Eighth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

It's one thing if mankind is hunted to extinction by ChatGPT, but I really do object to being executed by Bing.

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3169743#cmt3169743 )

Welcome back! Fandom chat, misc creativity, internet weirdness, books, films, anything! Tell meme about it so we can get to the next post title!

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Comments

Re: Poetry - 面朝大海, 春暖花开 by Hai Zi (海子)

[(Anonymous)]

春暖花开 is a stupidly hard phrase to translate, by the way. In Chinese, you can just slam four characters together and call them an idiom; in English, you have to add all these joining words that kill the elegance of the original phrase. Plus, you have to make a bunch of assumptions about parts of speech. If the original text says spring-warm-flower-bloom, is 'spring' a noun or an adjective? Does it modify 'warm' or 'flower' or 'bloom'?

When you read the original, you just feel the line. You read the phrase as a single atomic unit, so you don't have to worry about breaking it down into constituent parts. My interpretations are what feels right to me, but I'm not a poet and my wording is blunt and direct. Luckily, Hai Zi's poetry also uses simple language and clean imagery, but my flaws will probably show hard if I attempt anything more complicated.