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Woxin fic
Wanted to do a February prompt but the theme was still last December's. This, BTW, is what happens when people who don't read Chinese read Chinese stories.
Three Angles
1. Fu Chai looks up at Gou Jian
The Prince of Yue is never still. He shifts from foot to foot, turns half away, looks over his shoulder, raises a hand, turns back again. Silk whispers with his every movement. He's a candle flame, flickering and bending with every passing current of air. No, not quite as fickle as that. A pale fire, colourless, dancing over dry wood, that the eye can barely follow. 'You will regret it,' Fu Chai tells him. But the fire doesn't care. The wood grows brown, goes black, explodes into conflagration: and then one can see the ferocious orange and red and yellow of it, once the whole land is ablaze.
2. Fu Chai looks down at Gou Jian
The King of Yue enters his hall slowly, so slowly. His leather armour is drenched and his robe heavy with melted snow. He throws himself on his back at the stairs' foot and lies there, at Fu Chai's feet, motionless as a broken doll. All dark, all black: the fire doused by defeat and exhaustion, only a charred mass of leaves and branches sinking into the sodden sullen earth. Oh, he will die; he's half-dead already. 'This isn't the time for it,' Fu Chai tells him. 'Not yet.' There's no victory in conquering a corpse. When the fire returns to Gou Jian's soul, then Fu Chai will know his triumph.
3. Fu Chai looks straight at Gou Jian
The King of Wu leaves his hall slowly, and walks, so slowly, to where the five men of Yue wait below the steps. Gou Jian and his generals and his advisers, wooden dolls dressed and posed in an unreal tableau. Fu Chai looks at the face of the figure in the centre, his enemy and slave and conqueror. There's nothing there. No triumph, no satisfaction, no identifiable feeling at all. 'You didn't expect to see Us here?' The king of Yue's words sound dry and meaningless, a lesson learned by rote. The fire never did return to Gou Jian's soul; that's why he won. The chill dark coldness of his winter heart was enough to freeze and starve the great glowing bonfire of Fu Chai's glory. Fu Chai's kingdom and riches, his son and his lover, even the pride and ambition that was his before all those other things, are become only ashes and the memory of ashes.
Fu Chai feels no regret because Fu Chai can no longer feel. The coldness has him too. There's no victory in conquering a corpse, and so there's no defeat in being conquered by a corpse. The dead King of Wu kneels and puts his sword into the dead hands of the King of Yue. And thinks only, 'Now it's time.'
Three Angles
1. Fu Chai looks up at Gou Jian
The Prince of Yue is never still. He shifts from foot to foot, turns half away, looks over his shoulder, raises a hand, turns back again. Silk whispers with his every movement. He's a candle flame, flickering and bending with every passing current of air. No, not quite as fickle as that. A pale fire, colourless, dancing over dry wood, that the eye can barely follow. 'You will regret it,' Fu Chai tells him. But the fire doesn't care. The wood grows brown, goes black, explodes into conflagration: and then one can see the ferocious orange and red and yellow of it, once the whole land is ablaze.
2. Fu Chai looks down at Gou Jian
The King of Yue enters his hall slowly, so slowly. His leather armour is drenched and his robe heavy with melted snow. He throws himself on his back at the stairs' foot and lies there, at Fu Chai's feet, motionless as a broken doll. All dark, all black: the fire doused by defeat and exhaustion, only a charred mass of leaves and branches sinking into the sodden sullen earth. Oh, he will die; he's half-dead already. 'This isn't the time for it,' Fu Chai tells him. 'Not yet.' There's no victory in conquering a corpse. When the fire returns to Gou Jian's soul, then Fu Chai will know his triumph.
3. Fu Chai looks straight at Gou Jian
The King of Wu leaves his hall slowly, and walks, so slowly, to where the five men of Yue wait below the steps. Gou Jian and his generals and his advisers, wooden dolls dressed and posed in an unreal tableau. Fu Chai looks at the face of the figure in the centre, his enemy and slave and conqueror. There's nothing there. No triumph, no satisfaction, no identifiable feeling at all. 'You didn't expect to see Us here?' The king of Yue's words sound dry and meaningless, a lesson learned by rote. The fire never did return to Gou Jian's soul; that's why he won. The chill dark coldness of his winter heart was enough to freeze and starve the great glowing bonfire of Fu Chai's glory. Fu Chai's kingdom and riches, his son and his lover, even the pride and ambition that was his before all those other things, are become only ashes and the memory of ashes.
Fu Chai feels no regret because Fu Chai can no longer feel. The coldness has him too. There's no victory in conquering a corpse, and so there's no defeat in being conquered by a corpse. The dead King of Wu kneels and puts his sword into the dead hands of the King of Yue. And thinks only, 'Now it's time.'
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The fire never did return to Gou Jian's soul; that's why he won.
;_;
what happens when people who don't read Chinese read Chinese stories
(now I'm curious)
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(now I'm curious)
Language scrim. When you don't know a language well, and even more, when you barely know it at all, words resonate quite differently than they do for a native speaker. Literal meanings hit you between the eyes, where a native speaker registers only the accepted sense. (I was *so* struck the first time I read the Japanese word for unfortunate, 気の毒, poison of the soul. Now I just register it as unfortunate or sad.)
Thus the images in kareny's opening paragraphs, hacked out hanzi by hanzi, made me re-visualize the first encounter between Gou Jian and Fu Chai. 任山巒崔嵬宮阙華美 and all (even as I wonder what that 任 can possibly mean.) Sort of 'oh! I never knew you could look at it that way, let's try this in English.'
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Absolutely true. Though I used to get tripped up frequently by "false friends" in Chinese and Japanese (numerous by definition because of kanji), that was half the fun of learning the lingo.
*scratches head at 任山巒崔嵬宮阙華美* - is that fuzzy html (in the fic site and/or LJ), or the fragment of an extremely oblique sentence with esoteric descriptions? Especially since some of these words are traditional hanzi, and IIRC kareny's fic is completely in simplified Mandarin.
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初次的会面，是在越国青黑幽深的大殿。他长身立于石阶之上，透进大殿的日光正投在他身上，然而他往那里一站，连日光都似乎不是暖的，幽幽透着月亮一般的冷意。
黑衣黑冠，窄袍大袖，面容明整。凝重静谧之处，似有仙风道骨。
可偏生他的神情却全不像个得道之人，虽庄重淡漠，却透着一股子的心高气傲，不可一世。寒如水，冷如冰，任山峦崔嵬宫阙华美，也及不过他万分之一高贵
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任山峦崔嵬宫阙华美，也及不过他万分之一高贵
任 in this case meaning to allow, or give free rein to something/someone - human or otherwise. So one could also say, no matter how (high the peaks, or glorious the palaces)
Even better is the internal rhyme (sorta) of 嵬,美 and 贵 and the simile(?) of mountains corresponding (sorry don't know exact literary terms) to 高, and magnificent expensive palaces to 贵. Gou Jian is both a force of nature and a work of art.
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So true. I first noticed literal meanings only when I started doing translations, and they lend a marvellous flavour to the language.
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