Two translations

[flemmings]

So Waley translates a poem of Ts'ao Sung's, however you write that in pinyin (and unless you can write it in pinyin you can't find anything googling, evidently: certainly not how it's written in Chinese):

A Protest in the Sixth Year of Ch'ien Fu (AD 879)

The hills and rivers of the lowland country
     You have made into your battle-ground.
How do you suppose the people who live there
     Will procure 'firewood and hay'?
Do not let me hear you talking together
     About titles and promotions;
For a single general's reputation
     Is made out of ten thousand corpses.

I know this one from an idiosyncratic, quirky but to me immensely useful book of translations called Old Friend from Far Away by C.H. Kwock and Vincent McHugh. (Someone called it a lost classic. Glad I have a copy.) Quirky because of how they lay out the poems- which necessitates me using the unwieldy rich text format for this entry, because otherwise all spaces must be hand-coded, and god knows there are spaces. Also words written above and below the lines, which I can't do in RTF but, annoyingly, could in hand-code html. 

Lowland hills and rivers
                       dragged on to the war map
              O lowland lowlands O!
Those groaning people!
how can they live?
                                       A turnip or two
                                       grubbed up
Don't talk to me
                                       about titles
                                          promotions
                                          all that slop
One general
pulling out a victory

                    leaves
                                   ten
                                   thousand
                                   corpses
                                          to rot!

There's a dialogue at the end of the book between the two translators where they talk about this poem:

V.MCH: What about that 'War Year' poem we did?
C.H.K.: Oh? The Ts'ao Sung? ... remember, we thought the original was pretty flat. Just another Confucian diatribe against war.
V.MCH: Yes, but we-- or I, rather- got pretty far off it. Why did we want to do it anyhow? Because it had that strong ending about the corpses?
C.H.K.: Yes. Do you have it?

V.MCH: Your literal version? Yes, it's here.

Marshland;/ rivers(&)mountains/ (have been)included/ war map
Lowland     territories                                    (into)

People;/ (in) what/ way;/ (could)enjoy;/ sticks(&)weeds
Population;          plan;            relish;

(I) request;/ you/ never/ discuss/ (military) promotion/ matters
     ask
One/ general;/ (after)achievements/ made/ 10,0000/ bones;
                                                             numerous; corpses
                                                             (have)dried up;
                                                               rotten

C.H.K.: Yes. And you remember when we sent it out round-robin with   the other poems to the consultants... -sent the first finished version, I mean, Dr. San-su Lin and her husband Dr Paul Lin wrote us that the second line simply meant: "What can the (suffering) people do for a living now? 
....
I like it. It's really better than the Mandarin.
V.MCH: Oh, it's a *poem* all right, in English. But that quote from an English ballad! And the way I kept playing that open O all through the first four lines. ... The taste's all right. But it's the furthest off an original we ever got.
      You know, I feel now that almost any getting away from the text- anything you're not forced into, I mean- is probably a mistake. I wonder at myself. Why didn't I try harder to do something with that 'sticks and grasses' in line two? It's better than the turnip thing. And closer. To the fact, I mean. Everything happens in Chinese famines. Clay-eating. Cannibalism.

And here is feliciter's translation, complete with graceful rhymes:

Lowland territories marked on a war map:
Poor souls, to lose their joy of life.
Prithee speak not of spoils, old chap;
Ten thousand deaths rise from one man's strife.

Comments

[feliciter.livejournal.com]

(apologies for the intrusion, please feel free to delete if desired)

The entirety of 曹松 (Cao Song's) poem 己亥岁 (literally, the stem-branch name of the sixth year of the Qian Fu era of the Tang dynasty = AD 879) is:

泽国(The marsh countries=lowland)江山 (rivers and mountains = territory)入战图(entered on war-maps)
生民(The poor inhabitants,)何计(how can they even obtain)乐(the simple "joys")樵苏 (of brushwood and hay)
凭君(Prithee) 莫话(forbear talk of)封侯事 (ennoblements and such)
一将(A single general's)功成 (accomplishments amount to)万骨枯(ten thousand withered bones)

In pinyin:
ze guo jiang shan ru zhan tu
sheng min he ji le qiao su
ping jun (can't type umlaut, sorry) mo hua feng hou shi (pronounced more like "shir" than the Japanese, but surely I am being redundant)
yi jiang gong cheng wan gu ku

(mistakes in translation are all mine, original text taken from here (http://www.artx.cn/artx/shici/7317.html)

Incidentally, AD 879 was the year before Huang Chao's (黄巢) peasant rebellion, which had been raging for some time, took him into Chang'an; you may remember that he penned the poem 《不第后赋菊》：


待到秋来九月八
我花开罢百花杀
冲天香阵透长安
满城尽带黄金甲 (from which Curse of the Golden Flower took its Mandarin title)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much. This is exactly what I wanted to know.

(Kicks self for not realizing that a W-G Ts'ao is likely to turn into a Dynasty Warriors Cow, and that a W-G Sung, like the dynasty, will become a pinyin Song. Bad enough having two ways of writing the Chinese, say I, but two ways of writing the Englishing is enough to make a parson swear.)

What's interesting about your literal version is that to me it comes across quite strong enough as it is. It doesn't need either Waley's expansion (which to my mind blunts the punch) or the Old Friend's free-flight adaptation (which, granted, they admit to being more adaptation than translation.)

Is *that* how they arrived at the name Curse of the Golden Flower? Good god. Someone wasn't thinking straight.

ETA: having googled Huang Chao, about whom I knew nothing- sheesh, nasty man. "...captured Guangzhou in 879, killing most of the 200,000 inhabitants including most of the large colony of foreign merchant families there." 10,000 corpses? Try 20万.

[feliciter.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! Glad you found it useful.

(I was taught only pinyin, so W-G throws me every time with the apostrophes and such.)

Chinese poetry is frustratingly succinct and multi-layered: 生民 when inverted to 民生 can mean "all the people" (not just lowlanders, implying the extent of destruction); the use of 乐 is ironic in that brushwood and hay are hardly pleasures, but the people are denied even these. And 功成 reversed is 成功 (success). Which is impossible to convey in a straightforward translation, much less a structured one.

I...have no idea who and how they came up with the name. Perhaps they thought it sounded better than the literal translation? *facepalm*

Huang Chao was quite a piece of work; failed in several attempts at the Imperial Exams and was originally a civil servant (make of that what you will *g*)

thanks for friending me! I hope you don't mind if I friend you back? Truth be told have been lurking around for a while and find your posts fascinating.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Chinese poetry is frustratingly succinct and multi-layered

*Yes*. Like Japanese court verse, probably-impossible to render in a single English sentence all the possible meanings and nuances packed into a few words. You need a page of notes just to understand it. The Japanese I can pick apart, just, but the Chinese will always be beyond me. And I still can't refrain from picking at it, just to get what I can get.

If they didn't realize that anything with 'curse' in it will at once evoke associations of pulp fiction and schlock films (The Mummy's Curse)- well, maybe they weren't Americans. I haven't seen the film, since every Chinese person who's mentioned it has had fits and cows, to put it mildly; though the repeated mentions of 'operatic quality' in the western reviews intrigue me. Opera covers a multitude of sins (like *ahem* many stock BL tropes.) If Yang Zimou was aiming for Aida, maybe that explains why everyone missed his point. Still not sure I can take all that cloth of gold and what someone called Curse of the Golden Boobies.

Clearly, failed bureaucrats become murdering tyrants. That yer average bureaucrat nurses a deep hostility to and hatred of humanity that rivals a Jingiz Khan or Tamurlaine's is no secret to those who must deal with them. (/the urami of one who endured a provincial inspection just last week)

Oh, please friend away, and thanks. ljs are there to be read, I always figure.