[HN Gopher] Bai Juyi: The Tang dynasty's baldest poet
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Bai Juyi: The Tang dynasty's baldest poet
Author : apollinaire
Score : 31 points
Date : 2022-10-02 05:03 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.medievalists.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.medievalists.net)
| case0x00 wrote:
| It's interesting the very different roles hair has played in
| philosophical movements: the bald Buddhist monks, the beard-
| growing Greek philosophers, and here the growing of long hair in
| Confucianism.
|
| Unrelated to above, but I wonder how much beauty is lost in
| poetry with translation. Specifically, I wonder how much is
| actually changed between the original and the English
| translation... but I wouldn't even know how to quantify that.
| Blissful ignorance, perhaps.
| exolymph wrote:
| Facial hair also figured in the persecution of Russian Old
| Believers near the end of the 17th century! "Old Believers had
| to pay double taxation and a separate tax for wearing a beard)"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers#After_the_schism
|
| Hair is so visible, which makes it ideal for social signaling
| of all sorts. For example, if you know someone with beautiful
| long hair, that demonstrates both their physical health and
| their conscientiousness.
|
| > Unrelated to above, but I wonder how much beauty is lost in
| poetry with translation. Specifically, I wonder how much is
| actually changed between the original and the English
| translation... but I wouldn't even know how to quantify that.
| Blissful ignorance, perhaps.
|
| I also often wonder this about translations. I feel most
| comfortable with translations produced while the author is
| still living. And ideally the author has at least some facility
| with the language to which their work is being translated,
| which allows them to collaborate with the translator. Two
| authors who fall into this category are Haruki Murakami and
| Eugene Vodolazkin -- I'm sure there are others as well.
| (Perhaps this dynamic is less available for languages that
| aren't as ubiquitous than English.)
|
| If I recall correctly -- which I may not -- Nabokov translated
| some of his own Russian works into English, and/or worked with
| his son? Hopefully someone else can correct my faulty memory
| here :)
| sorokod wrote:
| I had a conversation about translations with an actual
| author, some things I learned from him
|
| * It is not possible to specify in advance how a good
| translation looks like, it is one of those "I know it is good
| when I see it". Naturally this assumes that the author can
| read the destination language reasonably well, otherwise they
| don't have a clue.
|
| * When authors can read the translation, they tend to feel
| very strongly about it. An author payed a large sum of money
| for a translation, hated it, binned it and payed another
| translator to start from scratch.
|
| * Many good translators (by whatever good may mean here) are
| not authors themselves.
|
| WRT Nabokov, some of his works were originally written in
| English - Lolita for example. He then went ahead and
| translated Lolita to Russian.
| sorokod wrote:
| The whole process is fascinating. The author encodes some
| mental structures into a language, at its lowest level, a
| sequence of letters. The reader decodes the letters into their
| own mental structures - the whole author reader interaction is
| very fragile.
|
| Enter the translator, he picks the original sequence of
| characters in the source language, translates them into a
| sequence of character in destination language so that the
| reader of that destination language can decode the characters
| into their personal mental structures. Amazing.
| [deleted]
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