42 sats \ 8 replies \ @Bitman 18 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: First "adult" book you read voluntarily? meta
I'd read and enjoyed Journey to the West too (but in my early twenties) - it really is a classic. Roughly the same time I'd read Herman Hess' Sidhartha.
Somehow I don't remember Journey as poetry per se - but prose instead (completely lost in translation from Chinese to English no doubt).
This is an example of these poems. This one describes a mountain.
There were many many poems, or at least sections of text written in poem form in the original Chinese text, describing scenery, mood, monsters, characters, mood, fights, weapons, etc. etc. Basically anything you can imagine. It seems to be the way the ancient Chinese novelists like to write, because there were lots of these poems in other Chinese classical novels as well. Maybe the translator did not translate the poems in the version that you read?
I actually read Journey to the West 2 more times when I was older, once in my late teens and another time in my mid twenties, where I was able to further appreciate and enjoy the writing, the character building, the story telling, and the wisdom.
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Thanks for the page - that's beginning to ring a bell with me now. I was beginning to wonder if the original was completely written in poem form - both to aid anyone wishing to memorize it and as a way to show if it has been changed - an early sort of checksum hash if you will.
The translation that I read was Waley's abridged translation BTW.
I often wonder if the imagery conveys hidden, esoteric meanings - I know that many religious texts do this; however, I'd imagine that as this combined many elements of comedy and satire, I'd imagine it would be a long stretch for the author to be so multi talented to land that one too.
I'd imagine that the authors of the 16th century, such as Wu Cheng'en and Shakespeare, are streets ahead of any author in our time - I wouldn't be at all surprised if that they could hide such hidden gems in plain sight.
There's an obvious asymmetry to me here that poor readers, such as myself, can't appreciate their mastery - as much as I try.
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I was beginning to wonder if the original was completely written in poem form
No, the original was not completely written in poem form. There were certainly a lot of poems in the book, but most of the text were in paragraph form. Although, the way they write back in the day is different from modern literature; just like how old English texts are different than modern English literature.
Below you can see the same page of the English and Chinese versions and I've highlighted corresponding sections with different colors. As you can see, although these poems gets imbedded into the text, they are all distinct and separate from the texts in paragraph form. Also, a mistake on my part from the previous reply, that poem on the page was talking about a cave, not a mountain.
And yes, I do agree these literary masters from back then were extremely talented, no matter it was Wu Cheng'en or Shakespeare. We don't get a lot of these nowadays, maybe because there are so many distractions around us and it is hard to stay solely focused to produce masterpieces like the classics.
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Phew, the difference between length of the poem's English translation and the original Chinese really is apparent.
I'm trying to imagine how a written language whose characters are glyphs could change a reader's experience.
For instance, would reading a poem written by a bilingual English/Chinese speaker be enhanced when it is written in Chinese (over that same bilingual author's English version)?
However, could there be a negative in that both reader and writer need to know the same pallette of traditional or simplified characters in order to fully benefit?
Though this might be no different from an English speaker utilizing an English dictionary when confronted with an unfamiliar word though.
I'm really finding the whole concept of Chinese characters really fascinating.
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For glyph character languages, I think visually, because every character is the same size and every character is a syllable, it becomes easier to see when a line has more or less characters, or if a line has more or less syllables. That is especially apparent if each line is separated by a line break, where you can just look at a poem and see if each line has the same number of syllables. Compared that to English, I have to read each line to verify the same thing. Also, visually, it looks more uniform with each line being the same length for glyph languages.
Another thing I find interesting is rhyming. When you rhyme in English, you rhyme the last syllable; but when you rhyme in Chinese, you not only rhyme the last syllable, but you also rhyme the tone, because Chinese is a tonal language. As a result, dialects with more tones (i.e. Cantonese with 9 tones) becomes harder to rhyme than dialects with less tones (i.e. Mandarin with 4 tones).
In terms of traditional or simplified characters, stick with the traditional set. To me, traditional characters is the standard and the truth. Simplified characters is just an abomination created by the dictatorial CCP to try to central plan language with their hubris. The CCP successfully created a character set that had shed the traditional wisdom and history, where the characters evolved over time from pictograms; just like how they shed the traditional wisdom and history of Confucianism.
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Linguistics seems to be a really wide subject doesn't it.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge. It's great for me to expand (and really appreciate) my world - and also the world of others...
Thanks for taking me down this fascinating rabbit hole gnilma 😃
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Yes, it is truly fascinating. I'm simply scratching the surface, as linguistics is such a deep rabbit hole that it deserves and has its own university program in almost every university.
It was fun going down this rabbit hole with you. Thank you for your responses and insight.
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