I was going to insert an idiom here, but... well, the usual.

Hi.

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Edit: Instead of an idiom, have a poem!

"黄鹤楼" (Yellow Crane Tower)

昔人已乘白云去，此地空余黄鹤楼。
黄鹤一去不复返，白云千载空悠悠。
晴川历历汉阳树，芳草萋萋鹦鹉洲。
日暮乡关何处是? 烟波江上使人愁。
--Cui Hao, 700s

"In ancient times a man rode off on a yellow crane; on this earth remains Yellow Crane Tower.
Once the yellow crane left it never returned; for one thousand years white clouds wandered the sky at ease.
The clear river reflects every tree in Hanyang; sweet-smelling grasses grow thick on Parrot Island.
At day's end, where lies my hometown? The waves of mist over the river make men anxious."




Am I horrible, or am I horrible? Butchering classical Chinese poetry is my specialty.
Lame excuses are as follows:

--Was almost a native speaker. Except I never learned how to write sufficiently. Most of my grammar/mood knowledge is from guangdonghua.

--Took poetic license with the semicolons. The comma breaks don't translate well. Text is from lovely Wikipedia; I first saw it in a book, which I think is "Poems of the Masters", an anthology of translations by Red Pine. This is a really rough translation, and by "really rough" I mean "dictionary was a huge help here".

--"In ancient times" is kind of meh. I know a lot of translations begin with "Long ago", but I think 昔 has a much more, er, ancient feel to it. This explanation is not at all self-referential.

--"on this earth" was reaaaally literal. It probably -is- taken to mean "here", as in "now", but... well, I don't know.

--"at ease" was also a dictionary definition. I think 悠悠 conveys relaxed and careless, sort of "freely", but I can't find a phrasing for that, other than "at leisure", which doesn't fit, either.

--"At day's end" <--This killed me. It's literally "day evening" connotative of "the evening of the day", and a lot of people say it's just "evening", but IMHO it's more final, more metaphorical than that, and kind of more transitional than "end". "Ending", maybe?

--And I hate the very last line. "使人" isn't exactly "men" as much as "mankind" and doesn't translate exactly into that or into "one", which is the only nonspecific pronoun that could probably stand in for the phrase. It's people in general, but I can't find a way to translate that without it coming off as awkward.

I do use he/his/men as the default gender, not out of sexism but because there's no neuter pronoun in English and "woman" is much less neuter than "man". I also leave punctuation outside of the quotation marks, which drives non-APA people insane, but hey, you're not quoting the punctuation as part of the word, are you?


......Input, if you'd like? Besides, you know, the "you're horrible please do not touch my precious poetry ever again. ever" sort of thing.