(no subject)

[oyceter]

Sitting in the internet lounge thing of a Honda dealership, in which my poor car is being maintenanced. I have hit 6000 miles. In three more months, I will have lived in CA for a year.

A year -- it hardly feels so long!

I've been reading everyone's replies to the food post with great interest, and now I want to dig up some sort of cultural history of food. Better yet, since the boy is going to dinner with some business school friend, I am going to see if I can bully them into eating Afghan or something Middle Eastern, because reading everyone's comments is making me very hungry!

Aliera's Chinese poetry post has led me to find Chinese Poems, which is a cool and nifty site because it has simplified and traditional characters, along with pinyin, along with a word by word transliteration and a final translation. My Chinese is horrible, but the poems just sound wrong in English -- the rhythm and the rhyme is missing, and for Tang poetry in particular, which is rather sonnet-like in terms of strictness, it's very disconcerting to hear it in free form verse!

In general I've never been that big of a fan of poetry, with the exception of ee cummings and sonnets. And Yeats. And maybe TS Eliot if I read enough. Oh dear. I take that back. Anyhow, I adore Chinese poetry, even back in the bad old days of Chinese class and being laughed at for horrible pronunciation. First, poetry is a lot easier to memorize than Confucian analects or various classical essays. And we memorized so much stuff -- I had to memorize even more because my Chinese was so bad I couldn't think of definitions to phrases on my own. So I memorized the phrases and the definitions word for word. For one class back in eighth grade (seventh grade level Chinese), we memorized the entirety of Bai Juyi's Pi Pa Xing (maybe three pages, front and back?). I still remember the first four lines, and a scattered couplet or two in the middle.

But I loved poetry the most, particularly Tang poetry, because for the short poems at least, I am captivated by the confines of the poems -- five or seven characters/syllables, four or eight lines, even-numbered lines must rhyme, there should be parallelism in the couplets from part of speech to an interesting contrast or comparision in the words chosen, and, to top it all off, the tones of the characters had to set each other off. The tones are sadly different now (Cantonese or Taiwanese, I've been told, sounds most like Tang Chinese, much like Appalachian English supposedly sounds like Elizabethan English), but in general there were ping tones (the, er, higher ones?) and zhe (the lower), so if you had a line of five (ping ping zhe zhe ping) the next one, which should be parallel, should also be zhe zhe ping ping zhe, for instance.

I miss my Chinese literature class and my Stephen Owen anthology dreadfully now. I really need to buy a good fat poetry anthology. I bet we have 300 Tang Poems at home somewhere, and my mom would be more than happy to ship them to me (she is quite enthusiastic about me reading Chinese)... then I could get commentary and look up translations ^_^. Oooo. Temptation.

The one thing I regret the most about the Chinese literature class was that we couldn't study them in Chinese, seeing as how some of the people didn't know any. But it was by far my favorite class in Princeton -- a great professor who graded tough but fair and was giantly enthusiastic and erudite, and four students. Apparently Intro. to Chinese Literature isn't a very popular class. But it was so wonderful, because we could meet in his office, and he'd pass around old bound books he'd gotten at an auction to show us Qing Dynasty printing and how they would annotate the books, he'd talk about trying to translate newly found strips of bamboo with oracles, about the language and its influence on the poetry, on the politics and its influence. He made it come alive. Not to say my Chinese teachers back at home weren't good -- some of them were great (notably the one in eighth grade who asked us if we wanted to try memorizing that entire Bai Juyi poem). She so obviously loved the literature it was hard not to be bowled away, and she was one of the few Chiense teachers who thought I actually had some potential despite my elementary level Chinese and encouraged me instead of writing me off as a total slacker (which I also was).

I love teachers who love what they teach. I think if I had had science teachers who were as enthusiastic as my lit. teachers were in high school and middle school, I would be a giant science person. I don't know. Or maybe it was just that the enthusiasm about literature swept me up in a way that other subjects didn't, because I definitely know people who thought those classes were boring! Boring!! Gr.

I wish I could go back and take a class specifically on Tang poetry, or Song poetry, or something with that professor -- the intro class was great because I was woefully undereducated about the Chinese literature canon, but now I want something more specific and in depth. Heh. He once said he could teach an entire class on Du Fu alone -- I would be up for that!

This blathering has been brought to you by Honda, who is still working on my car...

Comments

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

You're making me terribly, terribly sad I don't know a whit of Chinese. And if I can't read poetry in Korean, Chinese is utterly hopeless. (Except in translation. At least Chinese poets are easier to find in English translation.)

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

I am coming to very much enjoy it.

(Weird side note but along my mulling on privilidgeing the writer/ reader is some of the interesting discussion around Pound's translation of River Merchant's Wife and Whaley's, and someone else...sorry just got back from a very bad meeting and my head is mushy... and me sitting here thinking that I wonder what Li Po would do if he were alive to day and spoke English.)

[mogens.livejournal.com]

My food related reading is generally restricted to cookbooks, not histories, but if you're interested in Mediterranean cooking, an author to check out is Paula Wolfert. She's been writing about food from this region from than thirty years, and her work (recipes and background info) encompasses food from Greece, Turkey, Spain, southern France, Italy, the Middle East and North Africa.

There's also, Elizabeth David (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1590170032/qid=1082584858/sr=8-3/ref=pd_ka_3/104-1371550-8210325?v=glance&s=books&n=507846). She wrote about food in the 1950s, has had a major influence on a lot of people cooking and writing about food today, and her work is very interesting (and enjoyable). I haven't read this particular one on the food of Mediterranean, though.

[oyceter]

It's true... I know zip about Korean anything, which greatly saddens me. I really need to try to pick up Korean sometime -- I've heard people say that the grammar structure is very similar to Japanese, so hopefully it would not be quite as hard...

Besides, the alphabet is fascinating. And, if I knew Korean, I could read menus in Korean restaurants! This is of primary importance ^_^.

[oyceter]

*giggles* My first reaction is, Li Po might be too drunk to care!

Ooo, that is interesting -- I've never read the older translations because we were working from the Owen anthology, and another Chinese poetry book I have is someone else entirely. I do have a friend writing her thesis on Pound's translations of Li Po, which I need to commandeer once she's done.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

An Introduction to Korean (http://www.langintro.com/kintro/) is a very good starting point, especially for the alphabet. It's not quite as simple as it sounds--there are various contexts in which sounds change, and the spelling is not strictly phonetic, it's morphophonemic (i.e. roughly speaking, spelling is based on the "root" and not necessarily on how it sounds out--sorry if this is a redundant caveat), although the rules are consistent. Anyway, if you have questions, I'm not an expert, but I have two pretty thorough linguistics books about alphabet and language, so the answer will probably be in there somewhere. Unless you want slang, in which case...

Hear you on restaurants. Maybe I should learn restaurant/street sign Chinese?

[oyceter]

Thanks!

[oyceter]

Oh thanks! That's great. Ha, that's a much better way to start than how I started Japanese -- I would pick apart anime characters' names to figure out the syllables -_-;;.

I figure as a general rule one should always know things like "beef" or "chicken" or "pork" in other languages so one doesn't accidently order frog ;). Unless, you are like me and like frog.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose that's one way to do it. :-) I had the hiragana memorized at one point, but have forgotten most of them. I suspect it would come back fairly quickly if I made an active effort to use them regularly. The katakana, OTOH, are a frikkin' nightmare.

Wise, wise words. I've never had frog and actually wouldn't mind trying it. Once, anyway. =)

[oyceter]

I actually learned katakana first because that was how the character names were written. Very very strange. And the first phrase of Japanese I learned was "Omae wo korosu" (I will kill you). Haha... never learn languages from anime ;).

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

LOL! Latin's pretty bad too...lots of violence words, less of the ordinary everyday stuff....