syllable ro (as in Rouri) are "companion", "road", and "furnace". Rin could be "forest", "circle", "ethical", "bell", and "next". And, once again, these represent only a tiny fraction of the possibilities.