syllables in blossom
Aug. 5th, 2024 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiThe radio had a good idea the other day and programmed the Bach Coffee Cantata (basically a very short comic opera about a young lady who refuses to marry anyone who won’t let her drink coffee) with a piece written to go along with it called the Green Tea Concerto, by the modern composer Fujikura Dai. I liked it, and now I can’t find a recording of it anywhere! It’s not on YouTube, it’s not on the composer’s page. Oh well, maybe it will turn up later on; in the meantime, have a Flute Concerto also by Fujikura, nice and cool for the summer.
Reading bits of Lafcadio Hearn on account of last week’s![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
senzenwomen post about his wife Setsuko. From a letter to a friend:
okay, July is over (thank goodness; only the back half of summer to go); how much progress have I made with my self-imposed Chinese study plans? Some? I think?
If you recall the Japanese book I was talking about a few weeks back, the pseudo-pre-war-travelogue featuring a Japanese woman writer, Aoyama Chizuko, and her Taiwanese interpreter, Oh Chizuru|Wang Qianhe—I finally finished it.
Photos: Some more morning glories, other people’s nice flowers (a hibiscus and a purple thing I don’t know the name of), and my peppers and habaneros, which like the sun.
Be safe and well.
Reading bits of Lafcadio Hearn on account of last week’s
senzenwomen post about his wife Setsuko. From a letter to a friend: For me words have colour, form, character: They have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations; --they have moods, humours, eccentricities; --they have tints, tones, personalities. That they are unintelligible makes no difference at all. … Because people cannot see the colour of words, the tints of words, the secret ghostly motions of words; -- Because they cannot hear the whispering of words, the rustling of the procession of letters, the dream-flutes and dream-drums which are thinly and weirdly-played by words; -- Because they cannot perceive the pouting of words, the frowning and fuming of words, the weeping, the raging and racketing and rioting of words; -- Because they are insensible to the phosphorescing of words, the fragrance of words, the noisomeness of words, the tenderness or hardness, the dryness or juiciness of words, --the interchange of values in the gold, the silver, the brass and the copper of words,--
Is that any reason why we should not try to make them hear, to make them see, to make them feel? -- … Why should the people not be forcibly introduced to foreign words, --as they were introduced to tea and coffee and tobacco?
Unto which the friendly reply is, -- “Because they won’t buy your book, and you won’t make any money.”
And I say: --“Surely I have never yet made, and never expect to make any money. Neither do I expect to write ever for the multitude. I write for beloved friends who can see colour in words, can smell the perfume in syllables in blossom, can be shocked with the fine elfish electricity of words. And in the eternal order of things, words will eventually have their rights recognized by the people.”
okay, July is over (thank goodness; only the back half of summer to go); how much progress have I made with my self-imposed Chinese study plans? Some? I think?
I’ve been pretty diligent about doing a couple of hundred Anki cards daily, HSK words plus my words-grabbed-from-fic list (so many chengyu, I can’t do this) plus the Chinese Grammar Wiki sentences (with tinny’s Spoonfed Chinese deck lurking in wait when I need a new one). I’ve done several HSK6 practice tests, including the writing question, which is set up diabolically: you get ten minutes to read a passage of about 1000 characters, no taking notes, and then you have 35 minutes to summarize the paragraph in 400 characters or so, from memory. I assumed the passages would be impenetrable articles about the economy or the environment, full of complex words and 于s and 以s, but in fact they’re human-interest stories—how this couple met, what happened when the chef won the lottery, and so on—which are surprisingly easy to handle.
Otherwise, reading quite a lot of fic here and there, translating bits of it into English for my own consumption, also translating one very short fic of my own into Chinese—an excellent exercise but very difficult, and after all ZH-EN is a potentially achievable, if distant, professional goal, EN-ZH not so much. The trouble with using two lexically (?) related languages on a daily basis is that they keep sending out tendrils invading each other; my brain still has an embedded Japanese setting so that I can’t read the names of the songs 光 and 芽 as anything but hikari and me even though I know they’re actually in Chinese and thus guāng and yá. Conversely, Chinese words have started trying to fool me into thinking they’re Japanese; I caught myself saying to Y the other day 明日は何も安排してないから、I don’t have any plans for tomorrow, where 安排, plan, should have been something like 予定. (Not surprisingly he looked at me funny.) Also I was searching for a passage in a document at work and kept wondering why no matter how many times I typed “nuli” it would only convert to 塗り; finally I realized I should be typing “doryoku” 努力.
Also I’ve finished watching season 1 of the farming show (it only took me FOUR MONTHS of daily watching, with season 2 and then some yet to go); I don’t know if it’s having a measurable effect on my Chinese ability, but I remain singularly obsessed. To commemorate me having gotten halfway through, have three songs: the farmboys singing 后陡门的夏 and 麦芒 (this one is a live video, warning for flashing lights), and the theme song 芽 sung of course by Zhou Shen.
The latest in new words:
・无语 literally “speechless, wordless,” often used to indicate “I can’t be doing with this” or similar
・狗东西 a schmuck, a bastard, literally “dog thing.” This one I encountered when one of the farmboys was splashing frantically around in their duckpond trying to catch one of the ducks: he yelled something like 你这个狗东西！ to which another of them said 它是鸭东西, roughly “You son of a bitch!” “You mean, you son of a duck.”
・大名 full name, formal/government name; literally “big name,” opposite of 小名, “little name” or nickname (see also Zhao Yunlan introducing Da Qing to Shen Wei with 小名死猫)
・有一说一 telling it like it is, literally “have one, say one”
・钝感力, a Japanese loan word literally something like “power of obtuseness,” used to mean “stubbornly doing your thing without letting people throw you off course” (I think)
Otherwise, reading quite a lot of fic here and there, translating bits of it into English for my own consumption, also translating one very short fic of my own into Chinese—an excellent exercise but very difficult, and after all ZH-EN is a potentially achievable, if distant, professional goal, EN-ZH not so much. The trouble with using two lexically (?) related languages on a daily basis is that they keep sending out tendrils invading each other; my brain still has an embedded Japanese setting so that I can’t read the names of the songs 光 and 芽 as anything but hikari and me even though I know they’re actually in Chinese and thus guāng and yá. Conversely, Chinese words have started trying to fool me into thinking they’re Japanese; I caught myself saying to Y the other day 明日は何も安排してないから、I don’t have any plans for tomorrow, where 安排, plan, should have been something like 予定. (Not surprisingly he looked at me funny.) Also I was searching for a passage in a document at work and kept wondering why no matter how many times I typed “nuli” it would only convert to 塗り; finally I realized I should be typing “doryoku” 努力.
Also I’ve finished watching season 1 of the farming show (it only took me FOUR MONTHS of daily watching, with season 2 and then some yet to go); I don’t know if it’s having a measurable effect on my Chinese ability, but I remain singularly obsessed. To commemorate me having gotten halfway through, have three songs: the farmboys singing 后陡门的夏 and 麦芒 (this one is a live video, warning for flashing lights), and the theme song 芽 sung of course by Zhou Shen.
The latest in new words:
・无语 literally “speechless, wordless,” often used to indicate “I can’t be doing with this” or similar
・狗东西 a schmuck, a bastard, literally “dog thing.” This one I encountered when one of the farmboys was splashing frantically around in their duckpond trying to catch one of the ducks: he yelled something like 你这个狗东西！ to which another of them said 它是鸭东西, roughly “You son of a bitch!” “You mean, you son of a duck.”
・大名 full name, formal/government name; literally “big name,” opposite of 小名, “little name” or nickname (see also Zhao Yunlan introducing Da Qing to Shen Wei with 小名死猫)
・有一说一 telling it like it is, literally “have one, say one”
・钝感力, a Japanese loan word literally something like “power of obtuseness,” used to mean “stubbornly doing your thing without letting people throw you off course” (I think)
If you recall the Japanese book I was talking about a few weeks back, the pseudo-pre-war-travelogue featuring a Japanese woman writer, Aoyama Chizuko, and her Taiwanese interpreter, Oh Chizuru|Wang Qianhe—I finally finished it.
(To give it its proper title it’s 台湾漫游录 in the original, by 杨双子, and 台湾漫遊鉄道のふたり in Japanese, translated by 三浦裕子.) It was sadder than I expected—not a bad ending, but a very bittersweet one, made inevitable by the situation of the time. Also much more f/f than I expected, subtext pretty much textual, not surprising considering the afterword in which the author, Yang Shuangzi, says she writes 百合小说 (baihe or yuri novels). Going into detail, Chizuko falls hard for Chizuru, effectively proposing marriage more than once, but while Chizuru devotes herself not just to interpreting but to explaining Taiwan to Chizuko and preparing/tracking down all kinds of amazing Taiwanese food for her, she never quite lets down her guard, and eventually she breaks with Chizuko altogether. With some instruction from the Taiwanese-born Japanese civil servant Mishima (美島, an unusual name which has to be symbolic, suggesting “Formosa” as it does) who acts as substitute interpreter, Chizuko is eventually able to figure out that for all she adores Taiwan and loves Chizuru and declares herself against Japan’s imperialist tendencies, her protective/(m)paternalistic/I-know-what’s-best-for-you tendencies toward Chizuru are a mirror of Japan’s colonial attitude toward Taiwan.
This all makes the book sound like issuefic, but it’s well done enough that it feels real.
Reading it in Japanese is in itself a weird experience. The translator, Miura Yuko, is very good—I obviously haven’t read the original published in Taiwan and so can’t speak to the translation’s accuracy, but it feels natural, fluid and coherent (although I do think she should have let Chizuko speak Kyushu dialect occasionally). It makes more sense being in Japanese, because Chizuko, monolingual in that language, is the first-person narrator. Reading it in Chinese would be weird in that sense, although I’m curious about what it’s like. (Writing about it in English, or translating it likewise, brings up a problem not present in Japanese: what to call Chizuru? Chizuko thinks of her with the Japanese reading of her name, but are there points at which she should be Qianhe or Chian-Ho instead?)
The afterword notes that Chizuru is based in part on 杨千鹤 | Yang Chian-Ho , Taiwan’s first female journalist, and Chizuko in part on the Japanese writer Hayashi Fumiko, who traveled extensively in Indonesia as part of Japan’s wartime/colonial cultural programs (I wouldn’t have expected that; I have an idea of Fumiko as less resistant to nationalism than Chizuko in the novel, and also a lot more interested in sex (with men, not women, as far as I know) than in food).
The book brought to mind something else I was thinking about lately, what meikuree wrote about here as “first- and second-order description.” Her whole post (linked with kind permission--tell me if I've misinterpreted anything drastically here?) is worth a careful read and goes into a lot more things than I can discuss here, but to relate it to the book in question alone, Chizuko’s reactions to Taiwan and to Chizuru are dedicated to second-order descriptions (many of them food-related), what Mei’s post calls “interiority: the sculpting of perception, experience, and interpretation,” adding that it’s “also something you'd find in colonial anthropological writing, where the Other is treated to the exoticising gaze of a (presumed) white audience.” “White” is not in the equation here, but Chizuko’s gaze is, as she discovers to her regret, unquestionably coming from the suzerain direction. (The reserved and unfriendly Mishima specializes in the more “objective” first-order descriptions or exteriority, perhaps as a formal defense against his own mixed-up interior identity as a Taiwanese-born Japanese.) Chizuko’s aim, in spending a year living in Taiwan and writing a travelogue (which in fact eventually becomes an autobiographical novel) about it, is what Mei calls “the ability to refract the big hegemonic cloud of ‘culture’ through the prism of individuated senses and impressions, supposedly,[ ] what demonstrates a writer's real thoughtfulness about what living somewhere is like.” And it takes her most of a year with Chizuru to realize how she has been failing at it and why; how her individuated senses and impressions are refractions in ways she can’t see herself of her own big hegemonic cloud.
(and to put different bits of this post together, getting into the question of first- and second-order description in Lafcadio Hearn would be a whole ‘nother post or possibly a dissertation…)
This is getting very long; I want to look again at this first- and second-order description idea (along with the related concept of emic and etic?) in the context of SFF worldbuilding, but I think that’s going to happen on another day, if meikuree will forgive me for dragging her post all over… .
This all makes the book sound like issuefic, but it’s well done enough that it feels real.
Reading it in Japanese is in itself a weird experience. The translator, Miura Yuko, is very good—I obviously haven’t read the original published in Taiwan and so can’t speak to the translation’s accuracy, but it feels natural, fluid and coherent (although I do think she should have let Chizuko speak Kyushu dialect occasionally). It makes more sense being in Japanese, because Chizuko, monolingual in that language, is the first-person narrator. Reading it in Chinese would be weird in that sense, although I’m curious about what it’s like. (Writing about it in English, or translating it likewise, brings up a problem not present in Japanese: what to call Chizuru? Chizuko thinks of her with the Japanese reading of her name, but are there points at which she should be Qianhe or Chian-Ho instead?)
The afterword notes that Chizuru is based in part on 杨千鹤 | Yang Chian-Ho , Taiwan’s first female journalist, and Chizuko in part on the Japanese writer Hayashi Fumiko, who traveled extensively in Indonesia as part of Japan’s wartime/colonial cultural programs (I wouldn’t have expected that; I have an idea of Fumiko as less resistant to nationalism than Chizuko in the novel, and also a lot more interested in sex (with men, not women, as far as I know) than in food).
The book brought to mind something else I was thinking about lately, what meikuree wrote about here as “first- and second-order description.” Her whole post (linked with kind permission--tell me if I've misinterpreted anything drastically here?) is worth a careful read and goes into a lot more things than I can discuss here, but to relate it to the book in question alone, Chizuko’s reactions to Taiwan and to Chizuru are dedicated to second-order descriptions (many of them food-related), what Mei’s post calls “interiority: the sculpting of perception, experience, and interpretation,” adding that it’s “also something you'd find in colonial anthropological writing, where the Other is treated to the exoticising gaze of a (presumed) white audience.” “White” is not in the equation here, but Chizuko’s gaze is, as she discovers to her regret, unquestionably coming from the suzerain direction. (The reserved and unfriendly Mishima specializes in the more “objective” first-order descriptions or exteriority, perhaps as a formal defense against his own mixed-up interior identity as a Taiwanese-born Japanese.) Chizuko’s aim, in spending a year living in Taiwan and writing a travelogue (which in fact eventually becomes an autobiographical novel) about it, is what Mei calls “the ability to refract the big hegemonic cloud of ‘culture’ through the prism of individuated senses and impressions, supposedly,[ ] what demonstrates a writer's real thoughtfulness about what living somewhere is like.” And it takes her most of a year with Chizuru to realize how she has been failing at it and why; how her individuated senses and impressions are refractions in ways she can’t see herself of her own big hegemonic cloud.
(and to put different bits of this post together, getting into the question of first- and second-order description in Lafcadio Hearn would be a whole ‘nother post or possibly a dissertation…)
This is getting very long; I want to look again at this first- and second-order description idea (along with the related concept of emic and etic?) in the context of SFF worldbuilding, but I think that’s going to happen on another day, if meikuree will forgive me for dragging her post all over… .
Photos: Some more morning glories, other people’s nice flowers (a hibiscus and a purple thing I don’t know the name of), and my peppers and habaneros, which like the sun.
Be safe and well.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-07 01:09 am (UTC)The morning glories are beautiful~ (and I feel like biting the habanero, which is probably not a good idea irl)
no subject
Date: 2024-08-07 01:01 pm (UTC)and yeah, as you say, interesting and complicated. I'm so fascinated by the idea of a Taiwanese writer telling this story from the perspective of a (fictional) Japanese writer, it's so audacious and so nicely done.
and glad you liked the photos! I use the habaneros to flavor Thai curry but I am VERY careful not actually to eat them lol.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-10 07:48 pm (UTC)The many layers of translation inception XD It feels like either language it's read in, the text will be an interesting study, because of the layers of decisions at every step (that also intersects with each other + probably passage of time x geopolitics). So fascinating!
no subject
Date: 2024-08-11 12:47 pm (UTC)Yes! I mean, it's all technically fiction written in the modern day, but it's doing amazing things creating this complex structure of, as you say, language and decisions and time and geopolitics...