Dear readers of the forum, dear Stephen,
this is one of my prefered poems of Li Bai. Just wanted to introduce the wonderful translation done by Prof. Guenter Debon (emeritus). Stephen, you learned German in school for three years, enjoy it! Click the translation to hear the sound in German! (Since it is copyright, I'll soon remove it again - it's just to give you an impression of its beauty).
BTW, doesn't it sound perfectly in Mandarin?

¬îµn«Å«°Á²·¥_¼Ó §õ ¥Õ ¦¿«°¦pµe¸Ì ¤s¾å±æ´¸ªÅ ¨â¤ô§¨©úÃè Âù¾ô¸¨±m­i ¤H·Ï´H¾ï¬c ¬î¦â¦Ñ±ï®ä ½Ö©À¥_¼Ó¤W Á{­·ÃhÁ¤½

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

Julian, you're right, Dr. Wieger's work is based on ³\·V (¨û­«©Î¤ó)'s famous »¡¤å¸Ñ¦r, yet later on refined (¤»®Ñ²Î), thus giving the critics opportunity to rectify the errors and mistakes of Li Ssu and Hsu-shen.

Yes, I discovered the biography of Wen T'ien-hsiang already some days ago, thanks for the hint. (In the seventies I luckily could find 'Sung Biographies §º¥N¦W¤H¶Ç' edited by Prof. Herbert Franke, Munich, a real good source - naturally also containing Wen's vita). Among others, a sketch of Wen's biography is part of my Sung Anthology in German.

Ming, I'm happy to have the original of ¸Ö¸g together with Legge's famous translations on line. It's a great source and literary fund.

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

Three cheers to you and Chinapage for being chosen as the Site for the Day by Inside China Today. I like your recent additions, especially the Prose page which includes so many classic writings. Worth a visit by everyone.

Alfred, I know you are a fan of ¤å ¤Ñ ²» ( so am I ). There is a new biography on him in the new additions page. Take a look. I am sure you'll like it.

Dear Ming, my congratulations for your site being chosen by ¤µ¤é¤¤°ê - we all are a bit in a hurry with it before the day is over! ;)

BTW, still getting crash-downs with my homepage after I should have fixed the javascript problems??

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

Lexy, please open your eyes and look at this webpage (China the Beautiful) for finding "A is for love" and many other Chinese symbols! (There are still others - with the sounds added - at my site "Quileute School Project").

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

The second book done is ShiJing, with full Chinese text, as well as the complete English translation of Legge. (No need to buy it!)

You can find it at http://etext.virginia.edu/chinese/shijing/

Now, for a short introductory note in English, go here

You can also hear a recitation of one of love songs from Shi Jing at this website. From the home page, click on the "Read Poem" button, and scroll to "shi Jing". You can hear it even if you don't read Chinese.

I have 3 songs here, at

my website with both the original text and English translations.

One of the first project when Internet was created, and before WWW was invented was to digitize the Book of Odes - one word at a time. It was distributed when there was no direct way to distribute Chinese text. So the text has to be encoded from GB to HZ, emailed over and then decoded back from HZ to GB.

I do have complete set of Chinese text. But no Legge's translation.

Si tacuisses ... Sorry, seemingly I 'm not having a good day this morning, being rather absent minded: the 'Book of Odes' is first half of the first millenium B.C. - the materials might be a lot older yet (8000 years surely is a very daring guess though ;) - ¤Õ¤l gathering the remnants of Shih Huang Ti's burning of books is mere bullshit, excuse !)

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

Oops - Legge's year of birth should be 1815. Sorry!

Dear Stephen, I took it from "Chinese Characters, their origin, etymology, history, classification and signification. A thorough study from Chinese documents" by Dr. L. Wieger S.J. Transl. into English by L. Davrout S.J.. Second Edition, enlarged and revisted according to the 4th French edition. Paragon Book Reprint Corp. New York Dover Publications, Inc., New York.
I really appreciate this wonderful source, possessing two copies of it.

Jay, I envy you having James Legge's famous reprint of the 'Book of Odes'. (J.L. - 1850-1897 - was a British missionary and sinologist, living in Hongkong for 30 years and later teaching as a professor in Oxford. He is famous for his translations of the Chinese classics).
The 'Book of Odes' is a collection of very old folk songs (partly older than 8000 B.C.). It is said that Confucius himself had collected the remnants of these originally huge materials after their destruction under Ch'in Shih Huang Ti ¯³©l¬Ó«Ò. There are no authors known.
I'd like to know the details of your Paragon reprint.

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

Josh, the character you're looking for is 'li' (forth tone): ¤O.
The 'symbol/picture' in its original style shows a kind of (strong) arm, the middle stroke indicating the 'sinew'. (The top of it being curved, to take less room. The two side-lines and the transversal stroke represent the fibrous sheath). µ¬¤]¡C¹³§Î¡C
Assuming that you cannot display 2-byte-code on your computer, I'll send you a gif pic with the character.

Alfred

BTW, be careful with tatoos - they might be annoying companions for a whole life!

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

I did a bit more analysis of your Java Script, and found the errors to be in Lines 247 and 248. I fixed it and the error msgs go away.
Will send details to you by email.

Ming, are you able to tell me where are the culprit parts of my Javascript code ;))? With Netscape Navigator/Communicator my Chinese counter is tested out and working fine since years. Maybe anybody else is an expert enough to give me a hint (it's really annoying with all those different browsers and changing versions).

Dear Siu-Leung, you might be right with your guess: but I have purchased my calligraphy source a long time ago and also read it thoroughly with regard to the title brush's author. There is wether a name mentioned nor any claim for copyright. The very elegant and cultivated title brush in my opinion doesn't match too well with the content's style, so I would have desired a Ts'ao style title too. Since I do not know Chu's other styles' calligraphies, I imagined the title perhaps also being from his own hand (although having a somewhat 'modern' appearence). Maybe I'll find another brush some time in the future.

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

I took a quick look, and it may be that there are 2 errors in the Java script, which cause problems with both browsers.

The difference is: IE gives 2 error messages, and Navigators simply ignores them without error messages.

Only 4 digits are shown on the webpage instead of 6 digits. 2 are un-defined.

I am not sure about this. Just a thought.

Dear friends of the forum, I finally am able to announce that my Chu Yun-ming calligraphy site, as long promised, now could be finished (finished??). Partly it's been rather boring a job with having all the gif pics to be cleaned out etc. etc.. Anyway, it's done now and I hope you all interested will enjoy it.
For some unknown reasons, the pages seemingly are best viewed with IE (although for some other reason still more unknown to me, my Javascript Chinese counter is just working with 'beloved' Netscape Communicator 4.5).
I'd appreciate your knowledgable proofreading, infos on ÄÀ²®µM (up to know I didn't find his poems in common T'ang collections) or on translations of the five poems in English (I'm about to translate them into German and perhaps will add some of these versions later).
You find the site's link on my homepage.

Enjoy it!

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

They do not give their address, not even an email address, so there is no way to order anything.

I did a bit of investigation, and found their email address is ann@leelee.com

The website for National Palace Museum of Taiwan is http://www.npm.gov.tw

Dear Stephen, thank you for these interesting informations (medical records in German): Do you know the reasons for this? Had your people engaged in this project to learn/know German language?
I remember, during the sixties when being a junior lawyer, my judge (he was raised in Peking with his parents still living there when studying in Berlin; he was forced to take the cheapest opportunity travelling home during his hollidays, so going by the transsiberian with a rucksack filled with canned food) showed me an apparently brand-new book in German language, asking for my opinion what it was and where it came from. I read a few pages and it was our German penal code - and was different yet from it in some way: I thought it was still better because there were parts of judiciary incorporated we poor young lawyers still had to know by heart! Not having the slightest idea about it, my judge told me that it was the penal code of Taiwan. I must confess that up to now, I never had thought it over, why this Taiwanese penal code was written in German.

As you mentioned transscriptions from Western languages into the Chinese writing system. I had this topic already discussed with Dr. Lee and am regretting that very often the sounds aren't at least reproduced adequately (maybe depending from the specific pronunciation of souther Chinese dialects, and nowadays with regard to the specifics of American English). Here's a new example: why 'must' we write ºq¼w for our greatest poet's name instead of ºq¯S (giving the German sound much better) or ¾¥¦è­ô instead of ¾¥¦è¥i or even ª´¦è¥i etc. etc. ?

As for the g-sounds in English: you cannot see direct parallels to your different Chinese dialects. English being a mixed language with lots of different linguistic sources (like e.g. Romanian), there are Roman (Latin, French, Spanish) sources and - of course - a Germanic one: Roman languages differ in pronunciation of certain consonants like g and c according to wether it's preceding an e or i (y) vowel or another one. So in English 'Germanic' words like get, gill, give, go etc. always are pronounced with a glottal g, whereas in latin words it depends from the above rule: general, generation, giant or cease, cycle, cinnamon but guardian, guide or court, cancel etc.. Yet like in almost any rule, there is a paradox - with the pronunciation of the word German/Germanic ;( - linguistically not at all being Roman origin.
(But thinking of Latin's original pronunciation - Caesar as Kaesar etc. ! - you'd surely be right seeing very interesting parallels of sound shifts comparable to those of Chinese dialect.! BTW, the glottal version is here the older way of pronouncing - that's exactly what you're thinking of your southern Chinese languages, isn't it!)

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

(1) Feilian, a mythical animal and god of the wind. According to a 2nd century source, it has the body of a deer, the head of a small bird, horns and a snake tail and marks of a leopard.
(2) Feathered men are humans who become immortals. The azure bird is one of the three birds attached to Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West. See footnote (6) below.
(3) The golden bird, another one of the three birds attached to Xiwangmu. See footnotes (2) and (6).
(4) and (5) The Queen Mother of the West, Xiwangmu, lives in the Kunlun Mountain (in present-day Sichuan) and possesses the secret of the elixir of immortality. The Royal Father (of the East) is her geographic counterpart, a much later development in Chinese religion and seemingly of no great importance except as a balance to Xiwangmu.
(6) Taishi: an official rank in the Zhou dynasty, transplanted here into the celestial bureaucracy that has developed during the Han dynasty.
(7) An emperor who reigned from 168 to 188 AD.

J.W. v. Goethe in Chinese
´å¤l©]ºq

¸s®p¤@¤ù¨I±I
¾ð±é·L­·Àĸñ
ªL¤¤´Ï³¾½pÀq
µy±o§A¤]¦w®§

¿ú¬KºöĶ

Ming, once more on this topic: I'd be interested if you know the translator. After 'analyzing' the Chinese version, I think that it's done beautifully and very sensitively. In my opinion she knows German pretty well, as the translation's content is closer to the original than to the (very good) English version (e.g. 3rd line: ½pÀq - schweigen/asleep; and last line 'µy«Ý' with regard to the ambigious sense of 'warte nur, balde ...' (just wait for a little while, soon ...).

I'd be interested in any comments.

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

David, I can slightly remember a quest for a subject like this some time ago - obviously nobody visiting this forum could give you an answer - maybe depending on the cryptic way you're posing your query. Even now it's not quite clear what you are talking from. Did you read a certain book on this topic (a historical man in ancient(?) China refining white brass), what bronze mirror are you talking from?

As for the date mentioned by you: Zhongping reign must have been in Later Han dynasty, there are two nianhao ¦~¸¹ called this way (¤¤¥­): the first one beginning with the year A.D. 184, the second (als named Yong Han ¥Ãº~) in A.D. 189. I'd guess you're talking of the fifth day of the fifth month in the year A.D. 188 (as there was just one year under the second nianhao, in A.D. 190 already followed by Chuping ªì¥­).

So, give more details and I could imagine that anybody might be able to provide more information.

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

I really don't know where you have come to the conclusion that China wants to go to war with US. Let me assure you that Chinese people had far two many wars during the past 100 years that no Chinese in his/her sane mind wants to go to war with any nation. As this site primarily promtes Chinese culture and not on international affairs ( there are some other sites doing just that ), I will not respond or write further on this subject in this forum.

Dear Ming,
I updated the poem with two tiny changes (as I found it in an other - written - publication).

If your statement on Chinese knowledge of German poets is true (I'm not sure, because I've heard of Chinese germanistic scholars - and also met some of them in Germany and China), it obviously depends on too less translations into Chinese by Chinese scholars. Maybe during Ch'ing dynasty there generally was not too much interest in foreign literature (unless western missionaries translating into Chinese), in our century there soon were other German works of interest to be translated into Chinese language (°¨§J´µµ¥). Later on, the English language was (and still is) taking over the Chinese territory - as it does everywhere in the world, now even in Eastern Europe, where German is/was preferred - so also poetic translations being focussed on poets of English mother tongue. (But - as mentioned above - there are Chinese germanists of remarkable abilities, able to do this job, and infact doing it! And I know Chinese people with excellent knowledge of the German language). With regard to Goethe, Schiller and other great poets, I'm sure that they're translated into Chinese, like - viceversa - Li T'ai-po, Tu Fu etc. into German (up to now I was not very eager to find Chinese versions of our famous poetry, so I don't know too much about it. ;( ).
Hungary for example, a little country with a 'small' exotic language, ever was accustomed to have German poets and other works of 'world-literature' masterly translated by her own great poets. Otherwise the main part of their people literally would have been totally cut off 'the world'. Until up to our century, for great China hadn't been any real necessity for reading foreign literature or even learning western languages. This has changed now - but with the stress lying on the English/American hemisphere. But, we're having lots of Chinese students in Germany too (since 1989) and, in my opinion, - besides technical subjects - not too few also studying germanistics (hopefully, some of them also dealing with our great poets).

BTW, here's a good starting point for literature (e.g. to Goethe with lots of titles)

http://www.econ.jhu.edu/People/Fonseca/goethe.htm

the page's established by a real polyglott young Portuguese.

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

You brought up this topic that I have been wanting to let off my chest for a long time.
I am an American citizen of Chinese ethnic background. Let me review the following facts for you:
First of all, China did NOT want to, and HAS NOT militarily challenged US and gotten into war with US. If you meant Korean War and Vietnam War, remember where they were fought, not in Mexico or Canada.
If you are talking about what is happening in the Balkans, it is US bombs that hit the Chinese Embassy. I think you have got the cart before the horse. Mind you, even US government is calling it an air campaign, not war. And you better stay with that definition, or Clinton is violating the constitution that require the Congress's approval for engaging US in war.
So far, the US government(which is really my government) has not done any investigation on who did this and has no intention to punish the murderer. All China is requesting is : stop the bombing, investigate thoroughly and punish the murderer. Remember what the US government did in Sudan when US Embassy was bombed?
Chinese is a peaceful people without a single soldier outside of its territory. China never pretends nor assumes the position of an international police.
China respects the integrity of sovereignty of other nations and other nations to settle their internal affairs peacefully according to their cultural and historical characteristics.
China is opposed to international hegemony of interfering other countries internal affairs,
China will notengage in war with another country unless provoked by aggression.
The above principles were laid down by Zhou Enlai, who is still one of the most admirable diplomats honored by all world leaders including political opponents. these principles agree with the Chinese philosophy for peaceful coexistence, a hard lesson learned from thousands of years of war and internal ethnic conflicts.
To keep an open mind, you should also get your info from sources other than the American media, which are often self-centered if not biased. Go to the newsgroup soc.culture.china where there is a lot of discusssion going on as well as updated news.
Lastly, I just watched Cato Conference, an excellent video conference analysing the Balkan situation. If you can watch video on the internet, you can go to this site: NATO's Balkan War: Finding an Honorable Exit It is participated by a number of prestigious American scholars on foreign affairs. Listen to what they say.
About whether it was a mistake that US bombed China's Embassy, there is an excellent analysis: http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/bombed-Embassy.html
(You need to make sure the url is in one line if you cut and paste)

Many thanks for the original text. I am adding it to the page.
It seems that, besides German music, German literature is not so well known among the Chinese. One possible reason may be due to a lack of translations.

Dear Ming,
oops, please remove my first posting.

Just forgot to mention that your English version is really excellent because having a similar 'sound' (I met other English versions on the net not at least comparable). Also the Chinese translation seems to be rather good.
The special charm of Goethe's little nightsong in my opinion also lies in the ambiguity of the last verse (similar to the Chinese saying: the lines end, yet the sense still is going on).

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

Dear Ming,

although Goethe was a genius, he is not my special favorite (I prefer the suffering poets ;) ), yet this piece is very beautiful in its simple perfection and many times set to music. I just remembered almost all its lines by heart - so had to search on the net. I did a graphic file for you and a sound sample in real audio format.

Click the poem to get the sound !

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

The poem you heard is a well known poem written in Yuan Dynasty (13-14th century).

The Chinese translation for I love you is :

Go to the Tatto page.

Cari, to start with, maybe go to my page (below first line) and click "Quileute School Project" to learn some basics on Chinese characters' writing, sounds, numbers, date display etc. Have fun!

Alfred

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ½º¹Ú²ª
My Poetry

I am glad that you are interested in Chinese culture. There are a number of ways to learn Chinese culture, tradition and language.

One way is to read books on these topics. There are no shortage of such books in your city libraries and bookstores. Tin-Kay’s latest discussion listed a few of them.

Another way is to get some formal training by taking arts, history and language courses.