A bright moon flooded in, lighting the shallow-eaved cottage to the farthest corners

2005-04-15

A bright moon flooded in, lighting the shallow-eaved cottage to the farthest corners

I don't know why, but Edward G. Seidensticker's translation of the Tale of Genji is online. Yes -- all of it. Like LanguageHat says, "if you have a hankering to read a thousand-page classic online, here's your chance, if you can finish it before it gets yanked." (He also has a bunch of other links relating to the work.)

And, speaking of enormous books, here's a scarily comprehensive look at the Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese translations of Harry Potter. The Chinese sections are by far the most interesting.

Popularity factor: 2

butterflyblue:

Wow! From the Harry Potter site I learned that the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese words for stalagmite all mean "rock bamboo shoot." Most of them translated Hagrid's comment that "stalgamite has an m in the middle" as a comment on the number of characters in the word. So cool.

I loved Edward Seidensticker's translation of The Tale of Genji...but even I can't imagine someone willing to read the whole thing online. That is madness. I can imagine using it for a reference if you were writing a paper and had to look up something quickly, though. You could do a CTRL-F search as long as you knew the chapter. For some reason, a TOG quote I remember: "Mother says that napping is unseemly."

Matt:

Ha! That's a quote worth remembering.

The translations of the OWL (Ordinary Wizarding Level) jokes were kind of disappointing though.

2005-04-15