After the Handsome Monkey King got his name, he thanked Master Puti enthusiastically. The patriarch ordered the disciples to take Wukong to the inner courtyard and teach him to sweep and the proper manners to use among the disciples. Obediently, they went out. Outside, Wukong paid respects to his senpais,1 and they found a placeContinue reading “Journey to the West – Chapter 2.1”
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Journey to the West – Chapter 1.3
While he was looking around, he suddenly heard a voice coming from deep in the woods. He hurried through the woods toward the sound and found a person singing. “Watching chess, the axe handle rots.1 Thwack, thwack, I’m chopping wood. I walk through valleys at the edge of clouds and trade my wood for wine.Continue reading “Journey to the West – Chapter 1.3”
Journey to the West – Chapter 1.2
*As usual, translation notes are in the mouseover text or at the bottom of the post. 🙂 Let’s continue the story! The monkey multitude cheered upon hearing this.1 They said “Lead us inside! We’ll follow you.” The stone monkey closed his eyes,2 crouched, and jumped in once more, calling “Follow me!”3 The braver of theContinue reading “Journey to the West – Chapter 1.2”
Journey to the West – Chapter 1.1
First, a note on retelling Journey to the West. As a part of this, I wanted to share with you some of the decisions I made during translation, but I don’t want to distract from the story, so I’ve inserted them footnotes with mouseover text. There are these decisions almost everywhere. (For touchscreen viewers, clickingContinue reading “Journey to the West – Chapter 1.1”
Journey to the West – a beginning?
Journey to the West is my childhood. My first memory of it was probably this 1963 Chinese cartoon – 大闹天宫 – a movie adaptation of one of the first major episodes in Journey to the West1. Growing up, I read abridged children’s versions in Chinese manhua, watched the 1999 cartoon religiously2, studied a simplified versionContinue reading “Journey to the West – a beginning?”
Piano no Mori – Numbers are Weird
Looking up the etymology for this page, I got really distracted by 一 and 二. These two kanji (meaning 1 and 2) are two of the simplest characters that exist and, along with 三 (3), some of the first kanji/characters that you learn1. However, numbers are one of the most complicated and confusing things I’ve tried to learn in Japanese. Each number has multiple pronunciations, and thus far to me, it’s not always clear which one to go with.
Piano no Mori – Made-up Ceremonies
本物(honmono) means “the real deal.” 本(jap: hon, chi: ben3) means “origin” or “source”. The character is a tree – 木 – with a line through the base to highlight the root, or “source” of the tree. The word for Japan – 日本(jap: nihon, chi: ri4ben3) – is “the source of the sun”.
Piano no Mori – Stick Figures with Boobs
Kids in the US drawing stick figures usually distinguish women by their long hair, but that was not the strategy employed when developing this character. If you really squint at 女, you can see that there’s arms, legs, a head, and a kind of bulge in the middle of the body. What is that bulge? (It’s a boob).
Piano no Mori – Sassy Children are the Best Children
The nature of translation is that nuance will be lost. You want the text to be understood by people who live within a different cultural context and in a language with different sentence structures, idioms, and that sometimes just cannot convey all of the nuances and connotations in the original text. Reading this text in its original language, however clumsily and slowly I’m doing it, is shedding light on all of the color and connotation I’ve been missing. And I feel like I’m getting to know (and falling in love with) these characters all over again.
Piano no Mori – An Eye for a Head
人間(ningen) is the first time in this book we’ve seen the definitions deviate. In Japanese, 人間 means human being (in this context). In Chinese, 人間(ren2jian1) means “the human world”, as in the mortal realms. Breaking it down, we get 人 – person and 間 – space1. It seems what has happened in Japanese is that this started out as a Buddhist phrase: 人間界(ningenkai), meaning the human world in Buddhist cosmology. Perhaps, since 界 already means “world”, 人間 was taken to mean “human”.
Etymology Adventures 