Glad to see that you checked with DS and GPT, which I did as well. The poem was too well known, so when I input it the AIs recognised it immediately as from 红楼梦, and whatever translation they did weren't purely off the actual text, but highly influenced by the existing translation by Hawkes and the Yangs.
I gotta laugh at this: "David Hawkes gets a lot of praise for his poems — but the truth is that nobody reads them. His beautiful language is archaic, and is becoming increasingly unreadable." I don't disagree, so far.
After testing a number of the AI chat bots, I still think DeepSeek does the best at handling classical Chinese texts. I gave Qwen a try a few weeks ago, but I wasn't very impressed with it.
However, DeepSeek still has a lot of hallucination issues. It's also really funny if you ask it how David Hawkes translated a particular passage. It will get the general feeling and gist right, but it will never actually repeat the passage the way it was rendered.
Where the AI chat bots help the most is when you come across words or phrases that you simply can't find translated anywhere. The nice thing about Dream of the Red Chamber is that a lot of native speakers of Chinese also find the language difficult, which means that they tend to ask questions on various Baidu forums and other places. However, sometimes there are words that are harder to find. The AI chat bots can at least come up with a definition, though there are times where I think they're just making stuff up...
I like it -- it makes sense to me -- though there are some things I would like to point out:
- The 4th line actually has 倩 instead of 請 in the original scans (倩誰記去作奇傳). As for the 枘 in the Korean version, I must confess that I can‘t make sense of that character in there at all...
- 偈 (to my knowledge) is a special type of poem: it refers to a specific kind of Buddhist verse (or gāthā; it's written in 4 lines like the 絕句, but can be any number of characters each -- it doesn't have to be either seven or five -- i.e. it can be 3x4, 4x4, 5x4, 6x4 or 7x4 etc.)
- My knowledge of Japanese isn't (even nearly a 10000th) good enough to judge the translations, however, although the second (AI?) translation seems more compact and perhaps somewhat more poem-like, I have doubts about 空しく in the second line. The rather negative meaning here (that seems to be something like 空虛地、白費丶in vain etc.) doesn‘t seem to be in line with the way Buddhism usually uses the character 空 -- at least as far as I know.
Glad to see that you checked with DS and GPT, which I did as well. The poem was too well known, so when I input it the AIs recognised it immediately as from 红楼梦, and whatever translation they did weren't purely off the actual text, but highly influenced by the existing translation by Hawkes and the Yangs.
I gotta laugh at this: "David Hawkes gets a lot of praise for his poems — but the truth is that nobody reads them. His beautiful language is archaic, and is becoming increasingly unreadable." I don't disagree, so far.
Thanks!
After testing a number of the AI chat bots, I still think DeepSeek does the best at handling classical Chinese texts. I gave Qwen a try a few weeks ago, but I wasn't very impressed with it.
However, DeepSeek still has a lot of hallucination issues. It's also really funny if you ask it how David Hawkes translated a particular passage. It will get the general feeling and gist right, but it will never actually repeat the passage the way it was rendered.
Where the AI chat bots help the most is when you come across words or phrases that you simply can't find translated anywhere. The nice thing about Dream of the Red Chamber is that a lot of native speakers of Chinese also find the language difficult, which means that they tend to ask questions on various Baidu forums and other places. However, sometimes there are words that are harder to find. The AI chat bots can at least come up with a definition, though there are times where I think they're just making stuff up...
Correction: Pearl S. Buck's All Men Are Brothers was a translation of 水滸傳 (Water Margin), not 西遊記 (Journey to the West)
I like it -- it makes sense to me -- though there are some things I would like to point out:
- The 4th line actually has 倩 instead of 請 in the original scans (倩誰記去作奇傳). As for the 枘 in the Korean version, I must confess that I can‘t make sense of that character in there at all...
- 偈 (to my knowledge) is a special type of poem: it refers to a specific kind of Buddhist verse (or gāthā; it's written in 4 lines like the 絕句, but can be any number of characters each -- it doesn't have to be either seven or five -- i.e. it can be 3x4, 4x4, 5x4, 6x4 or 7x4 etc.)
https://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw/dictView.jsp?ID=5457#col4 (see last entry)
- My knowledge of Japanese isn't (even nearly a 10000th) good enough to judge the translations, however, although the second (AI?) translation seems more compact and perhaps somewhat more poem-like, I have doubts about 空しく in the second line. The rather negative meaning here (that seems to be something like 空虛地、白費丶in vain etc.) doesn‘t seem to be in line with the way Buddhism usually uses the character 空 -- at least as far as I know.