Bai Juyi: The Tang dynasty’s baldest poet | Hacker News Reader

Bai Juyi: The Tang dynasty’s baldest poet

medievalists.net

33 pointsapollinaire7 comments

It's interesting the very different roles hair has played in philosophical movements: the bald Buddhist monks, the beard-growing Greek philosophers, and here the growing of long hair in Confucianism.

Unrelated to above, but I wonder how much beauty is lost in poetry with translation. Specifically, I wonder how much is actually changed between the original and the English translation... but I wouldn't even know how to quantify that. Blissful ignorance, perhaps.

Facial hair also figured in the persecution of Russian Old Believers near the end of the 17th century! "Old Believers had to pay double taxation and a separate tax for wearing a beard)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers#After_the_schism

Hair is so visible, which makes it ideal for social signaling of all sorts. For example, if you know someone with beautiful long hair, that demonstrates both their physical health and their conscientiousness.

> Unrelated to above, but I wonder how much beauty is lost in poetry with translation. Specifically, I wonder how much is actually changed between the original and the English translation... but I wouldn't even know how to quantify that. Blissful ignorance, perhaps.

I also often wonder this about translations. I feel most comfortable with translations produced while the author is still living. And ideally the author has at least some facility with the language to which their work is being translated, which allows them to collaborate with the translator. Two authors who fall into this category are Haruki Murakami and Eugene Vodolazkin — I'm sure there are others as well. (Perhaps this dynamic is less available for languages that aren't as ubiquitous than English.)

If I recall correctly — which I may not — Nabokov translated some of his own Russian works into English, and/or worked with his son? Hopefully someone else can correct my faulty memory here :)

I had a conversation about translations with an actual author, some things I learned from him

* It is not possible to specify in advance how a good translation looks like, it is one of those "I know it is good when I see it". Naturally this assumes that the author can read the destination language reasonably well, otherwise they don't have a clue.

* When authors can read the translation, they tend to feel very strongly about it. An author payed a large sum of money for a translation, hated it, binned it and payed another translator to start from scratch.

* Many good translators (by whatever good may mean here) are not authors themselves.

WRT Nabokov, some of his works were originally written in English - Lolita for example. He then went ahead and translated Lolita to Russian.

The whole process is fascinating. The author encodes some mental structures into a language, at its lowest level, a sequence of letters. The reader decodes the letters into their own mental structures - the whole author reader interaction is very fragile.

Enter the translator, he picks the original sequence of characters in the source language, translates them into a sequence of character in destination language so that the reader of that destination language can decode the characters into their personal mental structures. Amazing.

I think its because hair is one of the most prominent displays of aging in humans.

I think the difference is big not only because translation is difficult, but also because the old Chinese poetry have very restrict meter and their language is different from nomal language in daily talk.

I wonder how often the ancient chinese wash their hair. In the article he mentioned he only washes his hair once a year to avoid losing even more hair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com