Recently, though, I found it covered in Chinese– then covered again in different Chinese, and then with the addition of what appears to be Persian. Unable to read either myself, I enlisted the help of the amazing typographer Muiz Anwar, the awesome programmer/designer/independent scholar of Chinese Peter Behr, the immensely cool grad student/photographer/knitter Lauren Osborne and the very talented artist Matthew Felix Sun. Sometimes it takes a village to write a blog post.

Spring and miscellanea

March 4, 2010

春江水暖鸭先知 is a Song dynasty line by Su Shi. “when the brook thaws in spring, the duck is first to know.”

悠悠我心 is a fragment from a well known couplet, meaning something along the lines of ‘lingering in my heart.’ (alt. translation ‘relaxed my heart’)

红帽子
Red hat

红色革命
Red revolution

绿帽子
Green hat, and a symbol of the cuckold; general rude phrase.

Literary graffiti

March 5, 2010

Whiteboard 1: A beautiful woman

减一分太短
增一分太长
不朱面若花
不粉肌如霜
色为天下艳
心乃女中郎

Peter explains: “This is a poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi 白居易. It is supposedly about female beauty. Line by line, it goes roughly like:

Trim an inch* and the whole becomes too short,
Add an inch and the whole becomes too long.
Her face needs no vermillion to be like flowers,
Her skin needs no powder to be like frost;
Colors as beautiful as anything under heaven,
And a heart like a gentleman among ladies.

(Translation by Matthew and Peter)

Matthew comments, “[The last line] seems to say that this woman has a heart like that of man, a misogynist point of view. People have made fun of the first two lines – is she tall or short? The poet wanted to have both ways.”

Whiteboard 2: Military ode

Matthew says, “The first relates to history of Han Chinese fighting off nomadic invaders and the second expresses sentiment that in China the militant heroes are of the things past and people are being too soft. Both are quite ‘heroic’ in tone but also nationalistic.”

Peter adds, “On cursory inspection this is an old ballad. ‘a guest came from the east, and told me of matters in Jianghu,’ etc. normally, though, it seems that the fictional locale of Jianghu (江湖) is usually replaced with Shenyang (沈阳), and this version has other minor variations from this example I found.”

有客自东来
语我江湖事
闻客闲言做冷笑
独对青灯难入眠
酒近十杯心愈寒
弹铁金樽前
鸣蜇低徊星月残
浩气激栏杆
昔日中原狼烟起
侠士凛然扶汉室
问寰宇几许好头颅
狂刀枭首九万九
胡虏血染一江山

There is/are a guest/guests from the east
Telling me affairs of adventures
Listening to guest(s)’s gossip, I sneered
Facing monkish lamp alone, I could not sleep
Near ten cups of wine finished, my heart grew colder
Flipped weapon in front of a gold beaker
Chirping insects’ sound hovering low, while the stars and moon are fading
Noble spirit collides parapets
In the past when middle land [meaning Han China] was covered by invasion signs of wolf-dung smokes
Paladins resolutely propped up the House of Han people
Asking the universe: How many good heads?
The crazy knife beheads ninety-nine thousands
The blood of those nomadic northern Hu bandits, dyed red the country, in one whole piece

(Translation by Matthew)

Whiteboard 3: Just plain depressing

太史至此亦不言
仰天一长叹
五千年来有豪杰
胸臆不平便仗剑
十步杀百人
直洗块垒间
今世安乐绝武功
九州不闻风雷动
情怀只合当生意
口腹蜜剑竟好汉
茶糜大戏夜夜歌
众人醉卧流苏帐
千载英雄事，不值一文钱
专诸聂政皆堪笑，好叫智者一算盘
易水河边看易水，易水潺潺意沉沉
断弦无故人

Come to this, Taishi [a title of an ancient high ranking office holder] became silent as well
Looking up at the sky, a long sigh
There were heroes in the past five thousand years
Whenever there were grievances, they relied on swords
Marched ten steps and slaughter hundred
Washed out the unjustness and gloom
In today’s peaceful world, martial arts disappeared
Nine prefecture [China] don’t hear the movement of storm and thunder
Feelings only suitable for trivial life
Poison in honey is the route to become heroes
Night after night rotten banquet and entertainment
Inside tassel canopy, lie the drunken masses
Thousands years heroes achievements, not worth a penny
Both Zhuanzhu and Niezheng [ancient heroes who assassinated tyrant and autocrat] can be sneered at, thus calculated the wise
Looking at River Yi [Another great hero assassin, Jingke who acrossed River Yi to try to kill the tyrant King of Qin, who became the 'First Emperor' of China] by the bank of River Yi, River Yi murmured and aspiration sank
Instrument string broken [also means the death of wife] and no more old friends

(Translation by Matthew)

A Persian pick-me-up

March 10, 2010

The literary Chinese took up only three of the four whiteboards. The fourth whiteboard remained blank for days, until I came in to find it covered in what seems to be Persian. Lauren helped pick out the Arabic loanwords for me, and Muiz took a stab at the rest (with the caveat that he wasn’t sure about some of the possibly-Persian words). Regardless, it’s a turn for the cheerier after the previous Chinese whiteboard:

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Bismillah, Ir Rahman, Ir Raheem
In The Name of God, The Most Gracious, The Most Merciful

…ءان شاء االله نجاح
InshAllah najah…
God willing, the success of the…

…هرهاي ماريا افراح…
…H(a)rhay Maria Afrah…
…(???) Maria enjoy…

جرج…
…(G)re(g)
…Greg

“God willing, enjoy the success of (?) Maria and Greg”

A few days later, everything was erased and replaced by a few notes for a problem set.

And this quarter, the room is reserved for a virtual anatomy course, and remains locked and empty almost all the time.

* In the original, ‘fen’ (=1/100 chi, 1 chi = 1/3 meter)

But if you try to go to crescatgraffiti.com in China, you get “Page not available“, along with a bar asking the user if they’d like to translate the (unavailable) English-language page into Chinese.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit puzzled. The site has nothing to do with the Chinese government and very little to do with politics, and there’s only one piece of graffiti that mentions Tibet. Maybe it falls under websites that contain “obscenity, pornography, and criminal activity”– admittedly, the inherently-criminal UChicago graffiti does include plenty of content that is arguably obscene and/or pornographic.

Go figure.

(P.S. After posting this, I noticed today’s date. No April Fools here, though, folks…)

Peter Behr, a UofC alum, identified the first piece as a notable passage from Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦), one of the Four Great Classical Novels (四大名著), “which posits a cyclical relationship between concepts that can be construed as meaning emptiness (空), perceived reality (色), and actual reality (情).”* For someone studying alone in the stacks, spending hour after hour in silence, perhaps exploring postmodern theories of this and that, I can imagine how those ideas might resonate.

Peter, furthermore, notes a typo: “our rushed artist committed a small typo in the upper left hand corner, 由 instead of 自.”

Matthew Felix Sun kindly translated this passage:

Through emptiness, one sees lust
Because of lust, passion grows
Conduct passion to lust
Out of lust, one learns emptiness

The second piece, written on a different wall above the same study desk on the 4th floor, reads as follows (once again, courtesy of Matthew):

[On top of the page, a very large and light character:]
Mountain
[then]
The benevolent love mountain(s)
The wise love water

I can’t help but wonder what the author would make of those who love graffiti.

* Please also note a postscript from Peter, in true UofC alum style: “The problem with those words I defined is that their meanings are quite diverse and have shifted heavily over history. Indeed I believe 色, as it ‘grew up’ so to speak, came to mean physical desire, and now is ‘lust, sex,’ in addition to ‘color.’ 情, which is ubiquitous as the component to words such as 情况 (‘status, situation’) and 事情 (‘thing, matter, event’), also means ‘feeling’ or ‘passion,’ as in 感情 (‘emotion’) or 情爱 (‘love, in the sense of relationships’). So if we take 空 to mean not physical emptiness but lack, loneliness, or emotional solitude, the cycle also works. I’m not a scholar of the book, and haven’t even come close to reading its entirety. But I will be cavalier and guess that Matthew’s rendering is immediately borne out of context (it is a love story, after all), while mine is an interpretation of subtext (and so again, caveat lector).”