Growing up, my grandfather would always tell me stories about “mirchibai” and “haldibai”, jackals and foxes, alligators and monkeys, lions and stones, and countless more folktales. Every night after I came home from school, I would rush to his room to hear more of the stories he had to tell. The rich tales that my grandfather would tell me have entertained and enlightened countless generations which are worshipped around the Indian subcontinent, especially because of how they often define shared values in the community. That is why I chose to explore South Asian folklore this semester in HathiTrust.
My Example
I picked this page from the collection “Folk Literature of Bengal” (linked) because it talks about the shawra plant, which is incredibly important in folk tales from Southern Asia, especially Bengal and Bangladesh. After doing some research, I learned that the shawra plant is one of the very few trees which has a direct connection with ghosts in children’s ghost stories. According to the stories female ghosts use to live on the shawra plants at night, and lots of people in villages nearby used to be scared to pass by this tree during the nighttime.
Connection to Sawyer Collection Title
Baital Pachisi connects to the example that I picked because of its connection to superstition and folklore. Additionally, there are two known versions of Batali-Pachisi, which are similar to the Bengali household tales that I picked because there are a lot of versions of the same tale. In fact, there are two versions of the Baital stories. One was featured in popular children’s magazines and another was present in a popular TV show in the eighties. Each story involves superstitious rituals and areas such as grim forests, spooky graveyards, and skeletons — which have haunted children for several years!
Sawyer Seminar Learnings
Something I learned in the Sawyer Seminar that relates to what I’ve been exploring with South Asian Folktales and Household stories was the portion about Anti-Caste literature in Marathi, with some English mixed into it. There is always a mix of Colonial English with the native language such as Bengali or Hindi. In comparative literature seminars, it is important to note that the English translation is not exactly translation. It involves multilingualism in ways that are incredibly important and which ended to be part of the archives that we access. Our professor, Christi Merrill, is the one who touches on this during th
Additionally, I really enjoyed learning from Heather Christenson during the seminar. Something that struck me is that despite digitization, the aggregate HathiTrust collection is uneven and incomplete and different kinds of gaps do exist in categories such as language, subject, geographic, cultural, content, and quality. Although we generally have high quality in HathiTrust, these problems do exist and we should be cognizant of this when going through translated works.
In this screencast, I have highlighted the keyword “story” and “tale”. Panchatantra stories. I chose this one because Panchatantra is the most frequently translated literary product of India, and these stories are among the most widely known in the world. Panchatantra stories also have many names in many cultures. There is a version of Panchatantra in nearly every major language of India so these tales spread far and wide. I also learned a bit about Theodor Benfey, who was a pioneer in the field of comparative literature.
A Category that Connects My Work to Others
A category that connects my work to others in the class is “community values”. Each of the stories in South Asian folklore has a moral at the end of the story that tends to define the values of the community. For example, if a child misbehaves, then his or her parents may bring up a folktale to teach the child a lesson so that the child does not do the same thing again. Community values are often defined by the tales passed along from generation to generation. These community values can also be found in the post by Abschmitt about Chinese folklore, as the values of the Chinese community are defined by ancient tales as well. The community values also apply to the post by ciheanyi about Arabic Love Poems Over Time. Imr-El-Kais, a poet that she talks about has had an enormous cultural impact. As a pre-Islamic poet, he has been a source of literary and national inspiration for many years and therefore defines several aspects of the community.
My HathiTrust collection focuses on two main aspects. One is about Jing Ping Mei as one of the classic Chinese works of literature, specifically attempting to uncover the book’s lasting popularity today while it was banned for over two centuries since its first publication. Another aspect of my collection would be focusing on the ways how Chinese characters are being transformed overtime and mainly because I found myself to be interested in the original text that was written in Jing Ping Mei and would like to investigate in what ways the Chinese characters during that period are similar or different to modern times.
Motivation
I have heard that some classic Chinese literature is something that all of us should be reading at least once throughout our lifetime, yet, I did not have much exposure to Chinese literature after coming to the United States at the age of 14. However, I have always been interested in one of the classic Chinese literature – Jing Ping Mei (金瓶梅), also known as The Plum in the Golden Vase or The Golden Lotus. What draws me to spend time digesting all the texts is one of the podcasts that I have been listening to – 吳淡如人生不能沒有的故事 (Necessary Stories throughout the Life). The host spent 21 episodes highlighting all the key parts throughout the plot, including an in-depth analysis of why all the characters are taking the actions that they are taking given that period, especially for women in China during the 1600s-1700s.
Jing Ping Mei 金瓶梅
The plot of the story is centered around Ximen Qing (西門慶), a corrupt social climber as well as a merchant at the same time along with his six wives. While many said the main reason why this book has been banned for over two centuries was due to the nudity as well as sexual scenes that are described throughout the story, some believed this book has shown too much about the corrupt social hierarchy as well as the government was the main reason why that this book was banned. One of the most influential authors Lu Xun commented on this book during the 1920s, “it is the most famous of the novels of manners in the Ming dynasty, both significantly and effectively showing the condemnation of the whole ruling class during the end of Ming dynasty”.
The Purpose of being a woman throughout China was to mainly breed children for husband, and take good care of her family as well as her parents for the rest of her life. These were the general consensus on how the public perceived women throughout China over the course of history for over thousands of years. Education resources were scarce throughout all dynasties in China, not to mention very few women have the ability to be educated in which most females in China were illiterate due to lack of education. Therefore, as long as females are able to find a husband that is willing to take care of them as well as providing needs to their life that everything should be good.
However, given the historical context of Jing Ping Mei that it was the end of Ming Dynasty, meaning there are lots of social problems that were taking place specifically on the corruption of the government. Most people are not able to live a decent life if they do not have any form of connections with the government, and Ximen Qing from Jing Ping Mei was a businessman/ merchant that works tightly with the government in which as long as there are some sort of “profitability” taking place that the government would be gladly opened leeways to Ximen Qing to grant all his requests.
Literature of Jing Ping Mei vs Contemporary Chinese Literature
The main reason why that Jing Ping Mei intrigued me besides the social problem it portrays is the way of language is being used. Over the course of time, both Chinese literature and character have transformed several times throughout almost three thousand years of Chinese history, from ancient times, before the century all the way to the present. Though Jing Ping Mei was written during the 1600s-1700s (the exact time period is unsure since the book has been revised a couple of times after being banned), its text and literature are surprisingly similar to modern times during the 1900s. Not only is the style of a character similar, but so is the language itself. The 1700s-1800s marked the critical period of how China is in the middle of a transformation from ancient periods to modern times, and its style of language has significantly shown that.
Transformation of Chinese Character
Character from Qin Dynasty Character from Qin Dynasty
As I worked my way to finalize this project, I noticed and became aware of similarities as well as differences over the course of Chinese language evolution. After sharing the project that I am working on for this class with my mom, I found she recently drew herself into Chinese Seal Carving. The characters that she carved were from the Qin Dynasty, which is 221-206 B.C. Furthermore, I have found that the translation of each ancient character would be translated into modern times. After a close reading of some pages, it is not hard to find the logistics behind the Chinese language’s transformation and evolution.
Connection to the Class and Peers
Part of the reason why I’m shifting my focus is inspiration from my peers as well as the discussion groups that I was paired with the other day during a class. Randy and Zara’s pieces are the ones that I found most interesting and inspiring when reading their blog post. For Randy, I like the article about how he finds expression of interest through the card game set we have played in class. This gives me a much better direction on how I can make connections and linkage among things that do not seem to have much in common. While it was fun and interesting when I was playing the game in class, I was having some trouble finding the direct linkage on how it can possibly relate with us when it comes to making the HathiTrust collection. Yet, from Randy’s discussion post last week that showed all the logistics behind, especially through randomization, we are able to pair various sets of cards together while they all look different from each other at a glance. For Chimuanya, I really enjoy reading all the poems that she mentioned throughout her post as this is something that I do not have much exposure to, and I find it intriguing to see how those poems relate to other cultures as well as folklore. Chimuanya’s idea on folklore-inspired me to put a deeper focus on simply focusing on one Chinese literature rather than diverge all my focuses without depth on any of those. Then to use that piece of literature to extend all the focus to other pieces such as artwork.
From the group discussion, I was paired with peers that shared common interests as we are all doing topics that are related to Chinese or East Asian literature. Yet, we found amongst ourselves that we all have an interest in translation differences while using East Asian literature/ languages to compare trends and findings we observed from the HathiTrust collection. For example, Yao is interested in seeing the connections between Chinese and Japanese characters, and specifically focusing on how the Chinese character would be pronounced differently in Japanese as well as the logistics behind it. Both Jake and Yining are interested in doing the Chinese literature on how it transforms over the course of time. Hence, I decided to turn my focus to Jin Ping Mei and then extend it further with other works. Since this literature by itself has discussed various aspects of Chinese literature as well as culture, the social scene when China was at the transformation from *ancient to classic times. *ancient time is before 1600s, classic time is 1600s-1800s, modern time is 1800s-present
Connection to Sawyer Seminar/ Lightning Talk
Nevertheless, the lightning talk, as well as the posts from Sawyer Seminar, have inspired me since the beginning of the class. From Lightning Talk, I would say it gives me a whole new lens to look at things that I have never been exposed to before. The most memorable one was Two men riding on horses in the forest. It is one of the most interesting images I found from our first day of class. From Swarnim’s lightning talk, I have learned that this image does in fact have a strong correlation with colonial literature along with the Hebrew/ Jewish culture. The recitation is focusing on what ways we can utilize all of those contextualized cultural objects and their power relation to help us align our interest in a study or even simply throughout our everyday lives.
From the Sawyer talk, I personally gained something that I have never been exposed to before. For example, in what ways we can be making the connections among all these Asian cultures as well as literature altogether in one place. On top of that, I am most interested in the Multivalence of the Hebrew Alphabet Across Jewish Languages in the HathiTrust repository. Because to me both Hebrew and Jewish are the languages that I rarely have been exposed to throughout my life, and to me, the characteristics of these languages are especially hard to understand or even see the patterns among all of them. Yet, with the power of HathiTrust, they would be able to distinguish the dynamic differences among all the characters including how the grammar structure would work for those languages.
Living in China as a child offered me many experiences that most American children don’t get. I attended school there and learned about Chinese history and culture. One thing that was not widely discussed, however, was Chinese folklore and cultural stories. In fact, it wasn’t until moving back to the United States that I received any exposure to Chinese folklore at all. This collection was intended to expand knowledge about Chinese folklore and stories, and to provide me with insight into connections between traditional Chinese stories and stories from other countries.
This Hathitrust collection is a group of documents related to Chinese folklore and children’s stories. It incorporates Chinese history and culture while still remaining interesting to children, which adds an interesting element to the information presented. This collection was particularly interesting to me because I’m not fluent in Chinese, so it’s often difficult to read documents with words that I’m unfamiliar with. Children’s stories include easier words that I’m more likely to understand.
This poem includes references to the historical Chinese tradition of feet binding, and brings up interesting questions about the quality of life of the little girl. It’s unclear if her feet are small because she’s a child or because of feet binding. The original Chinese text might provide more insight into this question.
In the Sawyer Seminar, Marina Mayorski spoke about how computers have difficulty reading texts that are not in roman scripts. This particular piece has both English and Chinese translations throughout, so this might make it more difficult for computers to analyze a document. Heather Christensen made a point during her talk, which was that over 50% of the documents in Hathitrust are English, so it makes sense why documents in non-roman scripts are more difficult to read. Ben Bunnell also spoke about the 3D reconstruction software in place for scanning documents like these, which is particularly interesting to me, because I am interested in computer science.
This next document contains a story entitled The Journey of the Corpse. I found connections to this story through the Tales of Hindu Devilry document in the interactive map. The Tales of Hindu Devilry includes a story similar to this one. This story begins with a poem about friendship, and goes on to tell the story of a man who desperately wants to save the life of his friend.
Other students also examined folklore from other countries. Comparing and contrasting Chinese literature to the stories of other countries could provide a lot of insight into different cultures. Anuja’s post, “An Exploration of South Asian Folklore,” would offer many interesting comparisons to Chinese folklore.
My collection incorporates elements of poetry, storytelling, and folklore in Chinese literature. The documents come from a variety of different time periods, showcasing the changes in Chinese literature throughout history. By looking at my collection, one is able to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese culture and history while reading engaging stories.
(https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=908696084) This collection has various translations of poems of Charles Baudelaire, specifically many translations of Fleurs du Mal.
I also found a document that was incorrectly labeled as French (it’s definitely not). I reported this to HathiTrust and their response was essentially ‘We’ve marked it’s wrong but we don’t know if it’ll be fixed.’ I am very curious as to how the language was determined with French, as OCR should have captured characters that would obviously indicate another language.
In the Sawyer talks, I would say that Mike Furlough’s quote “Well-capitalized companies with an interest in making material from libraries accessible don’t walk into libraries every decade, they don’t do it every generation, they do it once in a lifetime.” was the most interesting. It’s exciting as adding new technology with the immense resources we have in text but also sad that these collaborations and pursuits are so rare. It definitely emphasized that access (keyword) is sometimes taken for granted when it becomes so normalized in an environment like ours.
Poetry has been used as a way to reflect Arab history, and serve as a connection to heritage and self-identity. The theme of love is a tradition within Arabic poetry, and can provide an insight into the evolution of Arab culture and history. These poems have continued to evolve over time, reflecting the culture and norms around love of the eras they were written in. In my HathiTrust collection, I chose to focus on various love poems from famous Arab authors throughout time, along with some of their popular translations. I aimed to gather a few poems from different time periods to show a broad range of literary styles, and examine how the topic of love has evolved in Arabic poetry.
Sketch from 1916 by Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran of Abu Nuwas, one of the famous poets featured in this collection (Credit: Alamy)
Connecting to Sawyer Collection & Seminar
One of the titles this collection can be connected to is the translated text of the Crescent Moon by Rabindranath Tagore to Chinese. This title is a poem, which is what my collection features. But what I found interesting, and why I was able to connect it to my collection is that this a translation. Much of my collection also consists of translations of various poems to English, but also other languages. Some keywords they could share were: poetry, translation, and 1900s poetry.
Going back to the Sawyer Seminar Talk, Heather Christenson discusses how titles come to be digitized within HathiTrust. This was especially relevant to me as it seems there are thousands of titles within collections scattered across HathiTrust, and yet it continues to be difficult to find specific titles in Non-roman languages, especially those in Arabic I found. I believe this is one of the main goals of this class, and to get people thinking about how to make these items more discoverable. But it wasn’t until I watched the talk and began adding more to my own collection that I realized how important this is.
It was also very interesting learning about Romanization from Barbara Alvarez and Leigh Billings, as this was something I’d never heard of until now. I don’t know why, but when I thought about translators and translated texts, I always imagined a tired librarian working tirelessly into the night, translating them by hand. While I imagine this still might be true, it’s cool to see how there are established methods that people have come up with over time. And I supposed that is what allows digital databases like HathiTrust to exist, as people have done the work of creating standardized systems that are much easier to turn into code and algorithms.
There are a few titles from my own collection (link) I would add to connect to the Crescent Moon Translation:
This is a link to a catalogue record of a famous translation Imru’ al-Qais’ poems by Charles Greville Tuetey. Imru’ al-Qais is one of the most famous poets in classical Arab literature, and is known for many of his odes. This directly connects to the Crescent Moon title as it’s another translation of a famous poem (https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000575526).
Another potential title would be this image of a portion from another Imru’ al-Qais’ poem. This is an English translation of Imru’ al-Qais’ ode from the Mu’allaqat (The Hanging Odes) a famous collection of seven classical odes hanging in the Kaaba in Mecca. (Link to pdf) This poem was written a few centuries before Islam became prevalent, and many of the topics he discusses clashes with some modern Islamic values. Nonetheless, al-Qais’ provides a key insight into pre-Islamic life, and his poetry today is still considered an important part of Arab literature.
Here is also a screenplay to a catalog of the Mu’allaqat poems. While this isn’t directly related to Crescent Moon other than being a poem, it is a notable find. These poems serve as key insight into daily aspects of life pre-Islam, and are renowned in Arab literature. They are some of the first written pieces of classical Arabic poetry, and thus a keyword to describe this piece would be classical.
Connecting to other students
In Anuja’s post, An Exploration of South Asian Folklore, she discusses her collection on Hindu folktales. Besides including languages that read from right to left, there is no much overlap in the categories of our collections. However both our collections could be considered “emotional content”. They both focus on showcasing pieces that elicit a specific feeling. For mine this is love and how the writers at different periods experienced it and expressed it in their poetry. For Anuja this could be how folktales allow newer generations to feel a sense of connection to older generations who pass down the stories.
In Michael’s post, Sufism through Space and Time, pieces by Sufi authors through time are showcased. These collections are directly connected as some of the great Sufi poets take inspiration from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. Abu Nuwas is a notable author who is renowned for his love poems. However, his work was a bit controversial as it mentioned many topics that were considered taboo at the time such as homosexuality. Landmark works by Abu Nuwas have been used as inspiration for the Sufi literary style.
There are multiple publications about law, criminal procedure, and political system formation in the 1980s in both China and Japan. In this specific period, I want to figure out if there are some possible relationships between the foundation of the general political and constitutional systems of these two east Asian countries. After searching the relevant sources in HathiTrust, I noticed that around the time of the early 1900s, there were multiple similar publications in both China and Japan defining constitutional law and law system history. Thus, I would like to try to build some connections by including sources from that early period of time as well.
The above two images displayed a close look at the establishment of the Japanese and Chinese law systems from two different periods. I chose these two images because the first one was from the 1910s, at that time when Japan just started to consider improving its law system. From the page image I provided, though most of you (including me) do not know much about the Japanese, we could still gain some information from some Kanji such as “天皇” who was the top character of Japan. The second catalog record displayed cases of Chinese criminal procedure from 1984. This was also a time when China started to consider improving or completing its law system. Though they were from different periods, they were in common in the case of the goal and direction of improving the law.
One important thing from the hyperlinked lightning talks that could be related to my example was the different translations of “The crescent moon” in both Chinese and English versions. What I was interested in was the way that Chinese translators and English translators thought when translating the same thing. After taking a closer look at the two pages, I noticed that though the general meaning of the poem was the same in both translations, the ways of translation were different at some points. For instance, how the translators divided the sentences were kind of different. I was interested in the potential influences that might be brought when considering my example, as what it showed in the hyperlinked lightning talks. For instance, will it be possible that I will find something different when searching in the English language instead of Chinese and Japanese?
The screencast above recorded a search of Japanese law relevant resources in the 1910s in HathiTrust using two different languages. First, I searched with Japanese/Chinese characters, and then I used English to search. In this way, I assumed I could discover some translations of similar items in different languages in the same period. In this screencast, I used the keyword “Japanese law” to start my searching, and expanded it with more relevant topics to Japanese/Chinese characters. And then, I successfully found something I wanted. This was also inspired by what I mentioned above from the lightning talks.
After reading Yao’s post discussing the difference between the sounds of Chinese and Japanese languages regarding similar characters, I discovered that there might be some possible impacts that might be brought according to this. When both of us were searching in HathiTrust, it was possible for us to encounter difficulties looking after sources in Chinese or Japanese versions since similar characters might have different results. Not only Chinese and Japanese, the inter-influence of many east Asian countries’ was worth considering, including languages, literature, cultures, and even law systems which I was interested in my example.
One thing that was really helpful to me from the Sawyer seminar was what Olan Munson talked about by the end of the third video clip about looking for better quality scanning. She mentioned that sometimes it might be difficult to find pages in a specific language with a good quality image, but you can always try to look after similar sources in other related languages. For instance, if I can not find a good quality image from Korean sources, I can try to search for other similar sources that were written in the Korean-Chinese system, which might be helpful. In my example, once I can not find the good quality full text in Japanese or Chinese, it would be a good idea to look after the English version of that topic or try to search for sources in mixed languages.
My collection is focused on the translation of Chinese nouns, such as names, cities, etc. The collection includes works across the times and topics to discover the evolution and different approaches of the translation method. Specifically, how did the writers and translators use the English alphabet to mimic Chinese pronunciation?
As I clicked through the interactive map, I was intrigued by the Hindu devilry story, so I started searching for folklore and story in China. Searching non-Roman language in HathiTrust is a huge issue since when I search for keywords such as folklore or folktale, not many relating results came out. It was really helpful to learn from the librarians to search for the corresponding word in Chinese. So instead of folklore, I searched for “min zu gu shi”. Many works in Chinese do not have an English title, and they are titled with the pronunciation of the Chinese title. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924079725788&view=1up&seq=2&skin=2021Links to an external site. This is a collection of literature from the Yunnan minority in China and the title is “Yunnan shao shu min zu wen xue lun ji”.
This is a Chinese folktale. It is included in one of the books in my collection. The other stories in the book helped me examine the difference in character names compared to the modern standard translation. Although this particular story did not serve that purpose, the story connects me to the tales of Hindu devilry in the hyperlinked lightning talks. Both of these are English translation of folktales from a different culture that suffers from cultural and pronunciation differences.
As mentioned by one of my classmate Conor McCarty Durkin, “a note or a message“ can fail to be “captured by algorithms and search engines in the same way a human might”. The loss of information is even true for human translation. I have read the story in both Chinese and English. Since folktales are closely related to the cultural background, the translator from another culture is hard to capture the underlying meaning or the “atmosphere” even when they understand every word.
The screencast displays a search of the subject of a book’s catalog record. The translation method in this book is very old. The tonal mark in the title “The rambles of the Emperor Ching Tĭh in Këang Nan” is no longer used in today’s translation. I believe Këang Nan is the equivalent of Jiang Nan in today’s Chinese typing system. However, I could not find the historical figure in Chinese history based on the name provides in the book. It is even more interesting yet frustrating that when I search the subject, this book is the only thing that appears in the result, and I begin to doubt if it is only a fictional character.
This makes the search for related content very difficult, and this is an issue that also happens for other languages, such as Hindi. The Key word here is “evolution”, which occurs in writing system as time passes. For the google book discussed in the Sawyer Seminar, the issue really is, how do you correlate these contents that are essentially the same thing only spelled differently?
The Chinese translation is talked about extensively in the Sawyer Seminar by Xiaoxi Zhang . The evolution of writing system not only effects translation, but more commonly, the literature itself. The words in the Chinese version of the crescent moon are formatted vertically, and that is a common occurrence during the republican time because the Chinese wrote from right to left and from top to bottom ever since the dynasty era. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.32000011091339&view=1up&seq=3&skin=2021Links to an external site. This is another example of older Chinese text. In fact, this special format was shared by a lot of Asia Countries because they were influenced by the Chinese culture. This is an example in Japanese https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015083054752&view=1up&seq=1&skin=2021 Links to an external site. and you can see the text in also written vertically. Perhaps evolution is also evident in a single language. In the post by Kimberly K Liang, her collection is about the progress of how Chinese literature have evolved from ancient to contemporary.
This collection is based on works written by Tao, Qian and Su, Shi. They were both very famous authors one thousand years ago and their works are wide spread in East Asia. The screenshots shows the Chinese version and the Japanese version of Su, Shi’s Qian Chibi Fu. Even though they look very similar, how they sound are very different. Take the first sentense for example, the Chinese version is pronounced as “Ren xu zhi qiu” while the Japanese version is “jin jyutsu no aki.” They sound completely different from each other. It is interesting to see how Chinese and Japanese have similar writing system but very different speaking system one thousand years ago.
As you can see in the screenshots below, this book has Chinese on one page and Japanese on another page and their writing systems share so many similarities. I am able to establish a connection to The Baitál pachísí in the lightning talk mindmap. It is very similar to the books written in multiple languages during the colonial era. In addition, the Xin yue ji (The crescent moon) also connects to the example below since both are collections of poems. Both are written in non-simplified Chinese in a vertical order from right to left. However, as you read the actual content of them, you can find that their use of grammar and choice of words are completely different while the hanzi characters they use are the same. Xin yue ji is more colloquial and informal and my example is more serious and hard to understand.
From Xiaoxi Zhang’s presentation on a Chinese translation of Bengali prose poems via English, I learnt that Chinese has two different sets of characters and writing systems. To me, it is mind-blowing to see that written Chinese is completely different from today, and I am unable to read if I time traveled to China 100 years ago. Also, Zhang’s presentation is one of my major reasons to research deep into ancient Chinese literature in Asian297. During my research, I found a fun fact that at that time, translated books about math, science, and engineering were written from left to right horizontally at that time, since the translators found it annoying and hard to read if they tried to squeeze all the math formulas in the Chinese texts written horizontally.
In Kimberly’s blog, I really like how she compared two versions of Jing Ping Mei published in different times to show how the way of language is being used and the examples of the transformation of Chinese characters. Even though both literature and characters evolved a lot during centuries, from her example, I learned the change in the language itself. And the later part is a perfect example of how Chinese change in its form of writing, making connection to my discussion about the ancient writing system in China and Japan, as well as my connection to Xin Yue Ji.
I managed to get access to the no-full-view book via the interlibrary loan, which is super cool. The book is a Chinese-English translation of the poems and the author made connection between Tao, Qian, the poet, and a British poet, David Watson since Tao, Qian work satifies Watson’s theory of poetry. This is a connection that can never be found by robots.
Category: translation
Under this category, I am able to connect my work with abschmit, tsween, huang, zhang and yan’s discussion on their collections
Link to network: http://www.translationnetworks.com/networks/341
Before starting college, I had never learned anything related to Asian history in high school. Although, I did grow up with Disney’s Mulan and other Chinese legends like the Moon Goddess. I also watched The Guardian Brothers, which was based on another Chinese folktale similarly changed as the Western version of Mulan was created. I never realized that these stories were based on other stories from Chinese culture and not something they created based on their culture. This is why when I got to college, I really wanted to go into Asian Studies, and from my classes here, I feel I am finally putting the histories together little by little. From my Asian 235 class, we learned about how Star Wars was inspired by a Japanese movie. Then in my Asian 263 class, we learned about how translations and how these texts came together. This is interesting because I remember hearing about these philosophers when I was younger, and it shows that each country or culture really influences each other. This is why I think Translation Networks are very important to us because they can tell us the histories behind how things came to be today, but also what things were like during that time, what ideas they held, events that influenced literature, and so much more. I wanted to focus on this idea of how everything is connected, and there is a starting point or origin to every story and idea, and this is why I decided to focus on Mulan, as it is just one representation of a whole group and how its history is much more than just what Disney made it out to be.
My Collection focuses on different variations of the original Poem Ballad of Mulan from different time periods or across different cultures and languages (mostly only Chinese and English). The Ballad of Mulan doesn’t tell a full story and leaves out certain parts that are prominent in the US or other Chinese retellings of the story, which is what makes these variations of the story open for interpretation. This collection aims to find these discrepancies and the background regarding why it is the way it is by finding how these stories are telling these messages through how it is told.
This is the English translated poem of Mulan within a book of other translated Chinese poems, and I never knew that Mulan was based on a poem that has survived many years. I couldn’t find the original one on HathiTrust, but I did find this translation and what I thought was interesting about it was that it lacks lots of details that were mentioned in the Disney version. There were no mentions of what happened during the war or what happened after the war. There are many fill-in-the-blanks needed to be done, and there were many adaptations in China that I was not able to find and understand, but I do know it is slightly different for each one. I think it would be very fascinating to see all of these differences and similarities.
As it turns out, the other story that I originally thought was the same as my main source above is not the same as it turns out to be. Although they both include similar pictures (which is why I thought they were the same), I think that connections would be very cool to look into more if you had more knowledge on this subject.
In addition to the similar photos, there are also ads included in the books. I wonder why this is because in the US we do not include ads within our books, and it only contains the writing. This might be something else to look into and how texts can tell us about the people of the past for what they like and how the ad is targeting them. Overall, I wish I could’ve found English translations of the text of Mulan and discovered what made these separate distinctions between the stories. I did, however, find a source that did tell me a little bit about how each story had a focus based on the cultural elements of each time, such as a focus on filial piety and then more on being a strong woman. Something I learned from a classmate is that there is also an effect of literature on people, for example, how people were against the stories she found because the topic was taboo. In addition, too many other students showed me that it could be both ways: from culture impacting literature and literature being important to history. It shows that history, culture, and the people all influence each other whether we acknowledge it or not. This is what makes literature so fascinating to me because for every story, there is a past, and for every story, it makes an impact on the people. This is something that I got from Xiaoxi’s lightning talk on how some Chinese texts have traditional and simplified Chinese characters written in them; that really helped me to see how “relationships are expressed in language.”
Have you ever searched yourself on the internet? Dig into every search result to see what is mentioned about you? Can you find social media pages? Pictures of yourself? In this project, I sought to do just that: research more about myself. But instead of starting from my name, I sought to start from who gave me my name, and that is my parents!
This is what I found what’s accessible on the internet for me…
Welcome!
My HathiTrust collection attempts to explore different parts of the Southeast Asian Diaspora to America with a focus on Vietnam. As a child of refugees from the Vietnam war, this project gave me the opportunity to investigate a more political and historical point of view of the United States in the 1900s. Pieces feature a local newspaper about a Vietnamese community in Virginia, the naturalization and immigration processes, a directory of public programs for Indochinese refugees, and more! I wanted to know the circumstances my parents and relatives were in that causes them to be a part of the diaspora to the United States, and understand from an academic perspectives the processes they went through to acclimate and assimilate to a new foreign world.
My sister was born in 1998, a year after the article below was published. My parents heavily relied on government programs and the community they resided in to provide support in their transition to the States and the piece details so the programs provided. Kentwood, Michigan is now a huge hub for immigrants. So much so, my high school was the 7th most diverse in the country when I graduated in 2018. Additionally, many of the Vietnamese students at the University of Michigan is from the Grand Rapids area similar to myself.
A newspaper article from 1997.
Sawyer Seminars Synergies
Barbara’s discussion the Sawyer talks detailing HaithTrust’s data and metadata search methodologies came full circle when I was curating my own collection. I wanted a diverse set of pieces that would be representative of the political climate at the time in regards to immigration pre and post Vietnam War. Using quotes, experimenting with different languages and terms, etc. I sometimes found myself struggling to find many pieces with a direct tie to my intended topic.
This reminded me of Ben from the Sawyer Seminar and our in class discussions with librarians about optical character recognition (OCR). Whenever I try to use the search feature to locate specific key works, most of the time I am not about to get results. Therefore, it required more manual efforts to dissect each piece in our class’ collections. As programs continue to be developed and improved to better recognize text and especially different languages, I hope in relation to our hopes to develop a game, this helps computers to capture more nuances while ensure the accuracy of pieces. As seen in Teddy’s collection, reputable databases can easily mislabel translations themselves. OCR also allows for archives, historical records, books, etc. to be more accessible opening infinite possibilities in terms of study, research, and translation.
Connections to other Collections
One of the more clear similarities I found across all collections in our class where how each individual came to choosing their own respective themes. Initial discussions in class led to Randy, Anuja, and I all choosing the focus of our pieces to be inspired from our childhood. Upon further exploration, Claire and Kimberly also based their findings on experiences that compelled them to more formerly engage with their native cultures. Through our collections, we were all able to divulge more intentionally about our own backgrounds.
Other clear connections include the geographic focus in Asia given by the class, variety of text in terms of date, medium (pictures, videos, poetry, art), and variety of dialects or languages found in each.
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