Anklebones and Poetry

In my continuing battle to understand Jakdan's poetry, I am currently wrestling with the following lines in Tolgiralame orire uculen:

ede

waliyaha jušuhun baju,

hohoko gosihon misun,

naracun hican,

buyenin duyen,

beye gincihiyan,

weri basucun,

geren-i geigen,

gisun-i fesin,

At this point in the poem Jakdan has become fed up with his miserable lot in life, and he wants to make a change.

Therefore

I’ve thrown out the sour dregs,

I’ve discarded the bitter fermented bean paste,

I long for the simple life,

I desire indifference,

for myself to be the beautiful one,

and the other to be the butt of jokes,

geren-i geigen,

gisun-i fesin,

How are we supposed to read these last two lines?

The easiest one to make sense of is gisun-i fesin. The word fesin refers to a handle, such as the handle of a sword or whip, and gisun is language or speech. There are very few ways to read this other than "handle of language", but what does that actually mean? Given the immediate context in the poem, it makes sense to read this line as referring to something that Jakdan wants, and since earlier in the poem Jakdan expresses envy towards people who are smooth talkers, I believe the best reading is something like "control over language" or "to be adept at language". The same semantic connection could be made in English by saying "having a handle on language".

The more difficult one is geren-i geigen. The word geren has meanings like "a crowd; the many; the multitude", while the word geigen refers to one of the ways that the anklebone (gacuha) can land. But what is the significance of this side of the gacuha?

Both Jakdan and the Staatsbibliothek poet(s) make references to geigen. SB 4.12 has the following lines:

utala sure,

tutala menen,

entekengge jata,

tentekengge geigen,

uttungge nekeliyen,

tuttungge jiramin,

Meaning:

So wise as this,

so stupid as that,

jata like this,

geigen like that,

thin in this way,

fat in that way,

The lines above pair antonyms with each other, so wise/stupid, thin/fat. We should conclude, then, that geigen is being used as an antonym for jata, which means (according to the Qianlong dictionary) "a weak or inferior person", or (according to Amyot) "an ordinary person without talent". So we can understand geigen to mean a talented or superior person.

This works well with Jakdan's other use of geigen in Soktorolame gingsiha ucun, where he concludes his description of the most fortunate people in society by saying:

ne je

niongnio deji,

geigen amban.

Most importantly

and best of all,

[they are] talented officials.

(There is a double-entendre in the last two examples which the reader is free to investigate, around the fact that geigen and geihen are homonyms, but that isn't strictly related to the topic of this post.)

My question now is: What is the connection between the meaning of "talented" and some particular side of the gacuha?

In the Mongolian practice of divination with anklebones, the anklebone is treated as having four sides. Two of these sides are considered "convex" and are treated as lucky, while the other two sides are considered "flat" and treated as unlucky. Of the two lucky sides, one is said to come up about three times more frequently than the other, and the same distribution is said to exist for the unlucky sides.

Norman's lexicon has an expression meke ceke tuwambi, "to see who is better, to compete", where meke and ceke are vaguely described as sides of a gacuha. The word ceke seems to come from Mongolian cege, meaning "the flat" (or unlucky) side of an anklebone, and is described in the Qianlong dictionary as oncohon, "face up". The word meke is not from Mongolian as far as I can tell, but would presumably mean the "convex" (or lucky) side, and is described in the Qianlong dictionary as umušuhun, or "turned over".

If geigen is one of the sides of a gacuha, and it is used in the meaning of "talented", it seems likely that it refers to the less frequent "lucky" side, the one that is worth most and hardest to achieve. This is the side called the "horse" in Mongolian.

So what does geren-i geigen mean as a full phrase? I think the best possible reading is "the most talented one in the crowd" or "the luckiest one in the crowd".

Hong Taiji's three offices for handling documents

In 1636 (天聰十年) Hong Taiji established three offices for the handling of archival documents. I'm interested in how this reflects Hong Taiji's views on the difference between "history" (suduri) and "precedent" (kooli). Prior to this event, the Mongolian word suduri (a loanword ultimately from Sanskrit sūtra) was not used to refer to records of past events, only the word kooli was used.

The three offices were:

National Office of History (gurun-i suduri ejere yamun)

The functions of this office were:

• To record the emperor's speeches and edicts
• To store documents written by the emperor's own hand
• To compose the following types of documents to be read before the throne
• Records relating to the emperor's handling of military and government affairs
• Texts connected with rituals addressed to Heaven (abka wecere bithe)
• To compile and compose histories from the following sources
• Texts related to rites performed at ancestral temples
• Historical texts of ancestors over the generations
• Funerary stelas
• All secret documents
• Back-and-forth communications with officials
• All documents submitted to the throne
• To decide which of the following are suitable for recording as history
• Letters of posthumous enfeoffment
• Text to be made into seals (? doron de arara bithe)
• Communications with foreign and guest nations

Office of Secret Documents (narhūn bithei yamun)

There may be something wrong with the Manchu text here, because this description ends with a noun phrase and no verb. It appears to me this reads as follows:

• To consign the following types of documents to the temple of Confucius for ritual purposes
• Documents exchanged with foreign nations
• Whatever documents have been submitted by [other] nations
• Accusations of wrongdoing
• Documents issued by the emperor
• Imperial rescripts to be given to civil and military officials
• Texts to be left with people who have died. (There is no verb to say what is to be done with these documents)

Office for Promulgating Precedents

The functions of this office were:

• To write explanations of good and bad precedents across the generations since ancient times, and to report them to the emperor
• To discuss these with the Heir Apparent
• To teach the princes
• To promulgate precedents to the masses

How to Tell Time in Classical Manchu

There is an almanac in Manchu at the Bibliotheque Nationale, which lists (among many other interesting things) the time at which the sun was expected to rise and set at different locations in Mongolian and Manchu areas on calendrically important dates in 1769. The tables in this almanac give us examples of how to state the time in Classical Manchu down to the minute.

The time of day was expressed in three parts: erin, kemu and fuwen. There were twelve erin in one day, so a single erin was 120 minutes long, and they were named after the cyclical animals. The day started at 1:00 AM with the hour of the ox.

erin	Start	End
ihan	1:00 AM	2:59 AM
tasha	3:00 AM	4:59 AM
gūlmahūn	5:00 AM	6:59 AM
muduri	7:00 AM	8:59 AM
meihe	9:00 AM	10:59 AM
morin	11:00 AM	12:59 PM
honin	1:00 PM	2:59 PM
bonio	3:00 PM	4:59 PM
coko	5:00 PM	6:59 PM
indahūn	7:00 PM	8:59 PM
ulgiyan	9:00 PM	10:59 PM
singgeri	11:00 PM	12:59 AM

There were eight kemu in one erin, so each kemu was fifteen minutes long, and they were divided into two groups. The first group were the ujui kemu and the second group were the tob kemu. Of each group, the first kemu was called uju ("head"), and the other three were numbered one through three. This is interesting in part because the word ujui is usually synonymous with emuci (both usually meaning "first"), but here they have different meanings.

kemu	Start	End
ujui uju	+0:00	+0:14
ujui emu	+0:15	+0:29
ujui jai	+0:30	+0:44
ujui ilaci	+0:45	+0:59
tob ujui	+1:00	+1:14
tob emuci	+1:15	+1:29
tob jai	+1:30	+1:44
tob ilaci	+1:45	+1:59

There were fifteen fuwen in one kemu, so the fuwen is identical to one minute, and they were simply numbered one through fourteen, with the first fuwen left unnamed.

fuwen	Minute
(none)	+0:00
emu/emuci	+0:01
jai	+0:02
ilaci	+0:03
duici	+0:04
sunjaci	+0:05
ningguci	+0:06
nadaci	+0:07
jakūci	+0:08
uyuci	+0:09
juwanci	+0:10
juwan emuci	+0:11
juwan juweci	+0:12
juwan ilaci	+0:13
juwan duici	+0:14

So, if you wanted to say 2:57 PM, you would start with the erin, which would be honin (starting at 1:00 PM). Within that erin you would be in the second half (tob), and three full kemu will have already passed, putting you in the tob ilaci kemu (2:45 PM - 2:59 PM). Within that kemu you would be in the twelfth fuwen.

As with dates and places in Manchu, you always start big and go small. So, if you wanted to express 2:57 pm on the 8th of February, 1769, you would write it as follows:

Reign	abkai wehiyehe	Qianlong
Year	gūsin duici aniya	thirty-fourth year
Month	aniya biyai	first month
Day	juwan juwe de	on the twelfth day
erin	honin erin-i	Hour of the Sheep
kemu	tob ilaci kemu-i	second half, after three kemu have passed
fuwen	juwan juweci fuwen	twelfth minute

Manchus of the Water

(This post is partially inspired by a recent article by Andreas Hölzl which delves extensively into the "Riverside Hypothesis", holding that the name manju comes from the name of a river, possibly the Amur, possibly from a Proto-Tungusic form like *mamgo.)

On the 27th of November, 1619, an emissary came to Nurhaci's court from the Ligdan Khan of the Chakhar Mongols. He bore a letter that began as follows:

döčin tümen monggul-un eǰen baγatur činggis qaγan-u ǰarlaq, usun-u γurban tümen manǰu-yin eǰen kündülen gegen qaγan mendü buyu oo?

An Order from the Hero Chinggis Khan, Ruler of the Four Hundred Thousand Mongols, to Kündülen Gegen Khan, Ruler of the Thirty Thousand Manchus of the Water: Are you healthy?

Ligdan Khan opens with this greeting as a way of asserting his authority over Nurhaci. To him, this is an order (ǰarlaq) not a letter (bičig), and his authority to issue this order came from his position as heir to Chinggis Khan, as well as the numerical superiority of the Mongols over the Manchus.

But why does Ligdan Khan refer to "Manchus of the Water", and what does that mean?

Some context can be found in Nurhaci's response, in which he says that Ligdan Khan is living in the past. Those four hundred thousand Mongols that Ligdan Khan referred to were reduced to sixty thousand when the Hongwu emperor took the Yuan capital, and Ligdan Khan was not even the ruler of all of those Mongols that remained.

If the rest of Ligdan Khan's salutation is couched in terms dating back to the Yuan dynasty, then it seems likely that his use of the expression "Thirty Thousand Manchus of the Water" is also a conscious archaicism. If so, what does it refer to?

The Chinese translators of the Manju-i Yargiyan Kooli rendered this expression as 水濱三萬人, "thirty thousand people of the river banks," so from their perspective it seems the term referred to the fact that the Manchus lived along rivers. This was definitely true of the Manchus of Nurhaci's time (despite the often-repeated claim that the Jurchens were nomadic), and was probably true of the Jurchens during Yuan times. Indeed, the centrality of rivers is even baked into the Manchu origin myth.

If you recall the story, the divinely conceived boy Bukuri Yongšon floats down a river from the Long White Mountain to a ford where people come to get water. There he makes himself a throne of willow and artemesia--two plants that grow on river banks--and is discovered and made a prince of the local people.

While they might sometimes bring mythological beings down from the mountains, rivers also provide access to fish and trade routes. More than that, the rivers in Manchuria provided access to gold and iron, both of which were gathered by panning river sand.

Given the wealth that rivers bring to those who live along them, it makes sense to me that the ethnonym manju might ultimately come from a term referring to people living along rivers, though the exact etymology of the name may still be debated.

Dream within a dream

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?

Dù Fǔ and his Father (via Jakdan)

Dù Fǔ wrote On Climbing the Yǎnzhōu Tower about a visit to his father during the last year of his father’s life. The poem reminds me of the last years of my own father’s life, when I would go to visit him in Tucson to take care of things for him. When I had free time, I would go out of town and climb up into the Saguaro National Park.

In the second quatrain of the poem, when Dù Fǔ looks on the remains of the past, I think he is reflecting on the end of his father’s life. A man that once seemed to have a place in the world is now standing alone, and things that once seemed permanent are now in ruins.

Here is my translation of Jakdan’s translation.

Yan jeo-i hoton-i taktu de tafakangge

dergi giyūn ama uilere fonde,

julergi taktu tuktan tuwame elehe,

neore tugi hai dai nurhūhai,

necin tala cing sioi nikeneme,

cin-i eldengge wehe emteli dabagan debi,

lu-i hoton deyen arkan susuha hede,

julgei unesi udu labdu bicibe,

enggeleme karade emhun guwele mele.

When attending to my father in the east county,

I first got my fill of the view from the south tower.

Just as the floating clouds connected me to Hǎidài,

the level plain drew me near to Qīngxú, and

the stele of Qín was alone on the mountain pass,

the city and palace of Lǔ were just a desolate scar.

Though the ancient relics were many,

when I leaned forward to look out, I did so alone, and furtively.

Notes

hai dai and cing sioi: Since Jakdan left hai untranslated, and did not render it as mederi (ocean), I take hai dai to be a proper name for the region from Mount Tai to the sea, rather than a phrase referring to two places, “Mount Tai and the sea.” Since cing sioi parallels it in the next line, I took that in the same way.

nurhūhai and nikeneme: The verb nurhūmbi means “to link together without a gap,” as in idu nurhūmbi, “to do shifts back-to-back without a break between them.” (That example comes from the Qianlong dictionary.) Presumably the subject of the verb is the thing that does the linking, and in this line that would be the floating clouds. However, if we are taking hai dai to be a single noun phrase, then what is being linked to what?

I think Jakdan understood these two lines to describe the way that the view from the tower connected the poet to the distant places around him. The clouds above connected him to the Hǎidài region, and the plain below connected him to Qīngxú.

It is interesting that nikeneme is not a finite form, giving the impression that the thought in the first quatrain is not yet complete. I tried to convey that by putting a dangling “and” at the end of the quatrain.

An Idea about the Poet(s) of SB 34981

I was re-reading the introduction to Chiu's Bannermen Tales this morning when I noticed something that I had missed before. She translates a passage from a zidishu text called "Ziditu" (子弟圖), which includes the following line:

風流乞丐貶江湖

Chiu's translation: "People who are romantic but go about begging for money are derogatively called jianghu [roamers throughout the lakes and rivers]."

The expression ula tenggin, which would translate 江湖, occurs in SB 11.1 and 14.30, the Fishing poem, in which the poet talks about the romantic lifestyle of a wandering fisherman:

	nimaha butarangge [漁]		Fishing
	Staatsbibliothek 11.1 (View Online)
	tugi mukei ba,		A place of clouds and water.
	mini boo,		In what quarter
	ya falga,		is my home?
	ula tenggin hūi ciha,		Among rivers and lakes, wherever I please,
5	asu maktara,		I will cast my net.
	nimaha niša,		The fish are plentiful,
	nure hūlašacina,		I hope I can trade them for wine.
	wei sasa,		Who am I with?
	nurei hoki --		The companions of wine —
10	bele edun biya.		Rice, wind and moon.

I had previously assumed that this poem was written by someone like an official translator, whose ordinary life was stressful and boring, who dreamed about being able to retire to the quiet life of a fisherman.

But what if this poem is a romantic description of the poet's current life? That is, what if this poem was written by a member of the class of itinerant performers disparaged as jianghu? In that case, we can see the act of fishing as a metaphor for something like busking, performing one's art in the chance hope of receiving a little money.

The Idea of kooli in Old Manchu

In the Autumn of 1612, rumors came to Nurhaci’s ears that a daughter of his, Lady Onje, had been shot with bone-tipped arrows by a man named Bujantai, to whom she had been given in marriage. Bone-tipped arrows make a whistling noise when they fly, and to shoot someone with a bone-tipped arrow was a fairly dramatic form of public punishment.

According to the Manchu account, Lady Onje had committed no crime to deserve this punishment. Instead, rumor had it that Bujantai wanted to marry the daughter of Bujai of Yehe, so shooting Onje was apparently a part of dissolving his alliance with Nurhaci and re-establishing old ties with Yehe. This calculus was no doubt informed by the fact that Nurhaci lived beyond Yehe to the south, making former seem a less dangerous enemy than the latter.

The shooting of Lady Onje provoked Nurhaci’s anger not only because it was a direct attack on his flesh and blood, but also because he had spared Bujantai’s life in battle and felt he deserved his loyalty. Nurhaci gathered his troops and rode for the Amur river, on the far banks of which Bujantai’s walled city of Ula stood.

When they reached Ula, Nurhaci’s soldiers captured five or six towns on the south side of the river and burned their granaries, cutting off supplies to Ula in an effort to draw Bujantai out. Bujantai knew he was in trouble and delayed as long as he could (maybe hoping for reinforcements from Yehe), but eventually he saw no option other than to come out and face Nurhaci. He came in a boat to the middle of the river, and Nurhaci rode out into the water to meet him.

Bujantai groveled and begged Nurhaci to leave, but Nurhaci challenged him to explain his actions, saying:

mini jui ehe weile araci minde alanjicina. abka ci wasika aisin gioro halai niyalma de gala isika kooli be si tucibu. tanggū jalan be sarkū dere, juwan jalan ci ebsi si sarkū bio. mini aisin gioro halangga niyalma de gala isika kooli bici, bujantai si uru okini mini cooha jihengge waka mujangga.

If my child committed a crime, then I hope you will tell me. If there is a kooli for acting against a person of the Heaven Descended Aisin Gioro clan, then produce it! You may not know a hundred generations, but do you not know the last ten generations? If there is a kooli for acting against a person of my Aisin Gioro clan, then let you be found to be in the right, Bujantai, and my coming here with my soldiers will be deemed wrong indeed.

Here, Nurhaci is laying out two possible justifications for Bujantai’s shooting of Lady Onje, and challenging him to prove either one. In the first case, if Lady Onje had committed a crime, Bujantai could justify his actions by simply saying what the crime was. In the second case, if there were a kooli that would allow him to do something like this to a person of Nurhaci’s clan, he could produce it.

In later Manchu we find kooli equated to the Chinese term meaning lì 例, meaning “rule, norm, precedent, case.” This was not an especially important concept in Chinese law, but referred to a substatute that provided a very specific example of the implementation of a punishment for a crime, or else a previous decision by the Board of Punishments that could be used as a precedent for a later decision if there was no applicable law.

Among the Jurchens, however, there was no written code of law and no Board of Punishments, so kooli meant something very different to them than what it meant to later Manchus. Several clues to its original meaning can be seen in the event described above. While the existence of a mere crime would have allowed Bujantai to take action against Onje as an individual, it is implied that a kooli would have allowed him to take action against her as a member of her clan, putting him in the right (uru) and Nurhaci in the wrong (waka.) In order to produce the kooli, however, Bujantai would have had to call on a knowledge of history that might go back long before he, Nurhaci or Lady Onje were even born.

From this example, it seems that kooli was a concept that governed the idea of justice between clans and across generations. This would have made a knowledge of history important to the Jurchens, because the leader with the better knowledge of history would be better able to justify his actions against another clan.

However, since Jurchen histories would have been primarily oral, they would have been at a disadvantage when interacting with the Chinese, whose long written traditions would have given them more material to draw on. Nurhaci himself felt the bite of this in 1614 when the Wanli emperor sent a military official to him named Xiao Bozhi, bearing a letter to which he demanded that Nurhaci bow down. The exact content of the letter is not recorded in the Manchu history, except to say that:

hacin hacin i ehe gisun, julgei ufaraha jabšaha kooli be feteme hendume bithe arafi

A letter had been written, full of all kinds of wicked talk, and dredging up ancient kooli of success and failure.

In this incident we see kooli associated with the ideas of success and failure, but this is not unrelated to its association with justice. In the Jurchen view, Heaven would reward those whom it deemed to be right with success, and punish those whom it deemed to be wrong with failure. For this reason, while a knowledge of history was important for justifying action against another clan, it was also critical for determining who would have the favor of Heaven in any resulting conflict.

The important connections between kooli and the study of history persisted after Nurhaci’s death. When a translation of the Jurchen Jīn history was undertaken in 1636, the office in charge of the project was called Kooli selgiyere yamun, the “Office for the Promulgation of Kooli.” In his preface to the Jīn history, the Grand Secretary of that office, a man named Hife, explained the importance of the study of history and kooli as follows:

julgei kooli suduri be tuwaci, jabšara ufarara weile asuru narhūn, taifin facuhūn i forgon ambula somishūn. damu enduringge niyalmai dabala, gūwa sarkū. tuttu ofi han niyalmai dasan yabun jabšaha ufaraha babe bithei niyalma yooni arahangge, ne be olhome ginggulekini. amaga be olhome alhūdakini sehengge kai.

If one considers kooli and history, acts of success and failure are very subtle, and periods of peace and turmoil are quite obscure. Aside from divine people, others would not know of it. Therefore, literary people record all of the rules and deeds, successes and failures of kings and people, in order that those at the time should fearfully respect them, and those who come later should fearfully imitate them.

Go and Water the Horses Again

A while back I posted about a song in Grebenshchikov 45 about going to water the horses. I have now found a second, longer version of it in Grebenshchikov 45, and I have also determined that this is yet another extract from Jakdan’s translation of the Liáozhài. This makes the third work from G45 that is traceable to a Chinese original, and strengthens my feeling that this manuscript is composed largely of selections of other authors’ translations from Chinese.

It will be interesting to see if G45 contains any copies of Jakdan’s translations of classical Chinese poetry from Jabduha ucuri amtanggai baita, or Jakdan’s own compositions.

The Monastery behind Pò Shān Temple

This poem is kind of like my experience this morning. I got up early and worked on Manchu poetry, with early morning sun shining through the windows, and a clear blue sky outside. Then my kids came downstairs and started playing video games.

破山寺後禪院 （常健）

清晨入古寺，初日照高林。
曲徑通幽處，禪房花木深。
山光悅鳥性，潭影空人心。
萬籟此俱寂，唯聞鐘磬音。

Po šaṇ juktehen-i amargi samadi hūwa		The Monastery behind Pò Shān Temple
erde julgei juktehen de dosikade,		When I entered the ancient temple early in the morning,
mukdeke šun-i fosoko bujan-i sihin,		the canopy of the woods was lit up by the rising sun.
mudanggai doko daniyan-i ici hafungga,		A winding path went through toward the refuge,
samadi hūwa-i ilha moo fisin.		and thick were the flowers and trees of the monastery.
alin eldepi cecikei banin selacuka,		Birds rejoiced that the mountain was illuminated,
juce helmešehei niyalmai mujilen kenggehun,		as the pond reflected it, the human mind became empty.
eiten asuki nerginde [e]lenggei ekisakai,		For a moment, as all the fainter sounds became quiet,
donjihangge damu jungken kingken-i urkin.		all I heard was the clamor of bells and chime stones.

You might notice in my transliteration of the title, I used a dot under the n of šaṇ instead of šan. This is to reflect the fact that the n has a dot on it in Manchu, as you can see in the image below.

The general rule is that syllable-final n does not have a dot. One of the Jesuits (probably either Verbiest or Amyot, I don’t remember) tells us that the n without a dot indicates nasalization of the previous vowel. In this case, Jakdan adds the dot because the Chinese word shān 山 ends in a consonant n, not a nasalized vowel. This is something that is easily overlooked, but can sometimes help you tell the difference between a reference to the khan (han) and the Hàn (haṇ).

What is the genitive marker on ekisakai doing? Normally it would make an adverb, like “quietly,” but there’s no verb here for it to modify. From the context here, I think maybe this structure is comparable to the converb -hAi, which conveys that as one action proceeds, a second action proceeds along with it. This form appears in Jakdan’s translation of Lǐ Bái’s “Sitting Alone on Jìngtíng Mountain,” where he says geren cecike deken-i deyehei wajiha, “as the birds flew higher, they disappeared.”

In this case, since we have an adjective, I think Jakdan’s use of this form means that as the fainter sounds (of birds) became quiet, all the poet could hear was the ringing of bells and chime stones. He reinforces this idea by using the noisy word urkin to contrast with the fainter asuki of the previous line.

G45.50 Something from the Liáozhài

Like much of the rest of the world, I’m stuck inside because of COVID-19, so I decided to use some of that time to skim through Grebenshchikov 45 and see what interesting bits I could spot.

Today I spotted the following passage:

giogiyan bethei weihuken-i toksifi besergen de nikeme uculerengge,	This is what she sang as she leaned against the bed, softly tapping with her bound feet:
moo-i ninggude bisire u gio gasha mimbe  hoššome dobori dulin de fakcabumbi,	“The black drongo bird atop the tree tricks me into leaving in the middle of the night.
siolehe sabu usihibuhe seme gasara ba akū, damu agu de simen ararangge akū ayoo sembi,	I have no reason to cry about having gotten my embroidered shoes wet, but I regret there will be no one to cavort with you.”
seme mudan jilgan narhūn ohongge sirgei gese arkan ilgame faksalaci ojoro adali, cibseme donjici šurdeme forgošoro getuken tomorhon-i šan jakade dosifi ele mujilen ašša[m]bi sehebi.	As she sang, her singing voice became as thin as a thread, so that he could barely pick it out, but when he listened quietly it fell on his ears, encircling and surrounding, distinct and clear, and his heart was all the more moved.

This passage, it turns out, is from the Liáozhāi zhìyì, from a story called “The Girl in Green” (綠衣女). The Chinese runs as follows:

遂以蓮鉤輕點足牀， 歌云：	Then she tapped the bed with her feet, with her lotus crescents, and sang:
「樹上烏臼鳥，賺奴中夜散。	“The black drongo bird atop the tree / tricks me into leaving in the middle of the night.
不怨繡鞋溼，祗恐郎無伴。」	I don’t complain that my embroidered shoes are wet / but respectfully fear my lord will have no partner.”
聲細如蠅，裁可辨認。	Her voice was thin, like that of a fly, scarcely recognizable.
而靜聽之， 宛轉滑烈， 動耳搖心。	But he quietly listened to it, and it moved about sinuously, slippery and ardent, touching his ears and moving his heart.

When we see “Manchu” and “Liáozhài” in the same sentence, we immediately think of Jakdan, but I can’t find this particular story in my copy of Jakdan’s translation of the Liáozhài.

More Handwriting

This morning I looked through 20 manuscripts that are part of the Staatsbibliothek digital Mandschurica collection, with the hopes of finding another manuscript in the same hand as SB 34981.

In my last post, I noted that the syllable be in SB 34981 usually has a small right-pointing tooth, and I believe that is a fairly distinctive feature. In all of the manuscripts I looked at this morning, I found that the left-pointing tooth is by far the most common way to write the syllables be and ba, as can be seen in these examples:

I only found one other manuscript in which the writer generally used the right-pointing tooth. The manuscript is titled Bithe hūlara doro, “The Way of Reading,” and the writer often (though not always) produces a be that is similar to the ones in SB 34981.

The similarity here is very striking, but there are other ways in which the script in “The Way of Reading” differs from that in SB 34981, so I don’t think they are by the same hand. A distinctive and consistent difference is the appearance of the syllable he in the word bithe:

In “The Way of Reading” there is a little right-pointing tooth that starts the left tail in the syllable he, but that tooth is entirely missing in SB 34981.

There are many more digitized manuscripts available through the Staatsbibliothek site, and perhaps one of them will match the SB 34981 handwriting and give us a fragment more of information about the author of that text.

Manchu Handwriting

The Staatsbibliothek manuscript is written in at least three distinctive but related styles. By comparing these with the handwriting of known authors, perhaps we could eventually make a guess at who the author(s) of the Staatsbibliothek manuscript might have been.

But what features can we reliably compare between different writers?

One that leaps out when looking at a page of Manchu text is the shape of the left and right tails in words like be and de. These can be written in quite different ways, as can be seen in these examples drawn from Jakdan and Mucihiyan:

Jakdan’s left tail usually goes out in a long, relatively straight line with a small hook at the end. His right tail is usually shaped like a fishhook. Mucihiyan, in contrast, makes his left and right tails quite short, and his right tail is consistently thick while his left tail is consistently thin.

In both Jakdan and Mucihiyan’s handwriting, the be has a small left-pointing tooth before the tail. Contrast that with the handwriting in the Staatsbibliothek, where there is usually a small right-pointing tooth before the tail in be:

Based on these examples, as well as my general feeling from spending many hours reading these texts, it seems unlikely that the Staatsbibliothek manuscript was written by either Jakdan or Mucihiyan. It is unclear, though, whether the SB was written by one hand or by three. Is the thick right tail of SB-B a stylistic flourish, or the work of a different writer? Is the flatter right tail of SB-C just a way to conserve space on the page?

Topic versus Subject

Cén Shēn [岑參] wrote the following lines to Dù Fǔ [杜甫] when the two of them were serving together in different departments of the imperial government:

白髮悲花落，
青雲羨鳥飛。

The meaning of these lines seems relatively clear in the original Chinese:

The white-haired one grieves that flowers fall,
the dark clouds envy that birds fly.

Knowing that Cén Shēn addressed these lines to his respected elder Dù Fǔ, we can assume that the “white-haired one” must be Dù Fǔ, and the “dark clouds” would refer to the dark-haired younger man Cén Shēn. The couplet contrasts the older man’s sadness over what has passed away with the younger man’s envies and aspirations.

While the original lines seem relatively clear, what Jakdan did with them is not straightforward. Here are his lines:

funiyehe šarapi sihaha ilhai okto,
yacin tugingge deyenere gashai hihan,

The first line begins with a perfect converb phrase, funiyehe šarapi, “hair having turned white,” followed by a noun phrase, sihaha ilhai okto, “the medicine of falling flowers.” I have not found many clear cases of enjambment in Manchu poetry, so we should assume that this line contains a complete idea, and therefore that the medicine is a predicate. Somehow, we also need to square it with the meaning of the original.

A noun phrase can definitely be a predicate in Manchu poetry, and we often see this in poems with N-rhymes, because no Manchu verb form ends in -n. When we find the syntax NP₁ NP₂, we can usually insert a copula, reading it as “NP₁ is/are NP₂.” If that is what is going on here, and we take the medicine to be NP₂, then we need to look back and find NP₁, and the only previous explicit noun phrase in this line is “hair.” That would suggest a reading like:

The hair, having turned white, is the medicine of falling flowers

With a little imagination you could see how that line might mean something, but not necessarily the same kind of thing as the original Chinese line. The strangeness of this reading begs a closer examination of the line.

As we know, the hair in question belongs to Dù Fǔ, to whom the poem is addressed. If we take the topic of the line to be an unspoken “you,” then a different reading could be possible because the relationship between a topic and a noun predicate is looser than that between a subject and noun predicate. An example of this is the type of structure you might use when ordering a beer in Japanese:

私はビールです

In this line, the topic is “I” [私] and the comment is “[it] is a beer” [ビールです]. The meaning is not “I am a beer,” but rather “As for me, it will be a beer.” Applying this structure to the first line, we get a more sensible reading:

Your hair has turned white, and for you there is the medicine of fallen flowers

The word “medicine” doesn’t really capture the meaning of okto, which can also mean “poison,” so a slightly better reading could be:

Your hair has turned white, and for you there is the potency of fallen flowers

The topic+comment structure also works well for the second line, where the poet identifies himself as yacin tugingge, “the one with the dark clouds.” Treating that as the topic, we get:

For me, the dark-clouded one, there is the preciousness of flying birds

As a minor note, Jakdan’s birds are “flying away” (deye-ne-re), not just “flying”  (deye-re).

Translated Weirdness

Sometimes, when you’re translating a text, you come across something that just doesn’t make sense. If your text is prosaic then you can usually assume the author meant something sensible, and you can hunt around for a rational way to interpret what you’re seeing.

That approach doesn’t work as well when you’re translating poetry, because things happen in poetry that don’t happen in prose. When you find something that doesn’t make normal sense in a poem, you need to figure out whether the poet intended it that way, or whether you’ve simply misunderstood the text. The work becomes even more difficult when you’re translating a translation of a poem by a clever writer like Jakdan, who sometimes inserts his own twists into the product.

Take, for example, Jakdan’s translation of the following line from Spending the Night at the Yamen of the Left Gate in Spring [春宿左省] by Dù Fǔ:

花隱掖垣暮，    gurung-ni fu-i ilha buruhun-i yamjiha,

It’s easy to see which words in Jakdan’s translation equate to which words in the original, but less easy to see how he intends his translation to be understood.

The simplest way to parse the line is as follows:

gurung-ni fu-i ilha, noun-phrase, subject of the sentence, “the flowers on the outside walls of the palace”

buruhun-i, noun marked with the genitive/instrumental case,  adverbial phrase, “dimly, in a shadowy way”

yamjiha, perfect tense, finite verb, “it [the sun] set”

Unfortunately, this simplest way of parsing the sentence gives us a weird line that is difficult to square with the original:

“The flowers on the outside walls of the palace dimly set.”

There’s a certain beauty to the nonsensical idea of flowers setting, but Dù Fǔ can’t possibly have meant “the flowers on the outside walls” in the original because the character 隱 (buruhun, dim) is interposed between the flowers 花 (ilha) and the outside wall 掖垣 (gurung-ni fu).

Another way to parse Jakdan’s line is to take ilha buruhun as a coordinate noun-phrase, “flowers and shadows.” This works better with the original because Dù Fǔ put the two corresponding characters together. If we set aside the palace walls for a moment, and let the genitive/instrumental -i at the end of ilha buruhun-i create an adverbial phrase, then the remainder of the line can be read as:

“Dusk fell in a flowery, shadowy way.”

Again, that’s pretty, but then what do we do about the palace walls, which also carry the genitive/instrumental case marker? It seems awkward and clumsy to suggest that the sun sets in a manner like the palace walls, or by means of the palace walls.

It would be better if we could read the case-marker -i on gurung-ni fu-i as marking an object behind which the sun sets. Semantically that isn’t as big of a stretch as it may seem, because we’re essentially saying that the sun makes evening by means of the thing it sets behind. That gives us:

“It [the sun] set behind the outside walls of the palace, bringing dusk in a flowery, shadowy way”

Or, to put it more concisely:

“Dusk fell flowery and shadowy within the palace walls”