Chinese sayings: 26 (愛之深責之切)

 

愛之深責之切

ài zhī shēn zé zhī qiè

The deeper one loves, the more cuttingly one reproaches

Old friend Chris and I were reminiscing about our SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) days.

    One teacher who liked him (fortunately for him, as she had a reputation for targeting one student in every grade) would say the way he wrote the Japanese letter ほ made it look like a bean sprout.  

    My reply:

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Ah, that might have been one of those cases of 愛之深責之切 (the deeper one loves, the more cuttingly one reproaches [or mocks/laughs]).  You can tell from the fact that it's a set phrase that it's common practice.

    My St Joseph's Convent Primary 6 form mistress was a Mrs Enid Byrnes, a Scottish lady who was very fond of me (she signed my autograph book with "To my darling [+ my name]"), but always singled me out precisely because of this.

E.g.,

1. She'd hide my school bag (put it outside the window — we were on the ground floor), and watch in glee as I searched everywhere.
2. She'd drop a small piece of chalk down my back, and watch in glee as I tried to fish it out.  Our school uniform was a white short-sleeved shirt under a dark blue pinafore, belted at the waist, so the small piece of chalk would be wedged in there, trapped by the belt.  She'd then say sternly, "Stop fidgeting!”
3. She'd say maybe I could marry Mario, her son, then during school release time, she'd suddenly look out of the classroom window and say, "Ah, I see Mario walking home from school!" and call out, in a lilting "yoo hoo" voice, "Ohhh Maaa-riooo!" and watch me blush.

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(London, 1980; Singapore, 1966)

No common sense (Italy)

 

Old friend Valerie texted:

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...saw this at a B&B (Bed and Breakfast) in Gaeta (small town on the sea between Rome and Naples).  

They have a system for the keys that would be completely ruined if somebody locked the front door from inside. This is how they are saying "do not use this lock"

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Picture he sent: 

NON UTILIZZARE LA CHIUSURA INTERNA DELLA PORTA

DO NOT USE THE CLOSURE INTERNAL OF THE DOOR

My reply to him:

I’ve just got google translate to do this sentence, and the English is:  

do not use the internal door lock

So why haven't they tried google translate (although it must be admitted that google translate versions could  give them rubbish and they wouldn't know).

Wouldn't it make life easier by using a different kind of lock, as not everyone reads/heeds notices, no matter how big and how they might be staring at one right in the face — never mind one that doesn't make sense.  It is a B&B and would therefore have non-Italians — never mind how many, it only takes a small handful of people not reading/heeding the notice to make life a headache for the B&B people.  Even more stupid than the poor translation.

(Italy, 2024)

Manis the Malang pony (Indonesia)

I was private tutor variously to some Indonesian teenagers whose parents were either related or good friends, and also rich enough to send them to Singapore for their education. 

    They kept saying to me, “You must come to Indonesia, and we’ll show you around our country!” 

    So I went in December (1973), which is Singapore’s equivalent of the end-of-school-year, long summer break in the West, as the school year starts on 02 January — being in the tropics at 1˚N, it has no discernible seasons, just dry or rainy, or hot, very hot, unbearably hot. 

    With it being the school holidays, train tickets from Jakarta to Bali were all sold out, but we managed to join a package tour which happened to have four vacancies going. 

    The route there and back was overland: out along the northern part of the island of Java, and back along the southern part. One of the places near the eastern end of Java was Malang, our last stop before Surabaya where we’d be catching the ferry to Bali. 

    Malang is up in the hills, rather like Cameron Highlands near Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, so it’s pleasantly cool (particularly appealing for a tropics-bred girl). I saw apples on the tree (instead of in the market) for the very first time in my life. 

    I also rode a horse for the first time in my life. There wasn’t much to do in Malang, so the tour guide arranged for us to have a horse-riding experience on the morning of our departure. 

    “Horse sitting” is more appropriate a term: we were helped onto our own horses by our respective grooms (yes, one groom per rider!), who then walked alongside us, holding on to the reins, as we wove our way through a forested patch. 

    Being only 5ft 1in (1.55m) in height, I was given the smallest horse — a pony called Manis. Manis means “sweet” in Indonesian (and Malay), and she was indeed sweet: docile and gentle in temperament. 

    At the end of the “trek” through the forest, we came out into the open, to the bottom of the road rising up the gradient to our hotel. 

    A chap in my group on the biggest steed suddenly shouted, “Race you!” and charged off up the slope. Manis took up the challenge on my behalf and gave chase — and overtook that big horse! 

    Judge not a horse by its size. 

(Malang, Java, Indonesia, December 1973)

Duchess the Devon mare (England)

The London Conoco [oil company] Friday-pubbing group decided to hire a self-drive mini-bus and take off to Exmoor in Devon, S.W. England, for a (ahem, before dark only) healthy weekend horse riding. 

    Step One on the first morning involved getting us paired up with our own horses. The smallest horse they could find for me was a mare called Duchess. There was something about her that made me a bit nervous, particularly the look in her eyes. 

    She was still a little too big for me: they had to get me a stool to stand on just to get my foot into the stirrup. Even then, one of the grooms had to give my derrière a shove to heave me up into the saddle. 

    We were taught the rudiments: how to hold the reins; how to raise our backsides — up down, up down, up down — in time with the horse’s clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, which is hard work, requiring strong leg muscles. 

    Finally, we were ready to leave the stable yard, led by a groom. Within no time at all, we left the open road and entered a forested area. 

    I very soon found out that Duchess was a mare in more ways than one. 

    While the other horses followed the path between the pine trees, Duchess decided to show me who was boss. (She must’ve sensed my nervousness in the stable yard. I understand that animals can sense, or smell, that you’re afraid of them.) 

    She took me through the trees, with branches sticking out horizontally, some coming down to my face level. Branches she’d walked through (and thus pushed forward) would whip back and scratch my face. 

    Worse (because of the cost factor, especially if the lens got scratched), I had around my neck a Pentax camera with a metal lens cap, unfortunately not attached by a cord — like how skis are to the ankles, in case one falls over and the skis unclip, so that they don’t go careering down the slopes. One of those pine tree branches also whipped it off, so I lost that for good, as I couldn’t go back for it unaided (to get me off the horse, then back on). Besides, the others were some distance ahead by then, so I was already lagging behind. 

    At the end of that wooded section, we emerged into an open field. One of the riders suddenly spurred his horse on, and went into a gallop. All the other horses immediately followed suit, including Duchess. 

    Problem was: I’d only been taught a short while back how to stay in the saddle at a walking pace, and was just about managing that. 

    As Duchess charged forth to keep up with the other horses, I clung on to the horn of the saddle with all my life. 

    All of a sudden, Duchess came to a dead halt, which nearly catapulted me over her head. Lurching forward, my face was almost buried in her mane. I managed not to fall off by grasping big handfuls of hair — hers, not mine. 

    Then, she lowered her head as if to nibble at the grass on the ground, pitching me even further forwards. 

    Just as I was congratulating myself for not sliding down her neck, she turned her head round to face my left foot, and bared her teeth just inches away from my toes. 

    That was when I gave up trying to be brave, and cried out, “Help me, help me!” Duchess looked up and gave me a withering look, “What are you on about, you silly mare!” 

    It turned out she was only trying to scratch an itch in that part of her neck. 

    I am convinced, though, to this day that she knew how scared I was of her right from the start, and decided to have some fun with this total wimp of a novice. 

(Devon, England, 1977)

Chinese sayings: 25 (借花獻佛)

借花獻佛 / 借花献佛

jiè huā xiàn fó

“borrow flower to-present-to buddha”

This saying (from 過去現在因果經, a Buddhist scripture in the 南朝宋 Nán Cháo Sòng period, 420–479 AD) is about using other people’s things (flowers in this case) to present to the buddha in the temple.  One dictionary says:  “win favor or influence using sb else's property”.

    An illustration comes to mind.

    When I was working on a TV documentary series for Channel 4 back in the 80s, the administrator’s secretary told her boss that she had too much to do and needed a junior to help out.  (She also asked for more pay saying she was a single mother with two children.  I thought to myself, “Well then, given that I’m single with no children, no pets, and no car, I should perhaps be working for free in that case, according to her logic.  Nobody asked her to have two children if she couldn’t afford them.”  So, she wanted more pay for doing less work.)

    A young assistant was duly found, and given all the menial tasks, e.g., make tea/coffee, do the photocopying.

    One day, one of the film directors asked the administrative secretary for photocopies to be made of a film script.  The secretary gave the task to the young assistant — fair enough, that was what the junior was employed for.  Once the photocopies had been made, however, instead of letting the junior take them directly to the film director, which would’ve been the most logical and effort-saving (which was, after all, why the junior was employed in the first place, according to the administrative secretary: to save her work), the older woman took them from the junior and personally delivered them to the film director, going all the way to his room ("Here you are, David, your copies done!"), which made it look like she’d done the work herself.  

    This is what 借花獻佛 refers to: borrowing [someone else’s] flowers to present to the buddha.

(London, 1983)

Problems behind translating: 02 (London)

 

I worked on a BBC documentary series (1984? 5?) called The Bamboo Screen, about the kind of material Chinese audiences got on their TV.  The director chose Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou (/Canton) TV station programmes, selecting from the whole range of news, entertainment (soap drama, e.g.), documentaries, etc., and also interviewed TV directors/producers plus experts over here.

    She came back with Chinese TV footage.  The clip featuring a Chinese new year variety show programme saw the audience falling about laughing almost every other line at what a comic duo (very common formula in Chinese entertainment) was saying on stage.  The BBC director was interested to include that clip in The Bamboo Screen, and got me to watch it with her and explain why they were laughing so much.

    Chinese comic duo sketches typically feature a thin man [the intelligent one] and a fat man [the slow witted one], with the thin one constantly doing word plays at the expense of the fat one, which the latter has difficulty following.  This is the case in this clip, and this is why the audience was laughing every other line.

    This was how the comic dialogue started: 

Thin man:  Here we are, about to welcome in the Year of the Tiger.  You were born a tiger, no?  (The Chinese use animal imagery a lot when insulting people, like in Engl but a lot more.)

Fat man:  Oh yes.  (Audience laughs.) (Fat man does a double take, as it begins to dawn on him that the thin man is saying he's a tiger, not a human, and he's just agreed.)

Thin man:  Oh, I meant you were born in the year of the tiger.

Thin man:  Your wife was also born in the year of the tiger, no?

Fat man:  Yes.

Thin man:  Then she's a tiger girl.  (Audience laughs, as fat man agrees.)  

Background:  There's a famous story in Chinese literature, 駱駝祥子 / luòtuò xiángzi / “camel auspicious man” /  Rickshaw Boy, published 1937, by Lao She*, featuring a young man kidnapped by some barbarian tribe, escaping later with their camels which he sold, and then worked as a rickshaw puller.   The daughter of the rickshaw-hire boss was a shrew, called Tiger Girl, so it's not a compliment at all -- a woman is not supposed to be tigerish anyway even if not for the story behind the name; any man with a Tiger Girl would be henpecked.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickshaw_Boy)

    So, only a few lines into the comic sketch, and the translation for the subtitles was already going to take paragraphs and paragraphs to decode the original.  The director gave up.  

    The English equivalent I can think of would be calling someone Shylock without having to explain it, but would need some background filled in for an audience that hasn't read Shakespeare or doesn't know the story at least.

* Lao She 老舍 taught Mandarin Chinese 1924–1929 at the then-SOS (School of Oriental Studies, now SOAS / School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London).  Some of his stories were set in his time in London.

(London, 1985?)

Problems behind translating: 01

 

Old friend Valerio kick started a conversation about trying to find a good English translation for Divine Comedy to give to a former colleague, and how difficult it is to translate something into another language.  

I agreed, saying: 

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What instantly comes to mind is Chinese poetry (or such things in any language, for that matter).  

I read something on this during my BA days at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) which used a couple of lines from a Chinese poem.

The most common metre in traditional Chinese poetry is 5 characters or 7.

Can’t remember now the exact text from the poem cited (about walking in a bamboo grove or something atmospheric like that), but the author said what is immediately understood/felt by the Chinese reader of the first couplet with its 5 characters per line will take lots more words to convey in English.  It’s because of the cultural context:  that’s the way the Chinese look at nature with certain phenomena instantly evoking certain responses, therefore no need to use too many words.

In prose, the translator doesn’t have to try to match the meter too much so the problem isn’t so bad.

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