#sioirsebhan.txt

[sioirsebhan]

you’d think that a lifetime of being in crushingly hypercompetitive environments would have hammered the importance of remembering ‘comparison is the thief of joy’ into me but no!! my brain insists on undoing all the lessons of the past 10 years. currently thonking my head with a stick going STOP THAT! you’re going to eat yourself alive

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new love language invented: interpreting whatever half-awake nonsense your SO or friend says when you talk to them

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i’ve been playing a good bit of control (2019) lately and my biggest thought within the first hour of my playthrough was ‘omg, did they just make mr robot, but in video game form?‘

jesse faden talks like eliott alderson, emily pope resembles angela, and the dialogue feels uncannily like how it goes in mr robot, down to the quasi fourth-wall-breaking speech and skewed camera angles

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these days I feel compelled to plaster a sign over all correspondence from me saying: “I barely have the ability to string a complete thought together; please excuse the unfortunate effects of that on anything you’re about to read from me”

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I know Reddit is a meme on here, but the r/TrueLit subreddit has proved a decent rabbit hole to get lost in recently.

people get into pretty engaging and in-depth debates there about contemporary fiction, literature, and things in between.

like this discussion about that New Yorker article by parul sehgal on trauma plots, for instance: link

also race. also class. also whether MFAs truly are an evil steamrolling force effacing all signs of originality in debut writers.

[sioirsebhan]

@jade-ellsworth shifting my reply to your last reblog on that qiu miaojin translation post here; you raised two cool points i want to respond to! namely 1. the bit about 相吸引复推斥, and 2. chinese conjunctions, and more broadly the allowance for modification/transformation in translation.

相吸引复推斥: what’s happening here i believe is that these are two separate three-word fragments, written in a parallel [adverb] [verb] structure:

相 [adverb] 吸引 [verb]

复 [adverb] 推斥 [verb]

this means that 引 goes with 相吸引. this would’ve probably been clearer if there was a comma to indicate a break, like: 相吸引 ， 复推斥 (in the original, they’ve been smushed together, which creates confusion).

you’ve mentioned why 复 is such a cool, multilayered word in this context. it just occurred to me that 复 also has another connotation of, to restore something to its proper state, like in 恢复 (to regain [one’s health]), or to right some wrong, as in 复仇 (to avenge sth). that adds another fascinating layer of meaning!

some context first: the paragraph is part of a letter the narrator writes to her Chronically Unavailable™️ love interest Shui Ling, where she wrestles between self-persecution and unapologetic steadfastness over her attraction to women. the use of 复 hints at her state of mind, imo. following 相吸引 with 复推斥 makes it sound like she’s framing... their mutual attraction as a mistake, as some wrong that repelling (推斥) subsequently rights (复). which is a depressing assumption on her part, but in character given what we know of her, lol.

but that’s merely one reading. i also love how you translated it (’as attraction and repulsion mirror and overlay’). it’s a vivid image, and your reading is equally apt: the narrator has an infamously tumultuous relationship with Shui Ling throughout much of the book, where attraction is coupled/mingled with repulsion/disgust for them and it’s unclear where their boundaries lie... so the use of ‘overlay’ signals that well!

plus, your reading makes more sense on a sentence-level context. if you read the rest of the sentence, they are standing, facing each other; ‘mirroring’ dovetails well, symbolically, with this.

chinese conjunctions: I think your approach was great. speaking purely as a hobbyist & beginner translator it’s often acceptable to cut out tautological words as you deem necessary in translation. I recall i fretted over having to lose certain phrases in my dabbles too until I realised that translators happily take artistic liberties like changing sentence structure for clarity, excluding words, etc. all the time.

my impression is that translators aim in general for translating the intended meaning, rather than absolute fidelity. I can pull up specific examples from my own translation attempts of how I navigated this, but this is probably one reason why the original translator opted for ‘ravaged’ (’intended’ idiomatic meaning) for 皮绽肉破 instead of ‘split-open skin and damaged meat’ (more literal meaning). (but for the record, I totally prefer the latter! we love us some poetic lesbian body horror)

i’m ripping off a translation meta post i read a long time ago, but the exercise of translation can be described as a continual art of balance between the three principles of 信 (faithfulness), 达 (intelligibility), and 雅 (elegance). this post is here you’re interested in reading it; it’s an introduction/primer to what translation involves.

[sioirsebhan]

one of the places i used to visit pre-pandemic that i now miss is the buddhist temple my family headed to two or three times a year. i miss, you know, the act of praying with 求籤 at the altar and lighting up incense at the entrance to the temple, and the noise of other devotees/people shaking their cans of fortune sticks inside, and the group of bright red & yellow umbrellas you always saw outside sheltering men and women on motorcycles selling lotus flowers, joss sticks, and other offerings. to tell the truth i never knew what the heck was going on when i prayed as a child except what my mother told me to recite in chinese, but the trips were still meaningful for me. i was a fool, but a fool who appreciated the atmosphere at that temple: that net of religious striving, of clarity or knowledge sought when people asked for blessings from guanyin, whose statue sat at the centre of the temple.

my relationship with religion can be summed up in the words ‘passive’ and ‘unlearned’ after the words ‘neutral’ and/or ‘tenuous’. buddhism is to me less a religion than a philosophy, although it also obviously exists as an organised religion; and anyhow, it’s not a cerebral affair for me, because i have done insufficient learning/study about buddhist texts. it’s very much a set of irrational/instinctive feelings instead, because i associate my religion with a set of traditional and familiar rituals, places, and events, rather than abstract theology. i have been immersed in its practices and modes of thought growing up, because it’s influenced my culture, but i wouldn’t be able to tell you the first thing about buddhist philosophy. but it has still been a foundation for certain slices of my sense of community and identity: one of many, but no less important for it.

this excerpt from silas marner by george eliot sums up this idea of religion as something rooted in instinct, ritual, and familiarity (see the parent & child comparison!), and is also what i’d compare my own way of relating to religion to, if pressed:

There was nothing here, when he rose in the deep morning quiet and looked out on the dewy brambles and rank tufted grass, that seemed to have any relation with that life centring in Lantern Yard, which had once been to him the altar-place of high dispensations. The whitewashed walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with a subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then another, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at once occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the pulpit where the minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, and swayed to and fro, and handled the book in a long accustomed manner; the very pauses between the couplets of the hymn, as it was given out, and the recurrent swell of voices in song: these things had been the channel of divine influences to Marner—they were the fostering home of his religious emotions—they were Christianity and God’s kingdom upon earth. A weaver who finds hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as the little child knows nothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture.

[sioirsebhan]

reading one of claudia jessie’s interviews and wow she is so thoughtful and humble in it in a human way... like. She Gets It

text transcript under the cut / link

“The people who inspire me the most are those who plant trees they'll never get to enjoy. Those are the people I want to be. Someone who does something for now even if they don't directly benefit from it. There's something so magical about the philanthropic heart of those who want to do something for the future. And the way we do that is by treasuring the person in front of us. I've always been told to treasure that one person in front of you with your whole heart.

What kept me going is the word nuance. It's my favorite word in the world. Because what you might find completely abhorrent, I might not be as disturbed by, and that's not because you have a good moral compass and I have a bad one. It's just because 3,000 things could have affected and contributed to why I feel like that and why you feel like that. Coming from parents, school, the street you lived on, the food you ate — everything. There are too many factors to think of why our sensibilities might be different from one another, but it's something involving nuance. I don't think social media is the platform where the art of nuance can be expressed, really, because there's not much room for it. I truly believe within our capacity; we are all trying our fucking best. That's what I really believe, even if it looks messy.”