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Yet another useful web tool, and some poetry

Catherine :)   July 27th, 2012 11:20a.m.

I've just re-discovered pin1yin1.com, the first website I used to study online many aeons ago. (Ok, a few years.) It parses the characters into words and outputs the pinyin and meaning (not translation!), which was really useful before I started learning to write characters.

http://www.pin1yin1.com/#春晓%0A春眠不觉晓%0A处处闻啼鸟%0A夜来风雨声%0A花落知多少

Also just remembered learning to recite some classical poems before I knew what they meant or how they were written, so it's interesting to go back and look at them now.

春晓
春眠不觉晓
处处闻啼鸟
夜来风雨声
花落知多少

Spring Morning
spring wakes from a sleep so long
everywhere you hear birdsong
last night came wind and rain
how many flowers in mud have lain?

Catherine :)   July 27th, 2012 11:36a.m.

李白
静夜思
床前明月光
疑是地上霜
举头望明月
低头思故乡

Li Bai
Musings on a quiet night
the moon shines bright through window pane
it seems outside a frost has lain
I lift my head and wish to the moon
I bow my head and think of home

范博涵   July 27th, 2012 6:32p.m.

My interpretations:

春晓 Early Spring

春眠不觉晓 Spring, asleep, unaware,
处处闻啼鸟 birds are singing everywhere.
夜来风雨声 Evenings bring the sound of wind and rain,
花落知多少 so much the falling flowers know.

静夜思 Thoughts on a Quiet Night

床前明月光 The bedside moonlight
疑是地上霜 makes the ground seem frozen.
举头望明月 I raise my eyes to the moon,
低头思故乡 look down and think of home.

pts   July 28th, 2012 5:44a.m.

春眠不觉晓 In spring, one sleeps and wakes up to find it is already day.
Here, 晓 means dawn, daybreak. 不觉晓 is don't know that the sun has risen.

花落知多少 – how many flowers have been laid down (by last night's wind and rain)?

范博涵 gave an accurate and touching translation of the 静夜思. It seems that his Chinese is much better than what he claims.

Kai Carver   July 28th, 2012 5:45a.m.

That is a nice tool! Very nice presentation. Your link got badly munged by the bug in the forum software, here's a link that works: http://goo.gl/zmk2D

I like that you can choose zhuyin/bopomofo instead of pinyin. Also traditional instead of simplified. I just wish we could specify that in the URL. Also I wish there was a way to turn off the translations.

Catherine :)   July 28th, 2012 5:59a.m.

@pts
An interesting discussion that my calligraphy tutor began was the level of 'artistic licence' you should take with these translations- I translated it directly first but didn't like how the poem sounded in English so changed a few things. I assume you're more for the literal translation? I guess it depends on your audience's preferences; I get that some people regard the poet's exact nuances are more important than the translation, as it was never meant to be heard in English.

For example the last line of Chun Xiao is courtesy of my calligraphy tutor; I thought it was lovely when I heard it back in 2007, and haven't forgotten Chun Xiao since, even after learning the "real" meaning :)

pts   July 28th, 2012 6:25a.m.

Totally agree with you. Chinese poems carry so many meanings that it's extremely difficult to accurately bring out all their meanings. One can only do it artistically. So I don't even attempt to translate them. What I was doing was just try to point out the real meaning of the poem. Anyway, I think most of us here are more concerned about the meaning of the Chinese than how to artistically translate them, which belongs to a more advanced level.

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