Years of Poems and Spirits

I have been following what is going on in Tibet as closely as I could. At this moment, I found myself unable to reconcile different reactions I have while wearing different hats:
1. Clearly the unrest in Tibet is a race riot. The ethno-natured taunts from the Tibetans and their foreign sympathizers only heightened my awareness of my own ethnicity. So one reaction is: defiance and outrage;
2. As a rational observer, I can totally see merit in Dalai’s argument that the Chinese policy was the root cause of the tension. Dalai today challenged Beijing for evidence of his conspiracy, while messages from Beijing are the same as they were after 6.4.89. So the other reaction is: doubt and indignation.
3. As a student of history, I do not give the Tibetans much chance of success. They don’t have all the stars aligned for their cause. On the other hand, I am afraid that their determined struggle may become even more bloody and desperate as time goes on. Yet another reaction is: rationalized hopelessness.
4. As a student of state-society, I’d expect the Chinese state be “weaker” (more temperate, more constrained) than before after years of integration into the world. The role of ethno-nationalism should have diminished as a doctrine of legitimacy from both the state and the society’s perspectives. However, the police-state reaction and its capacity it demonstrated surprised me. The last reaction: where did I get it wrong?

I just finished translating an article for a professor in school (English to Chinese). It is my first academic translation work. Some things worth remembering:
1. I thought I could finish it in a couple of weeks. Instead it took me almost half a year (albeit on and off)!
2. Translation means concentration! I started translating during class. Felt like dashing the first 100 yards in a marathon. Didn’t work, even the class is as boring as ethics or sustainability.
3. Chinese is more concise. The original 29 in English ended up in 22 pages of Chinese. I tried to use the same font size (12) and page size and all charts and tables are scaled the same.
4. Chinese has a lot fewer “tree-like” subclauses. Often I had to break a long English into smaller pieces in Chinese. Felt like Chinese speakers take more breaks and rely more on context to convey meanings.

The subject is about late Emperial China’s demographics. The authors try to undermine prevailing Malthusian description of “mortality crisis” by suggesting the population used infanticide to respond to economic pressure. Not at all convinced, but:
1. Shows the conventional wisdom has strong academic support.
2. Echoing what I have learned from Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China was not in decline even during late Qing. Population pressure even brought about agriculture production upgrade that made Lower Yangtze comparable to Europe.
3. I agree with Kent G’s criticism: too much speculation too little hard evidence. I still remember his excitement during class.

Just a collection of some old favorites and new interpretations:

“Ah, there you go; ‘93! I was expecting that word. A cloud had been forming for the space of fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen hundred years it burst. You are putting the thunderbolt on its trial.”
(满天乌云密布了一千五百年。过了十五个世纪之后，乌云散了，而您却要加罪于雷霆)
—Chapter X. The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light, Les Miserables
I read it over and again during the summer of 89. Now I realize it has more to do with the theme of enlightenment, not “democracy”. Still very powerful however you read it though.

Thus at Time’s humming loom it’s my hand that prepares,
The robe ever-living the Deity wears.
—Spirit, Faust. Part I, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One of the most intriguing lines in Faust. The first Chinese version I read was translated by GMR, I think.

中学时读《楚辞》，不知所云：除去不认识的字或认识不会念的字，剩下认得的也已读不通了。只记得一些上口的，“若有人兮山之阿,被薜荔兮带女萝”。。。前一段看到余秋雨以当代散文翻写的《离骚》，特别欣赏。从网上下载至此。