I'm looking for the best unabridged translations of the Chinese Classics, Water Margin and the Three Kingdoms especially.
Chinese Classics
I'm looking for the best unabridged translations of the Chinese Classics, Water Margin and the Three Kingdoms especially.
how come Europe has thousands of classics, but China only has a handful?
I am pretty sure past rulers destroyed a lot of them
There is an insane amount of untranslated Chinese literature.
have they not been translated because they're just boring/bad?
There's just too much that's lost in translation, everything from the structure of the poem, to the interplay between tones (see https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%A0%BC%E5%BE%8B%E8%AF%97/90168, don't know what the term is in English), and the beauty of the language itself. With Chinese being such a context-dependent language, tense, subject, and even object, can often be omitted, giving it a quality of vagueness which gives the language a naturally poetic feel. Not to mention that you would never be able to discern, from translations, that most Chinese poetry, with the exception of modern poetry (which is dogshit), is written in Classical Chinese (文言文) - a now anachronistic form of written Chinese that is distinct from modern written vernacular Chinese (白话文). I'll use (arguably) the most famous Chinese poem as an example.
Classical Chinese:
床前明月光
疑是地上霜
举头望明月
低头思故乡
Direct Translation:
Bed front bright moon light
Suspect it's floor ontop frost
Raise head gaze bright moon
Lower head think native home
"Proper" Translation:
Moonlight before my bed
I suspect it could perhaps be frost
Looking up, I gaze at the moon
Looking down, I think of my home
In the original, each line of the poem consists of five characters and each character is one syllable. This is a form of poetry known as Wujue (五绝). In translation, this five syllable structure is clearly lost and, consequently, also its tonal contour. I could say more, but I'll just let you see the difference yourself.
Really interesting read and example. Thanks anonymous poster you made a meaningful contribution to this board.
why the frick did you use simplified characters?
Traditionally, Chinese considered novel writing to be an inferior form of art. Only losers who couldn't be an official wrote novel as a way to shitpost about the society and government etc. Any highbrow intellectual or reputable scholar either engaged in philosophical debates or poetry. That's why there are tons of poems & philosophical commentaries, but so few novels. It's really only until DotRC that novel became a bit more respectable, but that's mostly the effort of early 20th century scholars who wanted to push for a literary westernization as part of a scheme to increase literacy rate.
China has loads of texts, probably preserving more Classical texts compared to any other civilization, but you have to be an autistic Classical Chinese Scholar to study them and get access to them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siku_Quanshu
idk
I'm learning Japanese, but I'm interested in Clasical Chinese literature. Does Kanbun allow me to use Japanese to read Chinese?
Kanbun mostly just helps you rearranges sentences into Japanese word order.
Since Chinese and English word order are pretty similar, it's not really needed.
The main obstacle is just learning all the extra kanji that don't exist in Japanese, but Chinese kanji are easier because they only have one reading.
Why is this? Did the CCP not let Western scholars access texts, or did interest in China just fall off suddenly?
check out the Robert Moss translation of Three Kingdoms
idk man I grabbed a penguin copy of Dream of the Red Chamber off the shelf at the library and it was absolutely impenetrable
Dude, its literally War and Peace, just rich folk hanging out having poetry contests and shit, maximum comfy books.
yes I'm sure but between the antiquated language, awkward sentence structure in translation it's just too much to overcome for a passing curiosity. Just keeping straight the spaghetti bowl of proper nouns and names in Chinese is daunting tbh
Fair enough, if you've ever got the ambition though its a great read. The names didnt really bother me too much, I have more trouble with names in Russian novels though. Vol 4 and 5 do have a quality dip, because the author died and someone else finished off his notes I think. Good stuff tho.
James Legge for the Four Books. If you can get one with the commentary, he breaks down some of the key characters and traces their root meanings. Chinese University of Hong Kong Press also publishes a great series of bilingual editions.
Thanks
Lots of shit only has a translation from the 19th or early 20th century
It's insane