Filler

[muckefuck]

Can't I think of anything to say that isn't hopeless recondite or just petty bitching? Consider this a test.

• Last meal at the nearest Japanese restaurant to work, I think. I don't know that I could quite roll better sushi myself, but I know enough to demand that, at those prices, someone should be. Small portions, insipid flavours, intrusive service--goddamn did it make me wish I worked within striking distance of Oysy. People in the Loop! You owe yourselves a special lunch there. I know you don't have all damn afternoon to walk down to 900 S. Boul Mich so splurge for a cab. Their lunch specials are an absolute steal and, if my Monday-afternoon trip was any indication, they're not at all crowded after about 1:30 p.m.
• Following in our long tradition of being on the trailing edge of hot technology, monshu has finally procured for me an iPod Mini. So far, I'm liking it a lot although a few design decisions puzzle me:
  1. You can only charge it through a computer? How convenient is that? Very, if you carry around a laptop or return home every night; not so much if, say, you're on vacation for a week (which is when I suspect I'll be making the most use of mine).
  2. I need to return to the top-level menu to turn on the backlight? What gives! The reason I'm turning on the backlight is so I can navigate the menus in the first place.
• My other new acquisitions--with the notable exception of that Chinese music CD--have chiefly been books. In particular, monshu found an abridged bilingual edition of 西游記--with pictures! The English text is brief and colourless compared to the Chinese, so I've plenty of incentive to read the latter, but I can always fall back on the former (not to mention my own knowledge of the story) for the gist. The language is a curious mix of Modern Standard and Literary Chinese, with archaicisms like 道 for "say" (something I've only seen in Classical works) sidling up next to 那兒, which is so 北京話 it hurts my ears!

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

In particular, [info]monshu found an abridged bilingual edition of 西游記--with pictures!

Assuming I parsed those characters right, I've been reading the English side of a bilingual edition translated by W.J.F. Jenner. (It's five volumes, so if it's abridged I'm not sure I want to see the unabridged version.) I wouldn't call its English colorless, but of course I have nothing to compare it to.

I veritably raced through the backstory involving the Monkey King, which struck me as reminiscent of Silver Age comic books and Warner Brothers cartoons in its headlong power escalation ("And that's how Sun Wukong became double super extra immortal, even more than the last five times"), devotion to fights on a ridiculous scale, and kitchen sink crossovers ("So Laozi, Guanyin, Confucius and the Jade Emperor walk into a bar-- er, a banquet..." I especially like the bit where the Bodhisattva of Compassion offers to drop a vase on Monkey's head.) But I seem to have bogged down once the actual Journey to the West gets going in earnest; Sanzang doesn't strike me as so compelling a character and the confrontations seem to get repetitive. I may pick it up again and see if I just hit a bad patch.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

AFAIK, all English versions except for Anthony Yu's (in four fat volumes) are abridged. At the very least, they omit the poems found in each chapter (for the very understandable reason that they only recapitulate the action and the poetry is lost in translation). I read Waley's abridgement and found it quite readable; it's the Canfonian translation by "C.C. Low and Associates" that is particularly dull, with none of the rhetorical sparkle or descriptive excess of the original.

And I'm afraid I don't have much comfort to offer you about the body of the work. It is rather repetitive and Sanzang/Tripitaka is a rather uninteresting protagonist. A lot of it makes more sense when read as Buddhist allegory, but that still doesn't make it tremendously more absorbing IMHO. When I get that far, I'll probably only read selected episodes.

All in all, I think you'd get more enjoyment from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, if you haven't read it already.