MetaFilter posts tagged with Chinese and translation

"Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound." - T. S. Eliot

Kattullus — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:03:27 -0800

[Ezra Pound] worked on and for poetry as others might work on a major scientific discovery or a drawn-out military mission. Thus, as Sieburth reminds us in his introduction to The Pisan Cantos, when, on May 3, 1945, Pound was arrested at his home in the hills above Rapallo, he immediately put a small Chinese dictionary and a copy of the Confucian classics in his pocket. Working as he then was on his Confucian translations, he knew that, wherever the military police were taking him, he would need these books.

From Pound Ascendant by Marjorie Perloff. Ezra Pound's ability as a translator of Chinese poetry has long been disparaged by sinologists, such as George A. Kennedy in Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character. Other academics have sought to defend him. Two examples are Zhaoming Qian's Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei: toward the "ideogrammic method" of the Cantos and Stephen Tapscott's In Praise of Bad Translations: Ezra Pound and the Cultural Work of Translation (pdf). Eric Hayot draws the contours of this long-running debate and explores its significance in Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound's China. Pound's Cathay in full and a public domain audiobook version (iTunes link).

Twenty-nine Tao te Chings.

Tufa — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:14:15 -0800

Twenty-nine Tao te Chings, a line at a time. For Sunday evening, a spare, meditative post. The Tao-te-Ching in 29 translations, line by line and side by side. I'll leave you to investigate the writings on your own; here alone are just the words to consider. Suggested: Mitchell. Previously: tao

Tao Te Ching in many languages

Wolfdog — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 06:35:21 -0800

The Tao Te Ching in dozens of languages and translations, with a lovely side-by-side comparison tool.

Mo Nickels — Sun, 28 May 2000 20:59:00 -0800

Your site in Chinese. I picked this one up out of my logs. Enter your URL, hit return, wheet, there it is, your site in simplified Chinese. Dunno how accurate it is, but goddamned, it's the coolest thing I've seen in, oh, almost 16 hours.

You need to be running a browser and OS that handles Chinese characters for this to work, by the way. Mac users can install the appropriate freebies off of their OS 9 or 8.6 disks; it's a custom install. Windows users can download some big software turd. At least Internet Explorer on both platforms will display Chinese characters correctly once the system extensions are installed.