12 Comments
User's avatar
Phil H's avatar

You had me at demimonde valedictorian. Google thinks you're the first ever, and why not?

Third-stanza liberal translation is definitely a thing, though. I'm thinking about forcing myself to translate in reverse for a while, to break the habit of tight first lines and good-enough last lines.

Expand full comment
Brendan O'Kane's avatar

Yeah; part of the difficulty with this poem was that I painted myself into a corner with the rhymes without really having a plan for how to get where I needed to go. If I do another draft, I’ll probably do something along similar lines, reverse-engineering from “years.”

Expand full comment
Curtis Armstrong's avatar

I am new to Bluesky and I'm finding Brendan's posts to be seriously addictive. I know little about poetry and nothing about ancient China but these are delicious.

Expand full comment
Brendan O'Kane's avatar

Really happy to hear it -- that’s the goal: Chinese literature is a fine thing to study and a very worthy thing to admire, but I think it’s to be enjoyed first and foremost. Thanks, Curtis!

Expand full comment
Aaron's avatar

Landscape painting with a verse

I putz around for forty years

Expand full comment
Brendan O'Kane's avatar

I like it -- you just made me wonder, while waiting for the subway, whether something with “laughing.../faffing...” might be workable.

Expand full comment
Aaron's avatar

It does seem like it would match the meaning, but I’m not willing to give up “demimonde valedictorian/Imperial Historian”.

Expand full comment
Aaron's avatar

The party scene, I’m first in class

A river Bacchus, artsy faffing

Rate the high and mighty, laughing

Expand full comment
Brendan O'Kane's avatar

I like it! “Bacchus” is the kind of thing that can be distracting in translations, since he’s already a pretty familiar figure with associations of his own, but I think Qiao and his friends were probably acquaintances, even if they knew him by the name of Du Kang instead — and over on Bluesky someone suggested “sozzled sylph,” which I also like too much to nitpick.

Expand full comment
Aaron's avatar

When I was triangulating that line Google Translate gave me “drunk river fairy”, which I liked enough to almost use. I do like “sozzled sylph”, but here I’ll nitpick- sylphs are of the air and like naiads exclusively female. “Sprite” maybe?

I wasn’t sure how the Chinese viewed equivalence of deities. The Romans were the sort to see Odin and decide “Hmm, yes, ah, definitely Mercury”, so they wouldn’t have minded.

Expand full comment
Brendan O'Kane's avatar

FWIW. I also briefly considered “School of Hard Knocks? I was valedictorian.”

Expand full comment
Linda Jaivin's avatar

These posts make my day. I sang it to Tom Lehrer, by the way. Brendan, please never stop, or go away. Who cares for examinations - the demimonde shall hold sway.

Expand full comment