River Snow

I gave my eight grade class this Tang century poem by Liu Zongyuan (read top to bottom, right to left):

I suggested that when translating Chinese poetry it doesn't matter whether one has studied Chinese for 10 years or 2 months (they have studied Chinese for 4 months).  As long as one has a dictionary and has translated all of the words, one has about all the information one needs.  The syntax is largely based on word order, and otherwise there is no punctuation, no sense of time occurring, and, at least here, no clear speaker.

Here's the poem with the English definitions:

thousand/mountain/bird/fly/vanish
ten thousand/path/person/trace/extinguished
solitary/boat/cape/hat/fisherman
single/fishing/cold/river/snow

Some words are hard to translate into a single English definition.  "Thousand" and "ten thousand" are counting terms, but here they can also mean, "myriad."  The word translated above as "cape" actually specifically refers to the palm leaf raincoat that peasants wear, and the "hat" refers to the conical, bamboo leaf hat often associated with rice farmers.  Furthermore, "mountain, bird, person, path" and other nouns, since they are described in characters, have no distinction of being plural or singular.  Likewise "to fly" and "to fish" have no distinction of past, future, or present tense.  The word that is translated above as "solitary" in its most literal sense means "orphan."  "Fisherman" actually seems to mean "an old fisherman."

Also worth noting, since you do not have the phonetic translation of the poem, the last character in the first, second, and fourth line rhyme thus, "jue, mie, and xue."  Solitary and single also rhyme, "gu and du".

Maybe you already have a sense of the poem.  In class, we discussed how the first two lines mimic each other, most notably the first and last words ("thousand"/"ten thousand" and "vanish"/"extinguish").  However to compare each word in the first and second lines elicits some interesting contrasts.  So "mountain" is lined up with "paths."  I asked my students how many paths each mountain had.  It took a while, but ten, right?  It reminded me of "Loveliest of trees," the poem by A. E. Housman:

"Now of my three score years and ten
Twenty will not come again.
And take from seventy springs a score
It only leaves me fifty more.

"And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty years are little room.
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow."

Of the first verse quoted here, the first two lines can be described in this equation: (3 X 20 + 10) - 20.  And the last two lines describes the same thing: 70 - 20 = 50.  There is something absurd about having math in poetry.  However, both poems perhaps push readers' sense of numerical abstraction to overlay their sense of beauty.  The poet literally "abstracts" (lit. draws away) himself from the whole sensual experience, making the vision more pathetic and profound.

Continuing the comparison of words in the first two lines, "birds" are then associated with "people," and "fly" with "trace."  Birds vanish from the skyline, and the tracks of people along trails disappear--the contrast comments on the phenomenon that birds in flight leave no trace (unlike humans when they walk), and also suggests that human footprints, symbolic of human activity, also vanish with no more lasting remnant than the paths of birds through the sky.  It's very powerful to meditate simply on those first two lines.  We start to notice that after giving us the image of birds flying, the poet takes that away from us--by the final word, "vanished."  So there aren't birds there after all, it seems.  This first line also suggests that the poet has been there awhile--long enough to have noticed the birds passing.  And yet, now that one thinks of it, where did they go?  Have even birds left this forbidding region?  Secondly, the traces of people are disappearing.  Perhaps readers can assume it is raining or snowing, obscuring all tracks.

Again "solitary" and "single" suggest another two line comparison, especially since these two words rhyme as well, as noted earlier.  That means we have "boat" and "fishing" and then "cape/hat/fisherman" with "cold/river/snow."  The last three lines could be thought of us "a cold river with snow" or "a cold river and snow."  But if readers choose to strictly correlate it with "cape/hat/fisherman" perhaps it is also an adj./adj./n clause, as in "snow that is cold and in the river = cold, river snow."  The three words, "cold" "river" and "snow" seem to me a heavy paring.  There is no escaping the sense of coldness and dreary-ness.  Now, because I'm thinking of the two lines as parallel, I can imagine the figure slumped over itself, the fisherman barely visible under his cape and hat, himself almost like just another pile of snow in the river.

Here is my translation*:

The birds flying have vanished beyond the mountains          

No trace remains of man's footprints along the trails             

An orphaned canoe, a straw hat and cloak                            

Someone fishes in the icy river

*It is notable to mention that Chinese is nearly always more brief than English.  To write an English poem that suggests the succinctness of the Chinese poem one cannot comment on each character.  For example I have no English corresponding term for 5 of the 20 characters in the poem, including "thousand," "ten thousand," "fisherman," "single," and "cold".  However, I feel that I have not negated the sense that they lend to the poem.  Canoe, which is anachronistic, was a compromise against "boat" because I didn't want it to rhyme with "cloak."  

Some Puns (Revised)

“I have recently given myself to the study of Chinese language and I can promise you that it’s something quite different from either Greek or German. In speaking it, there is so much ambiguity that there are many words that can signify more than a thousand things, and at many times the only difference between one word and another is the way you pitch them high or low in four different tones. Thus when [the Chinese] are speaking to each other they write out the words they wish to say so that they can be sure to understand—for all the written letters are different from each other,” Matteo Ricci, sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary to China, from “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci” (1983), written by Jonathan D. Spence

While browsing in my Chinese dictionary (in the index in the back which very nicely sorts all of the characters to their phonetic qualities), I noticed that some sounds have many different characters, while other sound and tone possibilities have very few or none. “Ji,” which is not an uncommon sound, has 41 different characters sorted under its first tone. For its second tone, there are 31 more distinct characters. The third tone has 10 more, and the fourth tone has another 32. (For those wondering, I could immediately recognize and identity only four of these characters, one of which was "chicken," another "remember.") At least four of these characters, I myself could identity as homographs, characters that are written the same but have different meanings with different sounds.

In short, a lot of Chinese sounds the same. A important part in learning the language is finding what ways there are to help navigate this homogeneous landscape of sound (especially if you believe yourself to be “tone deaf"). I would say, however, that the vast majority of this ambiguity of meaning is cleared up through context and conventions of use. Often characters combine into two word compounds that provide enough distinction that they can stand on their own. Though the second tone is easily confused by most beginners with the third tone when spoken alone, a combination of a second tone with a forth, is really quite different in sound to a third tone with a forth.

Thus using Chinese orally constructs a different reality that goes some length to tame the insanity suggested in the back of my Chinese dictionary. It should be noted, however, that if one does jumble these tones, these two word compounds can quite betray you. For instance, a “stuffy nose” can turn into a “sporting competition” and the statement, “I’ve caught a cold” can easily be heard as “I screw cats!”

I started this essay believing I was going to write about puns in the Chinese language (something that sounds completely ridiculous in this diluted and in-a-sense punned-to-death language). But in fact, it is the variety of puns I have seen here that have led me to write this paper. And therein is the catch—“seen.” There are plenty of puns that are only of use visually.

One often sees (as in the picture below) characters of this kind, meaning either “spring” or “luck” in diamonds of red paper decorating doors. Perhaps there is an inherent integrity in the structure of Chinese words, for I don’t remember it being long (certainly before I knew what the words even meant) that I could see these words were upside down. ‘ When I finally got around to asking someone about it, they said that the word that meant “upside down” was identical in sound to the word meaning “arrive” or “come,” thus making in one brave, visual cue the meaning “luck comes” or “spring comes.”



Similarly proving a visual bias, but slightly stranger, is a pun that is found on nearly every menu I have ever seen in Taiwan, usually the first item listed, a set of three words that mean, “rice with meat brewed in soy sauce.” There’s a word for meat and a word for rice—neither is the problem. It’s the word that represents the “brewed in soy sauce” part. The real character for this word is a slightly funny looking thing. To the side is a water symbol, and then the rest of the character looks like a box with an “X” inside, interspersed with some dots, and on the top is a sideways “T.” This part of the character can be a word on its own (also pronounced exactly the same), yet which means “alkaline oil” or “a halogen.” And yet, this is the character I never see on the menu. Instead, the character on the menu is a very simple and poetic looking thing (pronounced, again, the same), but it is composed with the “fish” character on the top half and the “sun” character on the bottom half. This character also means something else entirely: “dull” or “rash.” Yet everyone knows exactly what they’re ordering when they see it—it’s rice topped with some meat that has been brewed in soy sauce. Here—I said it was strange—the pun has nothing at all to do with the meaning of the substitute word. As far as I can make out, it simply looks better, as if one day we decided that “eggsighting” was more pleasing than “exciting.”

There are many more—the time Fiona asked a manager what “G 肉” was—apparently something meat. The “G” stood for chicken, pronounced “ji,” although this appeared to be nothing more than a whim, and it occurred only one time on a menu that listed “chicken” faithfully two other times. Then there are the playful puns people like to make out of numbers. By saying “9-8,” for example, (pronounced jiou3 ba1), one knows it to mean “let’s go!” (pronounced zou3 ba1, differing phonetically but not by tone). “5-6” (wu3 liu4) means “bored” (wu2 liao2), and so on. “4” is a suspect number for it sounds like “death” only differing in tone. Yet because of this, some buildings go right from the 3rd to the 5th floor. When one time my change rang up as 444.00, Fiona, beside me, cringed. Yet later that day, when her balance coincidentally came to “666.00” she said, “this one is lucky!”

In short, language is never dead—even in a promisingly dead sounding one like “Chinese characters.” Yet we forget the origins of Chinese—no, all—language, merely a pun on nature, a perilous operation of transposing form or meaning into sound. Finally, when “researching” this essay (and that means punching in “pun” to wickipedia) I found the interesting observation that China’s space exploration project is represented, and here I quote directly, by “a stylized 月 (Chinese character for ‘moon’), but is also a pair of human feet, surrounded by a crescent moon, symbolizing ‘walking on the moon.’"

A Word on Chinese

Recently I have taken the opportunity at lunchtime to learn a few phrases of Taiwanese, a language I’m not necessarily interested in learning besides the fact that it is commonly used here and very distinct in utterance. I’m a little confused, but it has no written counterpart of its own. Rather, it shares the Chinese characters, using different sounds but otherwise sharing syntax. In this way, it’s rather not too hard to get the hang of—one simply has to learn a substitution of sound for any given meaning. The phrase for, “I don’t understand” for example is the same in both languages, “listen/not/understand.”

In these short language sessions with our mostly Taiwanese-speaking cook, I discovered that I rather enjoyed it more than I ever thought I would. The reason for this joy was simply that I had never expected to learn ANY Taiwanese in my stay here (rather choosing to focus entirely upon Mandarin) and that learning anything was a lot more than I had ever expected to do. Furthermore, this off-handed inclination to learn another language on the side seemed to validate, not diffuse, my capacity in Mandarin. Learning a second sound to any given meaning seemed to reconfirm the first, and push it further back into the recesses of my mind, fortifying it with one more layer of complexity, making it a stain that much harder to remove through the years that might come of not speaking any Mandarin at all.

These discoveries and considerations led me to observe more thoroughly my progress so far in picking up Chinese, my methodology, and my discoveries along the way, which have been, prior to now, taken for granted. As I would have found these things interesting from the outset, knowing little of the language, I thought it profitable to set down a general sketch of the characteristics of the language as I now find them both as a object of interest to those who may have no understanding of the language and as a record of my progress to this point, as I may look back at a later time with some curiosity as to what I thought with still such an incomplete perspective.

Most people know that Chinese characters are only obliquely pictorial in nature; that the language evolved from a system of pictures and that there are some characters that still evoke in their form the object that they represent in meaning. These forms as we now receive them are only vaguely suggestive to the ancient pictographs that they might have one time actually represented. Indeed, the vast majority of the characters have no dimension this way at all (the vast majority of words in any language having no visual correlation anyway). But in some cases, the romantic or creative mind will find suggestion in shapes 日(ri) and 月(yue) to represent, respectively, the sun and moon. And occasionally a rare word does a superb and intricate job at representing its object; 龜(guei), being a turtle.

Yet to think, because of the ancient style of the characters, that the language itself is primitive would be to vastly underestimate the importance of various language forms and the various functions they hold. Pictographs, for example, (and as my dad recently explained in a letter recalling sections from, The Spell of the Sensuous) serve a highly important function in trade nations (like China), whereby parts can agree on a common representative script while still maintaining their indigenous dialects. This is analogous in our portion of the world to the sign/hand language used by Native Americans across the country.

Similarly, written Chinese is employed for several different dialects all of which are as dissimilar to the ear as German and English. And, while not pictographs any longer, the characters do retain a nature of that past, maintaining a more intimate meaning-to-form relation than an alphabet-based language (completely divested from meaning through form). The system that I am alluding to is that of radicals. Radicals, though not visually correspondent to the world around, provide a system, stylized and exclusive, that has no real correlation in English. (The closest thing in English I feel is our etymology; seductive though I find that in how far and ancient you can make a word feel—a word otherwise whimsical and insubstantial, giving it foundation and denotive meaning—radicals and etymology are not the same, only sharing in their nature of being vestiges of the past.) For radicals, in a way, have replaced images with a more abstract method of representation (in the way that an alphabet is abstract to meaning, pertaining only to sound), but in nature and spirit work in the same way as pictographs.

Sometimes radicals seem daunting to explain, but in short, they usually begin as characters themselves (水-water 火-fire 手-hand 心-heart/mind 人-man, to name just a few of the most common), which later in simplified forms fit into other, larger, more complex characters. Often words will have two radicals or three, and sometimes radicals can be so large themselves that they dwarf the rest of the word. (A word is suggested in its size by how many pen strokes it takes to create it—most radicals being two to six, while any given word is usually around 10 to 20. The turtle (龜) for instance is an extreme instance of a large radical, sixteen strokes, and stands on its own as its own word; it stands as one of the last words in my dictionary, a collection that organizes all of its words in order of brushstrokes, beginning with the words that contain the simplest radicals to those with the most complex.)

When radicals are combined to words, often times I notice that the sound is not changed (or only changed slightly) and yet meaning is specifically turned to the quality of the radical. For example, 泡 (pao4) with three dashes upon the left as the “water” radical has the meaning, “bubble.” The word 炮 is phonetically identical yet has instead of the “water” radical the “fire” radical, changing the meaning and visual representation to “fire-cracker.” (Note, too, the word’s onamonapea that fits for both meanings.) A third manipulation, with the “hand” radical in place of the “fire” radical, changes the sound (bao4) and meaning, “hug.” In short, radicals may act as visual clues within the written aspect of Chinese that suggest its meaning (clues that may not be present in the oral Chinese). These clues may betray a cultural prejudice of meaning; by what radicals compose which words, one may be able to attempt to identify what characteristics seem most relevant to any object or idea’s identity. In this way, radicals are like English etymology. Yet because they portray a visual system exclusive to the written script (that is not represented in sound) I find them entirely different in nature.

My Word List

I began compiling all the characters I'm learning onto my computer by virtue of a program installed that allows me to punch in a phonetic alphabet and then choose between several or many characters that follow that pronunciation. With this excellent and chic tool, I can basically start writing with some facility and with the polished inherent beauty and structure of the words that I am almost entirely, completely unable to produce when I write them in long-hand. Purely for the exotic fascination of looking (and to boast to show you exactly what I've occupied my learning with), I've included a list. Of course, if you know something of the language, and can write on your computer as well, it will give you a very useful idea as to what I might or might not comprehend if you choose to send to me a message in Chinese.

In no particular order other than that in which I learned them in:

拍 手 右 左 大 來 好 兄 向 走 跑 開 心 在 起 吹 泡 你 先 個 小 我 再 天 四 空 也 地 有 白 和 咪 五 的 是 星 河 魚 美 門 爸 姐 媽 哥 笑 都 山 期 全 去 路 歌 唱 草 花 頭 過 年 放 炮 見 面 看 說 朵 不 他 太 公 抱 子 常 跟 著 陪 打 本 書 到 裡 故 悄 話 雨 老 師 長 春 中 光 新 戶 忙