Has anyone (among the people reading this, I mean) ever tried translating into or writing in Classical Chinese for fun? Or more generally, did anyone’s training in Classical include composition, or was it all just comprehension?
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Not in my training, which assumed that we were like botanists studying strange flora, external to the object of interest.
I occasionally do this on the fly when I teach CC: translate something said into (basic) CC. Reminds us it’s a real language capable of expressing the whole range of human exp.
If we had 2nd-year CC at UCSB, I think 絕句 writing would be a good exercise. Many of my best students come from a Sinophone background (China, Taiwan, HK, Singapore, Malaysia) and were trained in CC comp from an early age.
I remember this was a thing that was often on the horizon of my training at Cambridge and SOAS but I have no memory of actually doing it, so perhaps I didn’t. Now I wonder if a translation into Classical might have appeared on an exam?
I definitely feel like I *should* have had to do some of this, but I was mostly self-studying other than a semester of independent study in undergrad, so my education was largely vibes-based and entirely lopsided.
My sum total of classroom time specifically spent learning Classical: 1 semester undergrad (in my freshman year, aka 1000 years ago) & 2 quarters in grad school. The grad school quarters were 1) The Zhuangzi and 2) poetry up to the Tang.
Allllll my Classical is vibes based, basically...
I get the feeling this is the case for a lot of people - I did do an advanced Classical tutorial in grad school, but early on I noted the look of panic that came over the instructor's face when I said "so, I know what this means, but I don't know WHY."
(Obviously there are rules. Well, guidelines.)
The Vogelsang textbook seems to do a pretty good job of pretending that there are hard and fast rules, which is probably easier when you don't do anything later than the Han
Back when my Classical Chinese skills were at their best (i.e., deeply mediocre), I thought about trying to write a little something, but never did. 利瑪竇 I ain't.
If you want a confidence boost, you can find his Chinese writings online — they’re very good, especially considering that he had no dictionaries or textbooks or anything else, but written at a level that is definitely attainable.
(The whole paleo-Confucian routine worked to his advantage here, too, I think — it’s a lot easier to sound like a Han-dynasty writer than a late-Ming writer, because the language hadn’t been crapped up by centuries of nerds yet)
My non-joke is that early modern 文言 was so bad they had to reform the whole language — varies by writer and genre, obviously, but the further removed it gets from any spoken language, the worse it gets
also familiarity: I can read divination works quite easily (often repetitive, vocabulary used essentially unchanged in modern mandarin literature) daoist works fairly easily, but im stumped by confucian works. I tried reading zhu xi's 小學, the lesser learning and finding I could hardly understand...
Classical Chinese has the ability to convey rich meanings with concise language. This very feature makes it less conducive to cultural dissemination. Moreover, the cultural system behind it often involves controlling people’s thoughts, which, in many ways, stands in opposition to modern civilization
Don’t think I agree with either of those statements, I’m afraid. It was the common written language of East Asia for over a millennium, which seems like pretty effective dissemination, and I don’t know of any evidence that users of Classical Chinese were any worse at thinking than anyone else.
I have been dabbling with translation since 2021, I have had online courses, and now have a tutor, and love it. My biggest project has been the Nei Ye chapter 49 of the Guanzi.
Tried to write diary in 文言 when I was in middle school. That helped me to learn expressions I didn’t know. But even my Chinese teacher didn’t like reading them (she usually enjoyed reading my bullshit) so I soon gave that up…
That does sound like a great way of practicing, too — haven’t done any personal writing in Mandarin for years, but it did help me get a much better feel for the language.
Nobody ever asked me to produce any 文言文, and like others my training was (a) short, I think 3 semesters, without any textbook, but just a packet of texts that started with the 說苑 and then the 史記. I have, however, found the language of sixth-century inscriptions rubbing (heh) off on me.
For example, I realized while I was reading it out that my conference paper on Monday contained two different sentences that unintentionally slipped into four-character parallel prose 😁 I mean needless to say it wasn’t especially GOOD parallel prose, but still.
We end up doing this often for our translations, as the 1994 series uses Classical Chinese language to the point of reciting writings from the time period, like Cao Zhi's poems or Chen Lin's denouncement of Cao Cao which had no prior translation, and Cao Cao's military book https://youtu.be/Isn2SXh2Cx8?si=VGawjmM70RlGtTkK
When I was in Taiwan my Classical teacher would have us speak in classical structures whenever possible, which I enjoyed but most of my classmates hated.
My undergrad Classical class had one day where we spent a class working on a story as a group, I think? Maybe I still have them in my notes. But I am definitely too intimidated by Classical now that I know more to attempt writing in it
😄 literally the only handwriting of mine that i can reliably read is my calligraphy, probably because it takes a lot of concentration for me to do, whereas my other handwriting is usually rushed.
Pretty much any attempt on my part at writing academic Chinese is just me going half spoken Chinese, 1/2 文言文。I can't say the people who had to listen to me looked like they were having fun.
Fond memories of arriving in Beijing in 2002 and trying to work out how to say “international credit card” based on Warring States-era stories about incompetent farmers and suicidal rabbits.
Brendan: in our undergraduate class at ANU in the early 1970s, we were taught rudimentary literary Chinese that covered the composition of letters and suchlike. This is the last 半文半白 essay that I wrote, a preface to 《戊戌六章》by Xu Zhangrun — https://chinaheritage.net/journal/six-chapters-one-hundred-and-twenty-years/
I tried translating a very small game into Classical Chinese - remember getting confused reactions asking me if I had somehow used google translate to produce godawful Mandarin 🙃
Did a little bit for fun during undergrad (mainly jokes and so on shared between classmates, writing 诗 etc) but never since. Studied the language for four years and was never assigned to compose/translate into classical
this skill is worth learning because
- even trivial sentiments somehow sound profound, which makes It very amusing
- you can write one-word reactions to posts that are grammatically correct and hence even more amusing
- this is the only way that this degenerate generation can learn the language
Closest I ever come is tweeting in Chinese bc of strict length constraints. Chinese language tweets more concise than English to start with, maybe 2X; psuedo-classical tweeting (actually making modern Chinese more concise) makes it even more so.
Yeah - I’ve joked before about it being possible to do way more damage with 280 characters of 文言 than of any other language I know of, but other than a couple of jokey tweets i don’t think I’ve ever actually attempted it.
Original transcription in the images. I think my main annoyance with the draft at the moment is that I can't think of a way of saying "the people under the hill" that's explicitly not "the people at the foot of the hill" or "the people in the hills," but maybe inspiration will strike.
nothing but insane respect for the people who just brute force, depth-first annotate these texts until they get the politics of kinda lame poetry about a tree and a cricket, but it was not for me.
Fair; I like this stuff more than the average person and I still regularly find myself going “oh fuck offfffffff.” There’s (what I assume is) an allusion in the preface to the tale collection I was dissertating on that’s been irritating me for about a decade.
to be clear, the message of me posting that comic is that I think, ultimately, I am being a lazy reader and I should get over it if I actually want to read and be enriched by good lit
I got to do a very minimal amount of sentence construction in my intro course, but my brain was too cooked by intensive Mandarin classes to go beyond that.
Comments
I occasionally do this on the fly when I teach CC: translate something said into (basic) CC. Reminds us it’s a real language capable of expressing the whole range of human exp.
Allllll my Classical is vibes based, basically...
(Obviously there are rules. Well, guidelines.)
https://chinaheritage.net/journal/six-chapters-one-hundred-and-twenty-years/
- even trivial sentiments somehow sound profound, which makes It very amusing
- you can write one-word reactions to posts that are grammatically correct and hence even more amusing
- this is the only way that this degenerate generation can learn the language
https://bsky.app/profile/mati.woke.cat/post/3la2avks4sh2f
It was bad on many levels (mostly over representation of characters we knew and too few premodern ones) but it was kinda fun.
“NO ALLUSIONS”
“ONLY RICH MEANING”