halfcactus

1.

In any case, translation toward English is not an act of benevolent charity — Penguin’s imprimatur did not rescue Truyện Kiều from obscurity. Nearly a hundred million people live in Việt Nam and several million Vietnamese people live abroad. Việt Nam is now more populous than the United Kingdom, Turkey, Australia, France, Germany, South Korea — and many, many other countries. A friend recently shared a reminder from her mother: Vietnamese doesn’t need you. We get so embroiled in our diasporic angst, writing heartfelt, tortured essays about not being able to impart cultural knowledge to any children we might have, but we’re lucky for what is not the case for everyone who has lost a language or had it taken from them. Vietnamese is not endangered, and its literature is not honored by translation toward English — it is English-using society that benefits from gaining access to literature produced in other languages. . .

—Som-Mai Nguyen, "Blunt-force Ethnic Credibility" (h/t superborb on Bluesky)


2.

In that instant, Kiyose realized something. If happiness, or beauty, or goodness existed in this world, for him, they would take the form of this runner.

Just finished Shion Miura's Run with the Wind (translated by Yui Kajira) and loved it. Although I barely remember anything from the anime, I adored it the first time I watched it and I now appreciate it as an adaptation. :') The big race (Hakone Ekiden) took almost half of the book and I'm amazed at how invested and emotional I was throughout it, even when I was just reading it! I did mostly have to skip Shindo and Haiji's legs because I was too anxious haha.

Also loved the bits where Musa was struggling with colloquial language (as a foreign student) and Shindo was always checking in on him. I actually don't remember Shindo at all in the anime, which makes me feel bad because he is such a GEM.

Some of the side characters (namely the rival athletes and Hana) were more obviously narrative devices than people and it took some time for me to get used to that, and I was very surprised to see the (one-sided) Kakeru/Hana developments.

Really enjoyed the English translation, the (consistent and intentional) choice to leave specific words untranslated and unitalicized, and the writing.

Some excerpts from the translator's notes:

Miura's writing has a warmth and an openness, though it's hard to put a finger on what exactly gives it that feeling. Her all-embracing love for human beings and their everyday lives, in all their messy glory, seems to seep through her words and touch us, too. Her characters come alive on the page, each possessing their own past and future. As readers, we are pulled into that embrace, and, like the spectators of the Hakone Ekiden, we feel absorbed in the Chikusei-so team's endeavor as if we were running alongside them ourselves.

My general stance in translating this novel was to prioritize the momentum of the story, the feel of each character (and their relationships, with all the banter), and the authenticity of the language revolving around running. At the same time, I wanted to retain as many Japanese terms as possible, and in a way that allows curious readers to look things up. After all, it's perfectly natural to come across unfamiliar words or concepts while reading any book, no matter the language it was originally written in. Luckily, it's easier than ever to find out what an engawa or a kamaboko looks like, or what a higurashi sounds like. Of course, there are many English videos and articles about the real-life Hakone Ekiden as well, packed with as much human drama as the story of the Chikusei-so team.

3.
llonkrebboj linked me to their translation of 人是_ by Zhou Shen, which naturally led me to falling in love with the song and being tempted to watch Wandering Earth 2.

Songs: 一蓑煙雨 by Zhang Xincheng & Waltz About Death by Angela Autumn

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My computer is broken again so it's gonna be another exciting weekend of troubleshooting attempts. I'm not optimistic that reinstalling my OS or restoring from backup will help. :( The silver lining is that I finally managed to send off a long-overdue family photobook for printing a few days ago, and I laid everything out on Canva, so the draft file is on the internet and nothing of value will be lost if I have to restore my computer from the last backup point. (I'm still worried that it will turn out so ugly it's ungiftable but at least it's theoretically reworkable in the future!)

In other news, the new Link Click donghua OP just dropped:


And this is what the band has to say in response to the mass wailing:

POSTING HERE SO I DON'T FORGET BECAUSE both their band name and album title are not the most searchable lmfao but oh my God this band!!! Their languages!!! Their songs!!!

Fom their Wikipedia article:

Collage (Chinese: 珂拉琪; pinyin: Kē Lā Qí; Japanese: コラジ) is a Taiwanese band that released their first album in 2021,[1] with two members: lead singer Natsuko Lariyod, who is of mixed Hakka and Amis ancestry, and Hunter Wang, who is of Minnan descent. Rather than use Taiwanese Mandarin, the band focuses on producing music using Taiwanese, Japanese, Amis and English. They incorporate indigenous people's music into their compositions.

I haven't heard their entire album yet but I definitely got teary just listening to 這該死的拘執佮愛 and 萬千花蕊慈母悲哀 even though I could understand next to nothing... to be honest, I feel like half of the emotion was from them having such a moving and fanviddable sound... And the rest is the songs being in (Taiwanese) Hokkien, which I suppose always hits hard even when they're incomprehensible to me. The titles of the later songs in the album seem to be Amis so I'm even more intrigued, especially since they are English-subbed on their Youtube channel. And the album and song covers are pretty, which is always a plus!

I also love how the Youtube descriptions have both the hanzi (like the actual Hokkien hanzi, not the Mandarin translation, which is often the case) and the Hokkien romanization. :')

I'll probably forget this because Hokkien will never be a readable language for me, but:

袂: bue (in Mandarin... 不 or 不會?)

予: ho (in Mandarin... 給 or 讓? The passive thing.)

Tsin (very) really is just... 親

下晡: e-po (afternoon / 下午 in Mandarin)

厝內 chu lai (home / 家裡)

無要無緊 bo yao bo kin... (in Mandarin, 無關緊要) - is this where boey ao kin (it's alright) comes from???

這該死的拘執佮愛 Stubborn Love in Chains (with simpler and possibly more singable lyrics):

Watch on YouTube

萬千花蕊慈母悲哀 Green Tara's Thousands of Sorrowful Blossoms

Watch on YouTube

Btw listening to a song in Hokkien is always an interesting (and frustrating) experience because even with the lyrics in front of me I can't process the words... As opposed to Canto or any other Sinitic language, where my instinct is to match the words up with Mandarin.

ETA: Finished the album. I have to say that there’s a song that appears to be about Japanese soldiers, which I have a knee-jerk revulsion to, regardless of whatever the context is. But it’s otherwise still a great album! Interesting that the Amis songs are often mixed with Japanese.

Re-posting because I was feeling nostalgic—technically it's a Qihun fanmix (concept: Gu Yu and Jiang Xueming make a mix CD together), but it's pretty much a 2000s Mandopop playlist with three out of the five S.H.E songs I know. Originally posted on Tumblr 3 years ago.



tracklist, stream links, and notes here on chillwaves

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Recently:

Finished watching To the Wonder, which certainly, uh, took a turn in the last ep. I think I have thoughts about the show and some notes about the production, but right now my only thought is that I could have been healed with more scenes of baby sheep.

Started reading Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (Rainbow Turtle fantranslation). I'm enjoying it a lot more than I expected! Some of the character moments were scenes I didn't even know I needed... But it really is so long and I'm bad at consuming anything for extended amount of time so I've stopped, somewhere around volume 5. I like that it's appropriately webnovel-y and very easy to read on the phone (it's very light on descriptions), while also being meaty.

Got myself stuck in the Proving Grounds of Eiyuden Chronicle. 🤣 I initially stopped playing because I wanted to wait for "the right time" to do a dungeon crawl, but, well, weeks have passed... Sometimes I turn on the game so I can "explore a bit"... But there's a puzzle element to this dungeon and I genuinely don't remember which dungeon configurations I've finished... And battles still take forever to load so I ragequit every time I try to continue. 🤣

Saw 毛雪汪 ep 90, featuring Wang Yuwen and Zhang Xincheng. I now get all my ZXC updates from gixininja, a Tan Jianci fan who... has conditioned me to think about Tan Jianci every time I think about ZXC. I initially wasn't going to watch this because I just don't have the spoons/attention span for variety shows (ZXC is doing a lot of variety shows this year and I simply am not following them), but she assured me it was my type of variety show (chill and cozy) AND informed me that Mao Buyi has a pug who is an official cast regular... She was right! There were also mentions of TJC, which I reported accordingly. XD

My key takeaway from that ep is that ZXC wrote a song for the drama he and WYW are in (whose English title is *drumroll* You Are My Lover Friend), and that WYW was NOT asked to sing for it, as previously agreed. (From what I understand, it's meant to be a duet?) (This is all told in good humor, since WYW and ZXC are childhood friends, and 80% of the ep is WYW exposing ZXC.)

I also have to say that it also felt very freeing to just sit back and watch this without having any thoughts about subbing or translating or cutting the video into bite-sized segments... And to not really feel a thing except mild interest in music. I feel like my Chinese has deteriorated a lot over the past year of stepping away from fandom and most cmedia, but it's really nice to just be a regular viewer lol.

Anyway this is the ep... I didn't realize how clickbait-y the episode description was until now haha:

Watch on YouTube

I did these back in September but I was going through my works this year and thought I'd round them up for archiving purposes...


Note: Dailymotion doesn't appear to automatically display external subtitles, so you have to tap the captions icon (bottom right) or gear icon (upper right).

SO many feelings about this performance and how much Tank is leaning on the cast to help him get through it—and Ella, Zhang Jie, and Penny giving him the best support. He was a nervous wreck beforehand and utterly relieved afterwards. （；へ：）He nailed it, though!!!


Related Links:

subbed: Tank, "Three Kingdom Love" (Time Concert performance)

subbed: Tank's Time Concert entrance—reuniting with Ella!

subbed: Ella and Tank talking about meeting in 2005

subbed: Tank talking about his physical and mental deteriorations (an edited cut for copyright reasons)

subbed: Reminiscing about Hana Kimi (S.H.E, Tank, Fahrenheit era) (this one has lots of typos oops!)

First of all: Zhang Xincheng has been releasing tracks from his mini-album, culminating in a music video that I (unexpectedly) like a lot! The teaser caught my attention because it was giving sapphic vibes, so the part in the MV with "our unbreakable friendship" made me LOL.


Lyrics are by ZXC himself. While they are not the most poetic, they are sincere and uplifting. Both visuals and message remind me a lot of Reese Lansangan's St. Petersburg (about giving the listener the time and space to wander) and Easier (a song for her fan-community: I know I can’t change the world to make it better, no / I can’t heal the wounds / But I can proudly show you how I bruise).

St. Petersburg in particular is one I remember accompanying me when I felt sad and overwhelmed, so much that I have an embarrassing blog entry about it from 2016. (And I'm highly reccing the MV if you want the island + community + FOOD experience and a true sense of space and light, and not just the idealized aesthetic hehehe (it's pretty much a travelogue set to music)

+I've been listening to Easier a lot lately!




I spent September and October making lyric videos of ZXC's other tracks (all compiled here) and at this point I'm ready to retire my Youtube channel lol??? I've been feeling extremely non-fandom-y and lately I want to go back to personal journaling; my planner is nothing but boring and increasingly long daily to-do-lists now and I think it's affecting me. I need quiet time and visual stimulation!!!!!

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Time Concert: Old Friends

A list of ep2 things!

It is revealed that G.E.M. almost declined to join the show (at Jason Zhang's invitation) because she was nervous about having to sing covers; she attributes the success of her songs to the people who wrote and produced them for her, declaring her own singing quite ordinary. (+ She debuted early and never had the chance to play around with music or do covers, it seems.)

Ella is very consistent in her advice to just enjoy the time onstage. :') It's very sweet and it makes me glad to know that she likes performing!

Tank talks about how his older sister always fully supported his decision to pursue music (whereas their parents objected) until she passed away from heart problems. :( If I Become a Memory was written for her. And he talks about how Ella always made him feel safe and reminds him of his sister. Their siblingly dynamic is so sweet and cute!

ELLA, using her normal outside voice:
SO? NOT NERVOUS ANYMORE, ARE YOU? :D :D :D

TANK, embarrassed and long-suffering:
Can you lower your voice!!!

Personal Angel transforming from a song written for Hana Kimi to a very personal one about his sister, his friends, and all the people who've given him strength and watched over him. ;___; And Ella singing it with him because he still had stage trauma, and it turned out to be such a lovely duet, one I loved before knowing the context of their performance. I guess it makes sense for Ella to be so natural with harmonies since she used to be in a girl group, but her voice really is so smooth and unique. ;___;

Roy Wang (TFBOYS) telling Tank that Personal Angel had also given him strength. He has covered it before (Tank, smiling: "I saw.") and the covers helped him get fans.

Zhang Xincheng is proof that if you make your fandom your personality while working to make a name for yourself, you can not only meet your idol, but also have the opportunity to sing with him. XD

I've been having an emotional full-circle week; I really wanted to sub the concert vlogs because majority of the people who translate these types of content (including official translations for various cmedia) skip over the songs. I'm a tiny account, but I really hope!!! That the handful of people who see my videos!!! Become more interested in Jay Chou's (and his co-lyricists') songs!!!

(I did get one person thanking me for my notes in my subtitles, so there's that.)

I'm a casual Jay Chou listener at most, but he definitely has been integral to my life: first as a point of connection to a language and culture I wanted to be part of, and, more recently, owing to the longevity of his career and the heights of his popularity, as a point of connection with other Sino diaspora people I met online. I started listening to his music long before I had any functional Chinese ability (or the technology to learn it), when all the words were, for the most part, just syllables, rendered more mysterious by his disinclination to enunciate. It's been really surreal to revisit old songs with fresh eyes and realize I can understand and interpret them myself now without depending of fantranslations or needing to go over every word with pen, paper, and too much guesswork (though I absolutely still recommend this method, I learned so much from this).

(It does help that a lot of the singalong clips that were included in the vlogs—as well as ZXC's preferences, it seems—were the ones with straightforward lyrics. XD I still need to level up to unlock his other songs hahaha.)



Funnily enough, the parts I struggled the most with in translating were the chorus parts of You Can Hear It, which I couldn't get to come out more naturally or more cohesively. (My first thought for "太過依賴" was "clingy" or "needy", but they feel too colloquial and a little anachronistic for a song written in the 2000s???) On the other hand, I feel that I've really improved a lot in the past year in the sense that I'm much more comfortable with changing words and aiming for natural, concise, and reasonably paced, rather than precise. And also being more succinct with my notes, instead of overexplaining the way I used to. /o\

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In somewhat related news, my dad has found out that I can read Chinese, while I learned that if I read out messages to him in Mandarin, even without me necessarily understanding what I'm reading, he can translate them in his head in Hokkien? It's making me feel both like part of the problem (by not learning the heritage language), but also... the solution (by having some level of literacy in the only feasible language). PS. He was especially baffled because I was reading text in simplified and tbh so was I. 😂

This is an odd mixture of romance and family drama that didn't quite fit well together. She is a poor girl from a small town who values education as her ticket out of her toxic household, while he is a popular rich boy who's always out cutting classes and causing trouble. They fall in and out of friendship (though Li Ran pretty much falls straight into love XD), ultimately losing contact when she moves to a different country, only reuniting when she flies back for a family emergency. The movie alternates between present and past.

It felt like they shot so many scenes (and they were shot very well too!) from the novel but couldn't figure out how to put them all together into a cohesive story—to the point that it didn't really feel like the story had any themes at all. Subplots that I thought would be called back to or addressed later on were simply dropped. The characters didn't really get a chance to be characters or have personalities, they were just ingredients for conflict—conflicts that weren't actually resolved, just pushed out of the way.

Pacing and flow were really weird. There was poor judgement in what parts to include and how much of them was needed; some scenes felt either completely extraneous or overly long, while the ones that I felt were important only lasted five seconds, or were omitted altogether, and nothing really made emotional sense to me. It's such a shame because there were some really cinematic moments that ended up feeling wholly unearned. Similarly, the "memorable" lines also ended up falling flat because they simply didn't get the space to gather weight.

It's so weird because I spent two hours following Chen Jianxia's journey from insecure teenager to assertive adult, and at the end of everything I still had no idea who she was. But I think what this movie lacks the most is joy, something that Chen Jianxia was clearly capable of but was shunted off as a background detail (apparently she's good friends with Zhang Ruonan's character at the end, but all of this happens offscreen, while significant time is spent on multiple bullying scenes with varying levels of plot relevance). I think if the happy moments had been given a chance to be in the foreground, the resolutions would have felt meaningful enough to give me some satisfaction.

On a more positive note, the songs were nice, the cinematography was actually pretty great, and my favorite part was the middle bit where Chen Jianxia realizes that she's more capable than she thought and learns to assert herself.

*

That said, here is the ~*lyric video*~ I made of ZXC's song, whose title (Shattered Time) I now think is fitting given the movie's very fragmentary and jagged pacing. XD


Other MVs for this movie (note that I feel that the ZXC song is the weakest among these, since it's more of a character song):

晚星 / Evening Star:


空空的/ Empty-Handed (my personal favorite; it's the most thematic one):


And here's my playlist of trailers, BTS, and promotional materials that I personally subbed:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3oeFgk5YVn8t8w9qydoRpHRo55JiCaGB

This video has been sneaking its way around Twitter lately! And completely worth watching because:

a filipino boy group serving “fuck colonizers” concept in their mv and im sitting here wondering how the world isnt hearing them pic.twitter.com/0271wPbL3B

— closed (@yeosangliker) November 6, 2022

I'm so sad that the subs are only in English ajsfioaasfj;a I could tell they were singing in various regional languages (I speak two, with a passing familiarity with a third because it's my mom's native language), but the vocals get drowned out by the production. :(

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In light of that, I've been having many Thoughts about language! For most of my life I've felt extremely inadequate, never able to pass as a native speaker and always trying to "catch up", but for the past week I've been finding doors in languages, opening and closing and escaping through them when everything becomes too much. I know I'll feel bad again once my feelings settle down, but just for this week I feel lucky to be able to consume art and media in three languages? All of a sudden I'm remembering how much art and literature mean to me as an individual, not just as a means to socialize and be opinionated, but just as a way to feel present and human and connected to someone's vision—and sometimes, to be alone.

And so I've sort of been retreating to Filipino media lately, the ones I don't have to discuss with anyone at all, and it's nice to just... be there with the text. No outsiders, no translation happening in my head or outside it, no explaining to other people or even discourse-ing about the themes because the only dialogue is between the text and our lived experiences. Recently installed Penlab (kind of our local Tapas) and binge-read the webcomic Ang Jowa Kong Crosswise (My Crosswise Boyfriend) up to its latest update! Also booked a ticket to Mula sa Buwan (From the Moon), a Filipino musical retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac that I’ve already missed twice and regretted. It's still a month from now and I'm so anxious that there will be unexpected real life incidents that prevent me from catching it. 😂

I also have a couple of media in my to-finish queue that I hope to finish within the year: The Kangks Show, a sex comedy show that explores sex positivity, body positivity, and generation/social media platform gaps (English subs available, the whole thing is actually completely free to watch on WeTV [here]); Oro, Plata, Mata, a 3-hour war film that's finally now on Netflix and that you thankfully can break into three one-hour chunks because the structure of the movie seems to echo the title (Gold, Silver, Misfortune). CONVENIENT. It's an important and critically acclaimed local film but I'm no longer used to watching serious films and am scared. 😂

Rainless Love in a Godless Land (2021)
Omg I swear I had an entire post about this but Dreamwidth ate it. :(((((( tl;dr this was just an okay drama that is a bit of a cross between Good Omens and Goblin/Guardian, but had very, very, veeeery powerful cinematic moments (the entire intro, and then the Shi Shi performance in the middle, for example!) and a banger soundtrack. The soundtrack is really impressive to me--it's not only cohesive, but the lyrics are actually very relevant and used for maximum effect in the show!!! It's very purposeful about the music in ways that I found EXTREMELY satisfying. The Mayday song is used exactly once, in the end, and there are even some great BGMs that they saved until the later scenes.

I had and still have a lot of thoughts about its use of Amis folklore and I guess overall I appreciated the intention but ultimately I think it falls short. I wish they'd used their artistic budget to have short informative post-credits segments about the real lore and practices.

Other things I liked: Toem's everything!!!!!!! She is the single most interesting, and most well-executed character in the show. Best BGM, best styling (not just her excellent collection of earrings, but her outfits that play a lot with PoV), best storytelling. And generally I think this show did well with visual themes of dualities, reflections, and seeing people through reflective surfaces. I also loved that one scene where Hsieh Tienti compares prophecy with the experience of having to rewatch a movie and laugh at the same jokes again and again.


Midnight Diner (S1)
I've only finished maybe 7 out of 10 episodes, but I was enjoying this as a Sunday afternoon background watch! It's a slice-of-life show from the PoV of the diner's owner (known as Master)--his policy is to accommodate requests from customers if he has ingredients on hand. Each episode is centered on one customer and one dish, and dishes are usually simple, homey, comfort food, from butter rice to ochazuke to yakisoba.

Of all the food-related shows, this is the only one that genuinely made me want to cook and made me realize that I do actually enjoy food, haha.


Jay Chou, "The Greatest Works of Art" [album + MV] (2022)

This is the long-, long-,long-awaited Jay Chou album, though half of the songs appear to be re-releases of his older singles. I think it makes for a good workout album, and that Still Wandering and You Are the Firework That I Missed fit so well together, lyrically.

I really enjoyed the MV!!!!!!! Plot-wise it's a lot like his 2007 movie Secret (Jay really likes his magical pianos), but more artsy and glamorous and whimsical, and with an outlook that is more adult and less self-absorbed. There's a little piano duel in the middle (with none other than Lang Lang) that's actually fun, not just a directorial flex.