abadideaI collected several of my "New Living Internet Translations" of Classical Chinese passages in the style of social media posts onto one page. https://xn--hmr.net/classicalchinese/livinginternet/
“Do not underestimate small problems: one crack can sink a ship. Do not underestimate small creatures: one fly can poison you. Do not underestimate the small-minded: one petty fool can plunder a nation.”
attributed to Guan Yinzi, the gate guard who allegedly stopped Laozi as he was abandoning civilization and got him to write down the Dao; translation mine. https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=280050#sid20
today I have made for you a New Living Internet translation of Confucius:
The Master said: Do not make haste, do not chase small profits. Moving fast is how you break things, and optimizing for engagement is how you never ship a real product.
original: https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=1422#sid10022584
today on how to tell a king his plan is stupid in the Warring States:
(The King of Wei wanted to attack the capital of a rival nation. One of his citizens said to him: ) So, a funny thing happened on my way here. I was at the Great Crossing, and I saw a guy heading due north. He said to me: "I'm going to Chu!"
I said to him, "Sir, if you mean to make for the southern kingdom of Chu, how are you going to get there heading north?"
He said, "I've got a good horse." Sir, no matter how good your horse is, this isn't the road to Chu.
He said, "I can spend whatever it costs." Sir, no amount of money or means can make this the road to Chu.
He said, "My driver's great." Yeah, great at driving you further and further away from Chu! This guy, he really needed to TURN AROUND.
original text: https://ctext.org/pre-qin-and-han?searchu=%E7%8A%B9%E8%87%B3%E6%A5%9A
The first hardest problem in Classical Chinese is knowing what's a name and what's literal
The second hardest problem is knowing what's a pronoun and what's literal
The third hardest problem is knowing what's literal and what's literally spelled wrong
rhyming translation of ye olde ancient ode 淇奥:
Green grow the reeds where the river bends,
A place for a princely heir to hone;
How noble and fine is the son of our lord,
Chiseled and polished by blade and stone!
(The final verse notes that a good prince should know how to be funny without being a dick about it.)
original text + more literal translation from my nemesis James Legge: https://ctext.org/book-of-poetry/qi-yu/ens?searchu=%E5%A6%82%E5%88%87%E5%A6%82%E7%A3%8B%EF%BC%8C%E5%A6%82%E7%90%A2%E5%A6%82%E7%A3%A8%E3%80%82&searchmode=showall
Ali Express scores: I got this massive tome of major Classical Chinese texts for $6. No footnotes, no commentary, no hints in modern language, just 700 pages of public domain text #classicalchinese #aliexpressfinds
The difference between my English and Chinese copies of The Art of War never stops being funny.
Cool History Fact of the night
Before woodblock printing (which was extensively used in China well before the west), there was a very clever, effective way to mass-reproduce the most important texts.
A few different times in imperial China, stone tablets of the most important books were commissioned. Anyone could walk up and look at them, but more importantly: anyone could lay a wet piece of paper over them and then gently rub ink over the paper, which would create a copy of white text on a black background.(And unlike printing, nothing needs to be done backwards.)
And if you were a famous enough calligrapher, you'd be asked to write onto a stone so someone else could chisel out your handwriting exactly, and then copies could be mass-reproduced as teaching examples.
(and I'm fascinated by how the stone fragment here is 1800 years old but the writing style is already extremely legible to me. It still uses the X-style 五 but is otherwise very Normal)
