Lost in Translation (page 46)
Li Bai is the poet immortal in the Chinese language. It’s hard to really see this in translation. Please join me into the Chinese language, for just two of his lines:
On page 43 I wrote about Li Bai’s couplet, about drawing a sword and cutting into water. Here it is again, as it’s written, as it’s pronounced, and as it’s translated literally by me:
抽刀斷水水更流
chou dao duan shui shui geng liu
draw sword break water water more flow
舉杯銷愁愁更愁
ju bei xiao chou chou geng chou
raise cup dissolve worry worry more worry
First, the poem rhymes as we know rhyme. If you look at the phonetic lines, you see the rhyming “liu” and “chou” at the end.
Second, the poem rhymes grammatically, too. What? Yes. Here it is again, with type-of-word labeled:
draw sword break water water more flow
verb1 noun1 verb2 noun2 noun2 (again but now as subject) adverb verb3
raise cup dissolve worry worry more worry
verb1 noun1 verb2 noun2 noun2 (again but now as subject) adverb verb3 (zinger here in verb3 because it’s using noun2 as a verb now)
Li Bai uses a very tight form here for his couplet.
“draw” matches “raise”
“sword” matches “cup”
“break” matches “dissolve”
“water” matches “worry”
Then the man playfully flips the object to the subject in this already extremely confined structure:
“water” had just ended grammatically as object, of “break water”, now it’s the next subject, of “water more flow”
which matches how
“worry” also had just been the object of “dissolve worry”, and then is the subject (and verb! show off!) of “worry more worry”
Here it is again with part-of-the-sentence labeled:
draw sword break water water more flow
verb object verb object subject (using previous object) adverb verb
raise cup dissolve worry worry more worry
verb object verb object subject (using previous object) adverb (zinger here, too, because it’s using the same adverb as in line 1) verb
Even as I try to point to the moon, I can feel my words are just fingers pointing to the moon, not the moon itself. I can feel the almost inconceivably virtuosic quality of the lines getting lost in translation despite my efforts.
Trotzdem, thank you for joining me on this brief language journey!
抽刀斷水水更流
舉杯銷愁愁更愁
Drawing sword, cut into water, water again flow:
Raise cup, quench sorrow, sorrow again sorry.