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There's a longstanding and deeply unfortunate convention over here that translates the word for female Taoist Immortal (sennyo in Japanese, 仙女) as 'fairy'. Taoist Immortals may be weird in spite of their frequently human beginnings, but they just don't correlate to English fairies, nohow. No wings, just for a start.

That stray thought courtesy of the fact that I got tired of trying to figure out from the raw Japanese what was the complicated political background to the extremely unlikable 'fairy' who ijimes Suzu in Twelve Kingdoms and bought the DVDs of a chunk of the Two Whiners arc. This is why it's nice to have money for a change. This is possibly also why my Japanese listening comprehension will never improve.

But while I was at The Beguiling for the DVDs I also checked out vol 5 of Saiyuuki in English just to see what *they* did with kiyou binbou. For those to whom I haven't whined about this phrase before, kiyou means clever, skilful, adept, and as I frequently see it being used, especially 'good with people.' Binbou means poor. It's what Gonou-Hakkai calls himself when he wins the card game at Gojou's, when he talks about how you can see the way the cards are going but it's not much use if you don't have luck on your side. 'You're the kiyou binbou type, right?' Gojou asks. 'I guess so.' 'Me too,' Gojou nods.

All the online J-E dictionaries and a few of the paper ones will tell you in smug uniformity that it means 'jack of all trades and master of none.' Yes, and what's that supposed to mean, and what's it got to do with needing luck to win card games, huh? The J-J goes into more detail, about KB people having superficial expertise at a thing, or many things, but precisely because of their cleverness never being successful at it. Dilettante has been proposed as a translation, and I guess that's as close as English will come, but I still get the sense that there's some value system inherent in the Japanese term that's absent from the English. *Obviously* someone who's good at a number of things can't ever be excellent at any one of them sniff sniff. Which isn't true, at least over here. Leonardo was an excellent painter as well as a more than adequate everything else. But over there- well, Hiraga Gennai was innovative and original, but he wasn't truly outstanding at any of the many things he did.

I still don't know what this has to do with Hakkai, though.

And of course, in the English translation, kiyou binbou is rendered 'jack of all trades and master of none.' But naturally.

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LOL! It took me 8 disks of 12K to realize what senin was. Then I 'was like' ohhhhhh ...

I agree that 'fairy' is completely wrong.

But Leonardo was what we call a renaissance man, wasn't he? And wasn't he the first and still the model for all who followed?

In Asia, would the body of literature you needed to know have consumed pretty much all of your time? In comparison, I get the feeling that European literature didn't really blossom until Lonardo's time, so he wouldn't have had as much historical stuff to know.

There is the concept of being good at multiple things in Chinese. You mostly see it in HK wuxia novels as being 'double complete' meaning the person is good at literature and the arts AND physical activities. The sciences didn't really take off until much later contact with the Europeans, so there isn't an idiom I know that is a direct correlation with Leonardo.

I'm of no help whatsoever with kiyou binbou. I think binbou in Chinese doesn't necessarily mean monetarily poor, but can also mean poor skills, lacking in quality (or quantity?), or (I suspect) stingy/miserly.

Leonardo was doubtless the most amazing example of the Renaissance man, but not the first, and his genius puts him in a special category. I'm thinking more of people like Pico della Mirandola (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Pico_della_Mirandola), who took himself off to Rome at age 13 to study law, or Poliziano (http://natey.com/poliziano/history.html) who was a leader in the revival of Greek learning.

There was plenty of Latin writing that a man needed to be conversant with then- not merely all the classical writers but the major Fathers of the Church as well: and as there were many Fathers of the Church and they were a wordy bunch, reading them would take more time than reading Confucius and Mencius. That's before you get to the Greeks, both pagan and Christian. I figure all these Renaissance guys slept four hours a night and ruined their eyes reading by candlelight. At least they didn't have to memorize the Fathers.

However that never applied to the Japanese AFAIK. Literature was a frivolous pastime and a samurai-family man didn't read it. If there were neo-Confucianist classics that everyone had to read (not memorize) they've dropped into well-deserved obscurity.

Polymaths existed before and after Leonardo. As for literature... well, I would say round about that time, it became more accessible. Paper! Printing! Yay! But that's not to ay there wasn't literature before. Expensive, often not easily accessible, but it still existed.

How curious that I was thinking about the exact same word this morning. Was rereading the Ima Ichiko manga, and the sense I get is that the causality's reversed as we understand it. It's not because the young master is a dabbler at everything that he excels at nothing. It's because he's missing something -- a certain passion or spark of genius, I suppose, that he is never more than a dabbler at everything. The often repeated line from his father is that it's nothing to worry about, since one day surely he will find something that he does feel passionate about. And perhaps that's what's meant about Hakkai as well, that he doesn't have that particular spark, passion, luck, what have you. But I don't read Saiyuki, so I can't really say. Did you ever ask a native speaker, or did they only give you the standard spew?

I'd got the impression from some webpages I'd looked at that that was it- a shallowness in the character is what causes someone to be such a versatile kiyou binbou. (And the consequent defence, that a shallow kiyou binbou maintains a sense of proportion towards the world that the passionate devotee lacks.) That may indeed be what the J/J was trying to say, but it came across as 'because one applies one's ability to so many things or for facile purposes one never becomes a master of them.' But that sense of lacking something internal that lets you go past a certain general ability into true mastery would indeed apply to both Gojou and Hakkai, who are both disengaged from the world. Thanks.

Oh, excellent. Thank you so much for spelling that out. In fact, 'jack of all trades and master of none' kind of has some of the same snobbery to it in Englsh, doesn't it? Ie, implying that there is a shallowness to a person, or a lack of application. But I like the Japanese version better and it explains the card game conversation... although I still don't get what it has to do with Hakkai deciding to rescue Gojyo in Reload vol 4.

'jack of all trades and master of none' kind of has some of the same snobbery to it in Englsh, doesn't it?

Yes. You can do a bunch of things but none of them *really* well. But is that saying the actual origin of the term Jack of all trades or is it a later reworking? I never heard the saying before Minekura. 'Jack of all trades' alone is what I knew, and NAmerica being what it is, the sense was usually admiring. To be able to do a lot of things is good- it's being well-rounded or, as people have said here, Renaissance. The question of how well you do your trades was never brought up.

I shall have to look at the Reload 4 scene again. Certainly it made no sense to me when I was translating it first time around.

From a fairly superficial googling, it looks like Jack of all trades came first(C1600), with master of none added later as an insult. In fact the full phrase is "Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than master of one". Which is really not an insult at all. Although somehow it has managed to retain in the UK its connotations of superficial knowledge, rather than someone who is a polymath.

I had only heard the positive meaning until recently. I was quite surprised to hear the second half.

although I still don't get what it has to do with Hakkai deciding to rescue Gojyo in Reload vol 4.

This continues to puzzle me as well. I have just thought Hakkai thinking of it has more to do with their conversation with Sanzo (the one about dirt rags and Gojyo saying you can't change that easily) than with the actual phrase itself. That remembering it makes him realize how hopeless it is to try to pretend not to be a murderer. And perhaps, I think, repeating that bit of conversation has the double point of reminding Hakkai of the ways in which he and Gojyo are alike, so that he comes to the conclusion it's his turn to save Gojyo.

But even after all this reasoning I'm confused. Discussion about this, please? *puppy eyes*

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Y'know, I have to wonder if Japanese does have a word for it, aside from the general nesshin. Single-minded devotion to your One Thing of choice crops up so often in so many contexts, from shounen manga to Chuushingura to whatsisname- Ninomiya Sontoku-, that I'd rather got the idea that the Japanese think it's a normal mindset. An admirable normal mindset, by and large, but not meriting a four-kanji phrase. Must go check four-kanji phrasebook...

Hi, another comment-crasher here.

louiselux tipped me off. I couldn't resist-- the concensus that it's desirable and admirable to focus all one's energies on a single pasttime has been pointed out to me before. I remember reading somewhere that such a singleminded approach to one's hobby (or job, etc) is encouraged in school from an early age, precisely because that unwavering loyalty towards something is such an admirable quality in Japanese society (and a deep and thorough-- what in many shounen comics comes across as obsessive-- knowledge of that subject is an excellent way of demonstrating such a quality in a character. Thus the Intrepid Hero always saves the day by whipping out some obscure fact and using it to stupendous advantage). It took me a while to realize that that's precisely why most shounen comics aren't my cup of tea-- it's not a mindset with which I can easily identify. (And as an aside, it could have much to do with that peculiarly Japanese approach to Scary Obsessive Fans.)

(And as an aside, it could have much to do with that peculiarly Japanese approach to Scary Obsessive Fans.)

The Japanese have Scary Obsessive Fans? Surely nothing like us (http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/1015949.html#cutid1)?

Wo-hoa, I stand corrected. (I also need to scrub my eyeballs out now.)

Right now, I am trying to translate a few dozen pages of Okano Reiko's ideas about Taoist medicine and different variations on that nine character spell thingy. Woe and pain!

Man, do the J-E dictionaries not have accurate translations of any of these words.

No, they don't. It's sometimes easier to stick with kanji dictionary and root meanings, or even to check out the Chinese.

That's good advice. I was puzzling over all the Daoist terminology about searching for immortality for ages until I found some bilingual Mandarin-English pages. One term was eluding me, so I just translated it as "Immortalism" based on the kanji. Imagine my amusement when I found a ton of pages in English talking about "Immortalism" in Daoist tradition.

I'm rather glad I'm not doing this translation professionally or with a deadline.

This is probably re-stating several things, but you know, this is a fascinating topic.

I was talking to my dad about this the other day, how in the Chinese language there is a terminology that states a person can be good at several things; both the physical and the mental (in fact he/she may excel at it beyond someone who has devoted their lives to it) yet they are not invested in any of the things they excel at. There is no passion, no actual drive to be great at it, it is something that comes naturally to them.

While it lacks the negative cannotation that 'kiyou binbou' seem to have, it seems to be a closer (in idea?) translation of it then 'jack of all trades'. You see, to me, Jack of all trades implies that someone is a dabbler of many things but a master of none, while 'kiyou binbou' (and the Chinese term) literally seem to say that they are 'masters' of whatever they do. However, they are not passionate in any of the skills that they excel at, thus, they lack a certain drive (everything is easy, there is no reason to strive for greatness). And they will, more often than not, lose to someone with greater passions if not skill, because they latter wants it more than they (the master) will even wants it.

Hmm, I'm not sure if I'm making any sense, I've to think about this a bit more.

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