Friday, April 26, 2019

Jakdan the Decoder

Jakdan often translates literary and historical allusions into plain language, giving his readings an earthy, plainspun feel. Sometimes his translations reveal a new side to literary allusions, such as his handling of "the home of Jù Mèng" in the following poem by Qián Qǐ (錢起).


逢俠者

  Faršatai yabure niyalma be ucarahangge

燕趙悲歌士,  amargi bai usacukai uculere haha,
相逢劇孟家。  weilere antahai boode lakdari ucarabuha,
寸心言不盡,  mujilen-i gisun gisureme wajire undede,
前路日將斜。  julergi jugūn-i šun dabsire hamika.


On Meeting a Knight Errant

A man from the north singing sorrowfully,
I encountered by chance at a roadside canteen serving parlour.
The sun on the road before us had nearly set,
But he was still not yet finished saying all the words in his heart,


The subject of the poem is a knight errant (also known as 遊俠), a kind of wandering warrior known in stories for defending the weak and fighting the wicked. In the original poem, the author meets him in a certain "home of Jù Mèng" (劇孟家), an allusion to a famous knight errant of the Western Hàn, who lived around nine centuries before the poet was born. The two continue on together, walking into the sunset, as the 'knight errant' pours his heart out to the poet.

Some interpretations take the "home of Jù Mèng" to mean the city of Luòyáng, but Jakdan interprets it differently, using the phrase weilere antahai boo. This term does not appear in my dictionaries, so it needs some decipherment.

Norman has antahai boo meaning "a room for receiving guests," and in spoken Sibe we have antⱨey bo, with the same meaning. But what do we do with the modifying weilere? Literally this seems like it ought to mean "a room for receiving working guests," but what kind of place is that?

The similar Sibe term antⱨey kuren means a hotel, in which the "guest" is actually more of a customer than an acquaintance. It seems possible that a weilere antahai boo then could be a place that welcomes laborers as customers, presumably for a brief rest and refreshment. This could also be the type of place that a lonely traveler might stop to take a break before continuing on his long journey into the west.

4 comments:

  1. I think the spellings weilembi and uilembi were interchangeable at some point in the history of Manchu. If I remember well (but I could very much be wrong here), some standardisation took place later, with weilembi reserved for "to work" and uilembi for "to serve, to wait upon". Even if this has been the case, I wouldn't be surprised if the two spellings could still be used concurrently for the same verb even after that.
    Given this, I'd be inclined to take weilere antahai boo here as "a house for waiting upon guests"

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    1. I like your idea of reading weilembi as 'to wait upon', but strictly speaking a house for waiting upon guests should be 'antaha weilere boo', shouldn't it?

      But we could read 'weilere' as modifying the whole phrase 'antahai boo', and that would give us something similar: "a serving parlour."

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  3. Sorry, I apparently deleted my answer.
    Yes, I think weilere could be taken as qualifying the whole phrase antahai boo. I've seen something similar (I think) in the Nogeoldae/Laoqida when the price to be payed by guests having stayed one night is described as 'emu dobori deduhe niyalma de gaire booi turigen'.

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