Ok, here’s a bit of a challenge for those of you who totally dig ancient Chinese poetry.
As you may know, when poetry is translated from Asian languages into English, translations can differ to a surprising degree. The translator has the original set of Chinese characters to work with and the translation involves a great deal of interpretation. So, here’s the challenge. Below I will give you the basic character-to-word translation of a Chinese poem. For now, I won’t mention the author or anything about the title. From these words, see if you can fashion a nice English version. I’ll lock this thread and then you can email your entry to me at dalewisely at gmail dot com. When I get enough, I’ll re-open the thread and post the entries.
My only tip for translating, relax and don’t try to cling too much to the literal. Try to get a feel for what he’s/she’s trying to say.
Don’t googlecheat.
That character translated “long” refers to length, not to long for something as in desire it.
Now, I’m told by my reference that the last character, translated into English as “shine” has these possible nuances:
- To keep him company by shining, (2) illumination (3) the primary meaning of shining–as in what some shiney thing does.
Good luck!
Dale