"When falsehood is taken as truth, the truth becomes false;
Where nothing is claimed to be something, that something becomes nothing."
The meaning of these two are almost complete opposite though—truth becomes false, existence becomes nothingness (google translate) vs fiction becomes true and the unreal becomes real. Looking at the Chinese text, your translation is closer, and sounds more dire compared to Hawkes'. I wonder whether he was injecting his world view here, otherwise what was his intention to flip the translation?
I'm not entirely sure - it's one of those things where Hawkes' decisions really puzzle me.
I do know that the original poem is written this way as a play on words. There was apparently originally going to be a Zhen (甄, like 甄士隱 / Zhen Shiyin) family in contrast to the Jia (賈) family. There's even a Zhen Baoyu (甄寶玉) who shows up briefly, and apparently there are more references to him in the manuscripts and some of the editing notes.
Anyway, you're right that the poem is a basic contradiction. And it doesn't make much more sense in Chinese either, lol. It's one of those crazy things about this novel - and you wind up thinking about it over and over again as you read...
I think it makes sense for a difficult to comprehend poem to be famous, being difficult to understand is the sort of trait that gets people talking about something, like Finnegan's Wake for example. I liked the poem.
I think the celestial mystery isn't going to be celestial. It would come from Cao, who is a human being imposing his perception of the universe from the stand point of a human being. So any "celestial mystery" Cao provides later on is just going to be at the level of being a human. And that's the failure of studying spirituality from humans...since we are all standing from the same level, no one knows better, so what are we learning exactly. And this is why I don't think much of Goddess/Fairy Disenchantment. Her character is written by a human being, so I don't get the impression she's better than humans. Sorry...I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief and critical thinking to buy into the story. It's nothing about you as a student and translator of this work, of course. My comments are totally aimed at the author.
"Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;
Real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real."
"When falsehood is taken as truth, the truth becomes false;
Where nothing is claimed to be something, that something becomes nothing."
The meaning of these two are almost complete opposite though—truth becomes false, existence becomes nothingness (google translate) vs fiction becomes true and the unreal becomes real. Looking at the Chinese text, your translation is closer, and sounds more dire compared to Hawkes'. I wonder whether he was injecting his world view here, otherwise what was his intention to flip the translation?
I'm not entirely sure - it's one of those things where Hawkes' decisions really puzzle me.
I do know that the original poem is written this way as a play on words. There was apparently originally going to be a Zhen (甄, like 甄士隱 / Zhen Shiyin) family in contrast to the Jia (賈) family. There's even a Zhen Baoyu (甄寶玉) who shows up briefly, and apparently there are more references to him in the manuscripts and some of the editing notes.
Anyway, you're right that the poem is a basic contradiction. And it doesn't make much more sense in Chinese either, lol. It's one of those crazy things about this novel - and you wind up thinking about it over and over again as you read...
I think it makes sense for a difficult to comprehend poem to be famous, being difficult to understand is the sort of trait that gets people talking about something, like Finnegan's Wake for example. I liked the poem.
Yep! And the cool thing here is that the poem should start to make more sense as we slowly get into the story itself.
I think the celestial mystery isn't going to be celestial. It would come from Cao, who is a human being imposing his perception of the universe from the stand point of a human being. So any "celestial mystery" Cao provides later on is just going to be at the level of being a human. And that's the failure of studying spirituality from humans...since we are all standing from the same level, no one knows better, so what are we learning exactly. And this is why I don't think much of Goddess/Fairy Disenchantment. Her character is written by a human being, so I don't get the impression she's better than humans. Sorry...I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief and critical thinking to buy into the story. It's nothing about you as a student and translator of this work, of course. My comments are totally aimed at the author.
Thanks for the translation. Very clear!