I'm working through Jakdan's Handan Dream, which opens with a discussion of the idea that we all live within a Great Dream. In this section I have collided with the following couplet, which I find relatively easy to parse, but quite difficult to understand:
yaya tolgin bisirengge niyalma inu seci,
yaka niyalmai banjirengge tolgin waka biheni
The syntax here is easy to see, thanks to the parallel lines. Both lines contain a proposition, the first bracketed by the conditional seci, the second by the finite but interrogative biheni. The propositions are both copular, with the first line being of the form NP1 NP2 inu (NP1 is NP2), and the second is simply the negative of that same form, NP1 NP2 waka (NP1 is not NP2). In each case NP2 is a single word (niyalma, tolgin) and NP1 is a quantifier (yaya, yaka) followed by a relative expression (tolgin bisirengge, niyalmai banjirengge).
So it's pretty clear how all the lines are structured, but getting meaning out of it has been tough for me.
My difficulties lie in the relative expressions. Looking at tolgin bisirengge, at first it seems like it ought to mean "what exists in a dream." However, the phrase "what exists in a dream" should actually be tolgin de bisirengge, as attested by examples I have found elsewhere. We are missing the de in the relative expression, so that can't be the right reading.
Instead, I think we have to read this as "that in which a dream exists", or "that which has a dream". If we take it this way, yaya tolgin bisirengge niyalma inu would mean "Each thing in which a dream exists is a person". If you think of dreams as existing in people, then this makes sense.
Moving on to niyalmai banjirengge, the difficulty here is that the verb banjimbi can be transitive ("give birth to") or intransitive ("be born; become; live"). We could read this as "that at which a person is born; becomes; lives" or "that which a person gives birth to". We cannot read this as "that which gives birth to a person" because that would be niyalma banjirengge without the genitive -i.
I think we should go with the intransitive reading in this case, because we have no reason to believe that it would be idiomatic in Manchu to say that a person gives birth to dreams. This forms a nicer parallel with the first line, and gives us a rhetorical question: yaka niyalmai banjirengge tolgin waka, "What does a person live in that is not a dream"?
These two copular phrases are linked together as P1 seci, P2 biheni. It is tempting to take seci...biheni as an if-then clause, but I don't think the mundane idea of dreams residing in people logically leads us to the metaphysical conclusion that people live in dreams. I think Jakdan means to contrast these two statements with each other and call out the curious idea that dreams are within people, while at the same time people live within the Great Dream.
So putting all of that together, the best I can come up with is:
While every dream is said to exist within a person,
is there any person who does not live in a dream?
