nnozomi

Short clip of Zhu Yilong making friends with a shy cat; linked because a) adorable and also b) I hope Bai Yu saw him saying to the cat 你知不知道喵喵喵什么意思呀 and called him up to say YOU OWE ME ONE.

I have a translation job involving a lot of junior-high level math worksheets, which is taking me back. I was okay at math, but uninterested, up through eleventh grade, with just occasional flashes of algebra-related ooh, that’s neat; I damn near failed calculus my senior year (with a teacher who’d won national teaching awards, too), and have pretty much managed to avoid math and its relations ever since. I’m awed by people who are not only good at it but find it interesting, it just makes me think there’s something fundamentally different about the way our brains work (the same way it’s hard for me to understand that not everybody finds language learning intrinsically fun).

Veranda report: my morning glories are not good at multitasking, they can bloom or grow but not both at once, and for a while they’ve been specializing in the latter. The veranda is now a complete tangle of wires and morning glory vines. I’m hoping they will make good on their growth and bloom more in September or October, knock wood. Lemon tree growing more pointless leaves, enough already, give me some lemons! Mint syrup achieved again, time for mint soda or maybe something more adventurous if I can think of it, any ideas? Cherry tomato plant successfully repotted and seems to be growing with a little more energy? although it hasn’t managed any new flowers yet, knock wood again.

Chinese: mostly Anki and fic reading, with some ongoing translation practice. New words from the farmboys, somewhat game-related:
· 拿铁 the phonetic word for “latte” as in coffee, why they chose these characters I’ll never know (and why it’s nátiě instead of latiě).
· 头头是道 entirely logical, perfectly correct
· 绝了 slang for “too much,” “incredible,” used both negatively and positively
· 接龙 shiritori—I can’t remember the English name for this game, the one where you say a word starting with the last letter of the word the person before you said?
· 捉迷藏 hide and seek
· 说了算 what I say goes, that’s the final word on the subject

High school baseball tournament, featuring as usual sunburned buzz-cut teenage boys with improbably kira-kira names. Some of my favorites this time around: 利朱夢, pronounced “Rhythm”; 凱塁 (pronounced “Kyle”) and 球児, both clearly destined for baseball from birth, since 塁 is a base and 球児 is another word for a high school baseball player; 七聖, 吏紗, and 琥珀, all charming names more typically used for girls (琥珀, not a common name either way, means “amber”), and 空輝星, whose family name means “sky” and first name means “shining star.”

Some music that’s been in my head lately: Who Cares, one of the Gershwins’ best; He Can Do It, from Purlie; Les Barricades Mysterieuses (Couperin), and Jiang Dunhao singing a slow version of his 麦芒.

Rereading some Cynthia Voigt; like (the very different) Peter Dickinson, I think she’s one of those writers who would be considered a major 20th-c. author if genre (in her case, MG/YA and some fantasy) wasn’t a thing. She really needs a whole essay, not a paragraph in the middle of another post, but lately the one I was reading was The Vandemark Mummy, which is kind of about the importance of integrity and scholarship and family and feminism, as seen by a perceptive (and slightly psychic) but not especially academic or introspective twelve-year-old boy, in the context of a well-constructed mystery. It’s beautifully written in her deceptively straightforward style, with some incredible set pieces (Phineas going through the basement in the middle of the night). I also think it would make a very good movie, if they cast Althea right and didn’t make her too conventionally pretty.
ETA as it occurred to me: it would be really interesting to read The Vandemark Mummy alongside Gaudy Night, because although obviously very different they treat some of the same themes in (mutatis mutandis) similar contexts... it's the middle of the night right now, but I want to think more about this one...

Photos: quite a lot today. Bubbles against a shrine background; a cleverly concealed Jiji-chan, too hot to do anything more than open her eyes and give me the fish-eye; another cat I don’t know, eating her vegetables; some fresh figs; some sarusuberi, ah, crepe myrtle; a house with its own greenery; a humongous, translucent hibiscus; trees and sky; a fried-egg flower (no, I don’t know its real name); the neighbor’s morning glories; and a road sign that tickled me because all four of the place names on it are 難読地名, ie you have to live around there or you’ll never figure out how to pronounce them.

Be safe and well.

·I made (?) two things. The Guardian fic which is basically all my Zhao Xinci feelings in one place is now complete and ended up running to 35K, twice as long as the next longest fic I’ve ever written, which I did not expect. (Wish to hell I could write 35K of even vaguely coherent original work in six weeks!) I think maybe I’ve gotten Zhao Xinci out of my system for a while, but who knows. The fic is also, inevitably, another entry in my administration-saves-the-world series.
Also I’ve spent, oh dear, almost two months poking at another Chinese translation for fun, this one of an interview of Zhu Yilong and Ni Ni, to be found here (on the 0630 sheet), while the original interview is here (via the blessed Wenella; I don’t think she’s posted a proper translation of it, but I may just have missed it). Please note that it is spoilery for 消失的她|Lost in the Stars. Rife with my mistakes as usual, although a-Pei and Xi-laoshi helped me with some of the stickiest places. Notable for very sweet chemistry between them, Ni Ni doing about 2/3 of the talking (see also: all Zhu Yilong’s other shared interviews ever), Ni Ni explaining why she respects him as an actor and also giving him hell (“this from you, Mr. character bleed?”) when she feels he needs it.

·In other cdrama news, elen and I just finished watching Under the Skin, which I enjoyed a lot—good leads, good ensemble cast, lots of competence kink and interesting plot writing. Typically, I fell for a character who only appears in four episodes (Lu Haizhou, played by Zhang Tao), at first because he reminded me of a younger Chen Moqun, and then I kept liking him more the more I saw of him. Am I going to do anything with this? Who knows.

·Listening to San-San-San as it’s known in Japanese, more properly the St.-Saëns Third Symphony, which I’m never gonna get a chance to perform because amateur orchestras can’t afford to do pieces with organs in them, but it’s one of my very favorites and blows me away every single time. I realized that the first measures, the premonitory muttering of the strings, invariably come with a very strong sensory memory: standing on the upper balcony of the vast auditorium where my father’s orchestra rehearsed, listening to them play it, and eating something nougaty and delicious (not white nougat like Toblerones, German-style nougat like this).

·The high school baseball tournament is on—almost over, actually—and I’ve been following it on TV (every game in the national tournament is broadcast on national TV in full, it’s Japan’s national religion, you only think I’m joking) and hoping the Keio team wins, because I’m shallow: unlike almost all the other teams, whose players wear regulated buzz cuts, they’re allowed to have proper hair. Would like to think this also means that they’re somewhat free of the oppressively regulated culture of high school baseball (the fictional Nishiura High School being a shining exception, come to think of it they also have no hair rules), but who knows.

·Reading a couple of Japanese books about language learning experiences.

This got quite long

One is by one of those journalists whose motto is to go places nobody else does and do things nobody else has done, in the course of which he ended up learning bits of French, Lingala, Bomitaba, Spanish, Thai, Burmese, Shan, Chinese, and Wa (three of which I had to look up how to spell in English). His accounts of how to get a working knowledge of a language from scratch on the ground are really interesting (get a native speaker to come up with a bunch of similar but not identical sentences, ie “I eat, you eat, he eats” or “She goes, she went, she will go” etc., and figure out the grammar empirically), and tempt one to go learn a brand-new language somewhere. He talks about having difficulty connecting with French speakers from France, even when having a grasp of the language: “If only the French had different ethnolanguages!” referencing how a sure way to get into conversation in the Congo countries was to ask someone “So what’s your native language?” given the plethora of possible answers. (He really doesn’t like French: I was tickled by the complaint that in French “not only do all the consonants at the ends of words disappear, when there’s a vowel placed after them all these presumed-dead consonants rise up like zombies, it’s a horror show”). He also put me on to “Yokohama Pidgin Japanese,” apparently used for communication among foreigners and Japanese in Meiji-era Yokohama, as summed up in a comical/alarming “dictionary” published in 1879 which has to be seen to be believed (Orientalist all to hell but with not much mercy for foreigners either, and containing an appendix contrasting Chinese and Western pronunciations of Japanese). Weirdly, one of the sites that came up when I looked it up belongs to a university professor whose linguistics research I became familiar with after having met him in a completely different context (friend of a friend of a friend, it’s complicated, he got me some wonderful recordings I couldn’t have found elsewhere). Finally, this journalist describes spending a year in a remote village in the Wa State, speaking three languages (or a language and two dialects, depending on who you ask) none of which he was fluent in. He talks about someone in the village receiving a letter with news that their correspondent was in good health—mailed two years and four months ago, the time lag making him think of communication among different solar systems.
The other book, which I’m actually still working my way through, is by a younger guy who talks about learning Romanian and becoming a published author in Romanian while hardly ever leaving his apartment in Tokyo. I am really turned off by the linguistic tone, which is a sort of heavy forced colloquial style, with 俺 (casual male pronoun) instead of one of the more neutral ones, って instead of と (as in speech, not writing), and だよ thrown in at the end of every sentence, like having “I mean…” or “y’know?” scattered everywhere. (It could be that it grates on me because the latter in particular is very East Japan, and clashes with my West Japan-assimilated ears, but who knows.) He does have some interesting things to say, though, including a discussion of how to translate the title of Usami Rin’s novel 推し、燃ゆ into Romanian, without losing the distinction of the online slang, the comma, and the archaic verb declension (the English title is apparently Idol, Burning; I think My Fave, Aflame might work). Will report further later if he comes up with anything else to the point by the time I finish the book.

Be safe and well.

・Thank you very much indeed, anonymous benefactor (恩人？) who promptly followed up on my grumbling in the previous post by gifting me a paid account both here and at guardian_learning! Such a kind thing to do. Please let me know how to pay you back? Likewise if anyone is in need of a paid account but finding it hard to afford, or knows someone who is, drop me a line so I can do some paying forward. No time limit in either case.

・Still health-related gloomy, still (knock wood) in the tiresome rather than serious category. That aside, reminding myself to appreciate ordinary uneventful daily life... .

・For comfort, have Take 6 singing "Gold Mine". (I was going to say this is probably the only specifically Christian piece of music you'll see me post, but I forgot about, like, requiems and cantatas and so on and so forth. You know what I mean. For what it's worth, my atheist-Jew father absolutely adored this song...)

・Rereading the Mass-Observation wartime diaries, which deserve their own post sometime soon, both for funny and for painfully topical/relatable (see: pandemic, Ukraine, etc. etc.). “...Later in the day the depression wore off, but after 6 o’clock I asked a [nurse] what the news was; she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s too depressing.’” (Edward Stebbing, April 10, 1941) “There are the twin dragons, ‘too tired’ and ‘no time.’” (Edith Oakley, September 21, 1943)

・Random slightly silly Chinese question: You add 还 to good things to make them a bit less good, so 好 is good and 还好 is okay. So how do we translate 还OK?

・Just to confuse my Japanese/Chinese brain entirely, the Japanese novel I was reading included the word 那辺, with a pronunciation gloss of “nahen” and meaning “where.” Miura Shion, don’t do this to me.

・Watching bits of the spring high school baseball tournament and thinking about the various baseball players whose names suggest that they’re fulfilling lifelong expectations. The onetime Hanshin Tigers star closer, Fujikawa Kyuji, is named 球児 , kid who plays baseball. There’s a kid this year called Suzuki Rui, whose first name, 塁, means “base” as in first-second-third. The Yakult Swallows used to have a center fielder called Manaka Mitsuru, whose family name, 真中, means “dead center.” Another of this year’s high school kids actually goes him one better: he’s a center fielder whose family name is just 中, center, only it’s pronounced Atari, which is the word for a hit...

・I have some other (slightly less silly) language stuff to post about, and I’m still thinking about the post on translation I’ve had in mind for ages; sometime soon.

・Photos (now that I have all this wonderful paid-account photo capacity!) This year’s first cherry blossoms. Some not!lilies-of-the-valley, and some pretty blue starflowers (that’s not their name, I don’t know their name), and some flowers which are not actually flowers. A city canal, a real tree and a graffiti tree, and a vending machine which does not sell drinks.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

Daily life: Baseball is back for the spring, the high school tournament this week and real baseball beginning next week. Assuming they're taking suitable precautions, it's very comforting to have Koshien back after the gap last year--the spring and summer high school tournaments are as close to a religion as modern Japan gets, televised in their entirety and practically mythologized.

Music: The radio introduced me to Grażyna Bacewicz, new to me and very much my thing in her combination of neoclassical and modern. (Having been working with a fictional Polish composer, it's nice to spend some time with a real one.) She seems to have been someone worth knowing as well, with a pleasing turn of phrase. "My role is to do what I do tolerably, of course without standing still. So I will continue to write for our old instruments, but looking for new expression, by caring for the originality of the form, musical language and choice of instruments. What will come out of this--who the hell knows."

Books: In keeping with the above baseball news I've been catching up on Oofuri (Big Windup), one of the few manga I read regularly, a realist, down-to-earth, affectionate, unsentimental high school baseball story. (Not actually BL, but Higuchi Asa definitely knows which doors she's leaving open to that interpretation.)
(Edited to add: this morning I saw two high school kids in the park, swinging bats experimentally (not a euphemism) and chattering--"Well, the way batters used to do it...". I felt like I'd had a visitation from a couple of the manga characters.)

Chinese: I learned a helpful new phrase, 心有余而力不足, which I believe should be translated as "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."

Writing: Still receiving useful advice. I think I can solve a lot of problems by handling one secondary character somewhat differently, but I'm not sure where to go with that yet.

Photos: ( A selection from some long walks lately )

Be safe and well.

so I mentioned I've been reading, and occasionally writing, fanfiction. Having seen that people write real-people-fic about baseball players, mostly having them sleep with one another, I'm very sad that there aren't any fics in English about Japanese baseball. I am being horribly tempted to write a fic slashing Yuki Saito with Masahiro Tanaka. It would have a nice built-in plot arc, thank you Koshien finals fifteen-inning tie etc. etc., would in fact be ridiculously easy to do (allowing for the fact that, you know, I don't really know what either one of them is like as a person, nor am I likely to, and so their inner lives would have to be pretty damn fictionalized). But nobody would get it. Sigh. 
Another question: is it ethical to write fiction about real living people doing things they don't do in real life? (Historical fiction of whatever kind I have no problem with, as long as it's well done. Fiction about dead people with living relatives who knew them is a little dicier, requiring some respect.) I'm inclined to feel, well, ethical, no, not really. If I were famous, I wouldn't be thrilled to find that people were writing fiction about my sex life. Unfairly, I feel like I'd have a slight ethical edge writing about Yu-chan and Ma-kun in English, since the chances that they could or would read it would be extremely minimal.
Well, it's all just doodling. Back to the daily round.

 More thoughts on the crosscultural qualities of baseball in Japan.

The Russian-born ace pitcher Victor Starffin is interesting for many reasons, not less the standard English spelling of his euphonious last name: a back-formation from the Japanized Russian. “Starukhin” became “Sutaruhhin” (roughly) became “Starffin”… Wikipedia (I’m sorry to say) tells me that he came to northern Japan with his White Russian family after the Russian Revolution, grew up in Asahikawa where he became a high school star, and was more or less blackmailed into pitching professionally, with his family’s right to remain in Japan hanging in the balance. He won three hundred games, and is sometimes called “the blue-eyed Japanese,” an extraordinary feat in a country where a Korean boy can be born and raised of parents born and raised there and still not be considered Japanese.

During the wartime years, baseball was considered an enemy sport. The authorities had the good sense not to go against popular sentiment to the extent of banning baseball games altogether, but did, bizarrely, insist that all the baseball terminology, borrowed wholesale from English, be translated into Japanese. I’ve read that “baseball games stopped dead while players and umpires tried to remember what they were supposed to say,” but can’t verify this. Postwar, some of the Japanese terms stuck, some of the English words returned, and a whole new host of unique neither-nor expressions arose (some of them back-translations from the Japanese). Ichirui, nirui are commonly used in preference to “first base, second base,” for instance, but you’ll rarely if ever come across yuugekishu for “shortstop” or honruida for “homerun,” apart from the newspaper box scores. And how about “get two” for “double play” or “dead ball” for “hit by pitch”?
In his book about baseball in Asia, Joseph Reaves writes that while baseball was introduced to Taiwan by the Japanese colonists, it remained after the war—with some de-Japanification. “Baseball still was played, but when it was, Japanese terms like sutoraikku (strike) and boru (ball) were banned.” Japanese terms? Clearly, the de-Americanization of wartime baseball in Japan had not penetrated to the colonies: the enemy-English of 1942 Japan was the colonial-Japanese of 1946 Taiwan.

The Koshien tournament (see previous post) was suspended during the wartime years, for all the obvious reasons—materiel was needed for the munitions of war, not for gloves and bats, and young men were needed for aircraft factories or battlefields, not for pitching and hitting. The exception was the summer of 1942, when sixteen teams competed in a military-themed “ghost Koshien” or “makeshift Koshien,” so called because it does not appear in the official history of the tournament. There’s a whole book about the 1942 Koshien, fascinating and sad, given how many of the players went on to fight and die in the war. Others, like the ace pitcher Jun Togashi, survived the war but paid a less obvious price—Togashi’s professional career was shortened because he’d damaged his shoulder during the tournament, thanks to the wartime no-substitution rules.

The journalist Kim Chanjung has written a book about the summer Koshien of 1981, in which the two teams in the final (not coincidentally, both from the Kansai region of west Japan) boasted between them five Korean-Japanese starting players, two of whom chose to use their real (ie Korean) name: Han Yu and Chung Sosang. Kim writes about his young daughter’s excitement at seeing the Korean surnames on the scoreboard at Koshien Stadium. Despite this, there are still almost no Korean-Japanese players who use Korean names professionally, reflecting the general trend among Korean Japanese. Hichori Morimoto, long of the Nippon Ham Fighters and now hitting for the Yokohama Bay Stars, is an exception of a sort, using a Japanese surname and a Korean first name. (“Hichori” is a slightly Japanized spelling of a pet name; a more typically Korean transliteration would be something like “Hee-chul.”) The same Korean first name-Japanese surname pattern is used by a rising young high school star, Waseda Jitsugyo’s Kwonsu Yasuda, known for his habit of doing push-ups in the on-deck circle. Articles about him have mentioned his “unusual” first name (“he was named by his grandfather”), without specifying his ethnicity.
It’s probably worth mentioning that, while God only knows what goes on in the darker and damper corners of 2chan, it seems to be Not Done in Japan to use ethnic epithets in the ballpark. Foreign (meaning Western) players are often considered to be big dumb sluggers, to put it bluntly, but, for instance, I’ve never heard of a black player being called kurombo (a rude diminutive of the word for black, less offensive than the n-word but not nice). Nor have I ever heard bad words being yelled at the players who are known or suspected to be Korean. This may be good gamesmanship or Japanese sweep-it-under-the-rugification (koto nakare shugi, if you prefer) or some of both.

 So, my last post? Where I wrote about Kawahara in the Japan Series and pitching good there and how happy that made me? Well, today he pitched too, and today he got hit. 3-6 for the Dragons--his team--before he got in the game (in the fifth inning, what the hell?), and 6-6 when he stepped off the mound at the end of the inning. And now Lotte, the opposition, has another run in (off a different pitcher, but so what), and it's the seventh already, and if they win this game they win the Series. I really don't care who wins the damn thing, but I'm afraid it's turned into the one outcome I can't stand--the Dragons losing because of Kawahara. 
Right now I would like to go find him and give him a hug and tell him to please not hate himself. Isn't it odd how one identifies with others. There are plenty of people I know personally whose emotional state, whatever it may be, just doesn't make that much difference at all to me; and here I am heart-aching for this guy I've never met and never will and probably wouldn't have anything in common with if I did. But it's a long-time thing with me, Kawahara. I know it doesn't make any sense, but I care.

 Writing for an audience of zero plus me for now, to polish up my English. Watch this space for book reviews, random Japan and Korea notes, occasional quasi-religious musings, music and architecture ravings, baseball thoughts, and whatever else crosses my mind. 

Good things to start off with, then. The Tigers won today, with Akiyama pitching and Lin Isuke's two-run homerun (yeah, I know it's pronounced Wei-tzu, but I've always liked the Isuke reading, and he probably wouldn't mind. When is somebody going to come up with a history of Taiwanese players in Japanese baseball?). 
I've been reading Modern Osaka, written in 1932 by Kitao Ryonosuke: a love letter to the city, the same way I love it now, messy and industrial and every-which-way and beautiful because of all that rather than in spite of it, and full of the quirky details that make up the real life of the city. Would love to translate it, but can't imagine how; the text itself is part of the experience of reading it. Hard to figure. 

Leave it at that for now. Until next time.