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Simple Thing
Oct. 1st, 2005 04:50 pm
Bikes, Blues and BBQ has finally hit its climax, and I have to say, you know, it's not been so bad. The business hasn't been affected nearly as badly as Charles thought and we even sold 3 motorcycle books! Still, we had a pretty bad weekend as far as sales go.
Strangely I'm feeling a lot better than yesterday. It turns out drinking water and hot tea and getting enough sleep really *does* work wonders for your cold! You know all that stuff I was talking about taking it easy this weekend? Fuck it. ;)
Tonight I hope to finish moving (finally), do laundry, write the D+D game for Tuesday, revise a poem, start writing another one and learn to sing the Star Spangled Banner backwards. Before midnight. Oh, and to infect another person (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bamboofae) with LOST.
I've started reading "From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment," by Dogen, with commentary from Kosho Uchiyama. I thought it was -- and I'll admit -- a book mostly about cooking in a spiritual context, and it sort of is: the bulk of the book is really Dogen's Tenzo Kyokun, or, Instructions for the Zen Cook. It's the very first in a series of instructions for various functions in a Zen monastery. Very cool. Uchiyama comments and expands on the basic themes, though, so that it encompasses other day-to-day activities. Finally, Thomas Wright worked to translate it in such a way that it has relevance to a modern audience.
I'm finding the act of translating text to be really fascinating. I'm also reading Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky, and both translators in their introductions talk about the extreme difficulty in extracting the exact meaning of one language into English. With Russian, for example, there's a lot more flexibility with word order, so the first three sentences in Dostoevsky's Notes use that to emphasize exactly what he wants. (Directly translated, I think it comes across as "I am a man sick. I am a spiteful man. Unpleasant man, am I.") There's no way to reproduce this subtlety in English, so right off the bat something is lost in translation. Wright was mentioning the vast differences between the two authors in *his* text; Dogen is dense and technical, while Uchiyama uses much simpler language and tries to stay away from Buddhist terms. Trying to translate both of them into a seamless text that the modern reader will appreciate took shifting gears many times. It took him eight years to come to enough of an understanding that he felt comfortable with the final result. That's...amazing to me.
I'm also reading "The Dragon Lensman," which is a sequel to the original Lensman trilogy by Doc E.E. Smith. It's pretty fun, and strikes me as this pulpy Dr. Who-esque kind of story. Of course, a 25-foot hyper-intelligent, telepathic dragon as the main character certainly doesn't hurt, either. :)
Now, home!
Strangely I'm feeling a lot better than yesterday. It turns out drinking water and hot tea and getting enough sleep really *does* work wonders for your cold! You know all that stuff I was talking about taking it easy this weekend? Fuck it. ;)
Tonight I hope to finish moving (finally), do laundry, write the D+D game for Tuesday, revise a poem, start writing another one and learn to sing the Star Spangled Banner backwards. Before midnight. Oh, and to infect another person (
bamboofae) with LOST.I've started reading "From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment," by Dogen, with commentary from Kosho Uchiyama. I thought it was -- and I'll admit -- a book mostly about cooking in a spiritual context, and it sort of is: the bulk of the book is really Dogen's Tenzo Kyokun, or, Instructions for the Zen Cook. It's the very first in a series of instructions for various functions in a Zen monastery. Very cool. Uchiyama comments and expands on the basic themes, though, so that it encompasses other day-to-day activities. Finally, Thomas Wright worked to translate it in such a way that it has relevance to a modern audience.
I'm finding the act of translating text to be really fascinating. I'm also reading Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky, and both translators in their introductions talk about the extreme difficulty in extracting the exact meaning of one language into English. With Russian, for example, there's a lot more flexibility with word order, so the first three sentences in Dostoevsky's Notes use that to emphasize exactly what he wants. (Directly translated, I think it comes across as "I am a man sick. I am a spiteful man. Unpleasant man, am I.") There's no way to reproduce this subtlety in English, so right off the bat something is lost in translation. Wright was mentioning the vast differences between the two authors in *his* text; Dogen is dense and technical, while Uchiyama uses much simpler language and tries to stay away from Buddhist terms. Trying to translate both of them into a seamless text that the modern reader will appreciate took shifting gears many times. It took him eight years to come to enough of an understanding that he felt comfortable with the final result. That's...amazing to me.
I'm also reading "The Dragon Lensman," which is a sequel to the original Lensman trilogy by Doc E.E. Smith. It's pretty fun, and strikes me as this pulpy Dr. Who-esque kind of story. Of course, a 25-foot hyper-intelligent, telepathic dragon as the main character certainly doesn't hurt, either. :)
Now, home!
