And More..

wow.. the BKF looks so... so regal!

Lard of All I Survey?

I'm not sure why I find this so amusing (perhaps because my Jug-headedness means that to fit my actual face in the program has to crop out my double chin), but I do find it amusing.

And anyone can do it!

Smoke Em if you Got Em

As of 9:57 this morning there is one more little Korean-American floating around in Salinas (bringing the total to, three, in all).

JAE went to the hospital at around 6:30 last night and was delivered in just over 12 hours. "About 47 minutes of hard pushing" says BKF.

As usual, JAE was quick, efficient and without drama. Why, after all, have a three day labor? ;-)

There was an amusing moment yesterday as the BKF asked JAE's parents if I was allowed to visit in the week after the birth (there is a rule that only nuke-famblys can come in the house) and I will be allowed to "pass the rope" that keeps strangers (and disease) out.

There goes THAT plan to get out of the translation business!

Anyway, congrats and smoke em if you got em.

Pictures soon...

The Occidentalist

I spend much of the day today with the BKF working on issues of translation. Although he had marked yesterday and today out for translation he did nothing yesterday. He explains that 'translation is more efficient' when it is the two of us.

So we grind through the remainder of the text - pretty easy actually.. perhaps 10 pages or so in 3 hours. Primarily him reading, scrunching up his lips, and then translating aloud. I type and correct the obvious Koreanisms and suggest "real English" versions of what he is saying on the rare occasions he doesn't come up with them (e.g., He still says "10's of" something when he knows gawdamn well it's "dozens" in English). Sometimes we struggle around issues of word meaning between cultures and how to translate folks wisdom (the old, "beating around the bush" versus "licking the outside of the watermelon" thing).

We also go over the translations from "prose" to "poetry" in the poems. I tell him my LS has contributed one stanza and he is amused. She calls and leaves me a message about a couplet during our translation session, but in this case I like my version better.

It's mine.

That's why! Yeah sure.. but watch me leave a troublesome verse here before this is all over! ;-)

I read my versions of the poetry and it reveals a few misunderstandings which we clear up pretty quickly. In addition we have translated a few new poems (most of which I have got rough poetic translations on already).

Then, bastid that he is, he reveals we "only" have 10 pages of footnotes left to translate.

Degree of difficulty?

We need Hangeul, Chinese character, and English phonetic versions of each bit of text we are discussing. Then we can get about to translating the interpretive bit. It is an epic clusterfuck.

I nearly have all the breath out of the bastard's lungs, and my thumbs completely through his trachea when JAE wanders in and calmly announces that her water has broken.

She is unaturally calm. The BAG, who has been out getting her oil changed (yeah .. in the car wiseguys!) returns and she has also bought presents for all of us while she was waiting.

• BAG dispenses gifts
• JAE continues to leak
• JAE gets BAG some delicious Key Lime Cheesecake which BAG settles in on.
  
• JAE drinks milk and has an apple because "I should eat light food since I'm just going to throw it up anyway"
• BKF collects things
• Korean Nuclear Family (in town for the birth) inexplicably is not going to the hospital and invites me to stay with them for "drinks and beef" (that is probably an exact translation). I demure, just because I am that way.
  
• After the car is loaded BKF remembers a two-page business proposal (a friend's) that he would like me to look at. We leave JAE outside and go in and fire up the laptop and work on it as JAE waits outside.
  
• All suddenly realize that with BKF and JAE leaving, the visiting dad will need to be in charge of driving the family, so there is an ad hoc, "this is the car and this is how you drive it" lesson.
• BKF and JAE drive into street and then decide to check vehicle for necessities (primarily camera, and all I'm saying is it's a freaking birth and if I wanted to see that obvious and easy 'miracle' I'd be on Animal Channel) and block traffic for about 5 minutes.

To say the seen was surreal would be.. well, so real it would belong to Sir Real.

And I still have a few problematic verses (though new problems will be revealed if BKF and I have any time to get together before the Friday deadline - and we'd better) including the following that I leave for my LPS (there... Lovely Political Sister.. she is now yclept). This is one where I don't have all the words yet, so questions of beat and rhyme are premature.

Still, most of the others are not only done, but now in some kind of "ameter."

This shit better get me paid! ;-)

On the lotus curtain fragrant incense spreads Outside light rain wakes apricot blossoms Under a pavilion awning the bell before dawn wakes a dream Forsythia next to a pond a thrush calls out. A spring day, swallows fattens and I shut myself in Lethargic hands, the golden needle stopped its work Butterflies in pairs waft off from flowers And competes to follow the withering flowers in garden shades Shivery cold permeates into the green skirt Spring breeze cuts through the longing heart Who can understand the emptiness inside? Lovebirds dance in myriad of flowers. The color of spring deepens in Hwangsayang's villa Red and green shimmers on silken window screen The fragrant grass distresses (creates uneasiness)

On the lotus curtain fragrant incense spreads Light rain wakes apricot blossoms in their beds Under a pavilion awning a dream is broken by the pre-dawn bell Forsythia next to a pond, a thrush lets out a trill. A spring day, I shut myself in as swallows gorge Lethargic hands, the golden needle halts its course Butterflies in pairs waft off from blossoms And race withering flowers in shade in the garden Shivery cold permeates into the green skirt Spring breeze slices through the longing heart Who can understand when the inside is empty Lovebirds dance together in flowers aplenty. In Hwangsayang's villa the color of spring is deepening Red and green shimmers on silken window screening The fragrant grass is strange and somehow distressing.

The Fine Art of Translatio..

So me and the BKF are trying to translate some unread Korean classic into English...

Well, sort of.. apparently it has first been translated from Chinese to Korean. Now BKF and I are asked to translate this thing...

First from Korean to English (Him with a bit of me - I'll explain this process later)

and then

From prose to something resembling rhyme (Me with a bit of him)

Oh - and we have to do a literal translation.

Which is ridiculous, since this whole process is already something like the game "telephone" that we played in elementary school, except there are three languages involved. What we have is probably the remotest relation to the original text - we have the ashes of a chicken who was once injected with homeopathic medicine, boiled in a stew and the remnants tossed into the fire. We are asked to maintain the essence of the medicine at the heart of the art.

Consequently we both drink...

I do something like this:

Have I entered the enchanted peach garden? The flowers bloom everywhere. The love I bear is difficult to put to words.

Have I entered the enchanted peach garden? The flowers bloom everywhere. It is difficult to put into words the love I bear.

That's simple enough as the rhyme was actually in the words and not much violence is done to literality.

It gets more complicated.

The power of stroke overflowed And drawn a thousand peaks at the center of a river How magnificent the thirty thousand yard Mountain Bangho is! Mysterious, half of it soars amidst clouds. Several hundreds leagues of terrains stretches vaguely ahead And the blue conch shell of the summit is anchored right before the eyes. Waves of blue ocean hovers above Setting sun returns the memory of the hometown. Melancholic one becomes watching the drawing Like a lone boat on Sosang River Bay in wind and rain.

The power of brushstroke overflowed And drew a thousand peaks at a river's core How magnificent the thirty thousand yard Mountain Bangho Mysterious, half of it soars above the clouds below. Several hundreds leagues of land stretches off to the skies The blue conch shell of the summit is anchored before the eyes. Waves of blue ocean spread like a crown Setting sun returns the memory of the hometown. One becomes melancholic watching the drawing Like a boat on stormy Sosang River Bay, pitching and yawing.

Now the rhymes are beginning to get sketchy although I think the idea is still there..
Oddly (probably not), the biggest problem comes with simple, short sentences full of concrete example.

One of the last verses I am puzzling over is one of the simplest:

Picking up a green apricot and throwing it at a nightingale
In the southern pavilion the wind passes and the passing sun is slow
The lotus leaf spreads fragrance and the pond is filled to the brim with water
In the deep of the blue waves a cormorant bathes.

Of course I'll re-open the Word document and some bit of hideous doggerel will spring to my mind.
I
think we need to turn in two versions, one rhyming and one not. At this precise moment I have little confidence in what I'm cranking out. And imagine my surprise to find the deadline for initial submission is next Friday, not late September as the website indicates.

BKF and Soju will put paid to that sort of defeatism, I imagine!

Next - Why a "Library Book" is like a gravesite... Or, a "Semi-Occidental Incident of Translation"

Better Living Through Attempted Manslaughter..

Over on the always amusing and thought-provoking Dr. Helen blog, some guy named Danny opens an entirely new avenue of self-improvement - Shooting people!

Danny said...

NavyVet- when I was 14, I had to shoot my uncle when he attacked my dad and declared hisintention to kill both my dad and I. he did not die, but was crippled.
And unlike your assertion, I did not bring any serious psychological trauma upon myself. In fact, it turned me from an introverted, shy, geeky, easily frightened kid into a self-confident person.

There you go. And you don't even have to kill the swine, just cripple them! It leads to self-actualization, but not the ability to write proper English. A tradeoff, I suppose? Is the Danmeister really claiming that NavyVet's "assertion" caused the Danimal more "serious psychological trauma" than all that shooting bother? How can that be? Dan is now a self-confident maniac.

I don't think he's thought the thing entirely through.

I might also note that Danny, while proud to tout the advantages one might attain by attempted homicide, is also too much of a pussy to have his Blogger ID point to his blog....

alas..

another unidentified shooter...

Lyrics that are perfect as they are...

Close one there
Choking in clean underwear
Bleeding tongue
Eight ball pounding in my lungs
Ship to shore
I can't see the coastline anymore
I shouldn't be here
I thought I made that loud and clear

.......

China town
Chasing that old dragon down
Madam Wong's
We play the blues with the curtains drawn
Sidewalks of white
While the LA sun beat out the night
Pounding brain
My last transmission down the drain

.......

There's a debt I owe
I'll never pay before I go
So I sing the blues
Hand me down my walking shoes
You're in my heart
Though we may be miles apart
There's my point
I'll see you in another joint

John Hiatt (who has an enviable facility with a lyric) in his "Master of Disaster" which, if you like kinda old white blues stuff (infinitely superior to any of the shit that Eric Clapton has been pawning off -- some people just shouldn't give up heroin. Keith Richards, I'm looking at YOU!) is also a pretty cool sounding song.

Korean Marketing Fails Again

While I was in the lovely town of Colfax I saw something that bugged the marketer in me. I’ve repetitively blogged about how shitty Korea is at promoting itself, but in a small (and new) restaurant in Colfax I saw more living proof.

The lovely BAG and I sat down for dinner. On the table was a two-sided menu of drinks. All of which featured something I might never have heard of before, “Han Asian Vodka.”

But I had heard of it before at a joint down in Big City. A Thai place (Hint: not Korean) where they served a lovely drink called a “Han Solo.” Lo and behold, on this small-town menu, I saw the same drink. And a whole host more, which you can see on the graphics Terrifying Teefs and Dangerous Digits courtesy of the BAG).

I saw that this whole setup had to be engineered by the “Han Asian Vodka” Company. Once is a coincidence, twice is an attempt at branding.

…… and for christ’s sake I can’t even type that shit… “Han Asian Vodka” is Soju. Good old Korean Soju and yet here it was.. starting to creep into a niche, but without its real name.. So I went and talked to the bartender, who also turned out to be the owner.

I asked her if she was ‘featuring’ the whole “asian vodka” thing because it allowed her to, without a hard-liquor license, make mixed drinks (like a “hangarita”) without having to resort to wine. I knew the answer was “yes” but I wanted to find out how she had come to do this thing. After some chitchat she me that the whole thing had been presented to her as a marketing package by the folks at “Han.”

I asked, “well you know that it’s just soju, but it’s not even from Korea?”

She told me I was wrong and pulled out the bottle, “see, it is soju from Korea, but it is bottled and distributed in Taiwan.”

And I just about had a stroke, because once again I was face to face with a massive, hideous, total, and moronic, failure of Korean marketing.

Soju is “vodka” in the sense it is fermented and prepared that way. But its alcohol content is slightly above that of wine, and thus just fits in with the “soft” alcohol category of the ABC in California. Therefore, with it’s vodka-like taste (it reminds me of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Soju is “a beverage not completely unlike vodka.” Look it up, pointdexter!) it is the perfect “soft” booze to make drinks that “hard” drinkers like to order. At the very least, it can tart up a drinks menu that could previously only feature beer and wine.

But it took a TAIWANESE company to figure this out and to prepare an entire marketing campaign, with drink names and recipes included, for bars in the United States. They not only bothered to figure out what the US wanted (A thing Korean marketers are constitutionally incapable of) but the found the solution (heh, that’s a soju joke!) in Korea and created an integrated marketing plan around it.

Of course the Taiwanese didn’t call their product “Soju,” instead they renamed it “Han Asian Vodka” and thus the essential Korean nature of the drink is erased from it. Korea will never reap an iota of benefit from this.

The name, BTW, is clever, for Koreans will read the “han” and believe it is in reference to the Korean people. They will believe this, of course, because they know nothing about the United States and would never think that 19 our of 20 US citizens would identify the word “Han” as having to do with China and would never once think about Korea as part of “asia.”

But when the news of this gets back to Korea? Somewhere, in some obstructed bowel of some governmental building in Seoul, some guy in a tailored suit and snappy tie will exchange congratulations with other similar factoti, about how the “Korean Wave” continues to cover the world.

In reality? A brilliant marketing opportunity (similar to how Korean BBQs in the US don’t pump their .. well… their BARBEQUE!) was lost to Taiwan.

Stupid Korean marketers!

Thursday Comicallness...

Oh man.. after two so-so weeks "Get Fuzzy" has developed a plan for My Angry Friend. It combines the mysteries of the East, and the Anger within..



Tantrum Meditation... beautiful, man, beautiful!



It's clearly a process thing...

Mike Huckabee Better Understand Politics Better than Basketball

"I'm not just spending my time trying to bash other candidates. You know, I believe the best way to win a campaign is to be able to hit the three-point shots from out on the perimeter, not by going up under the goal and elbowing somebody or kneecapping them."

Jesus effing Kreestuu!

You like that European ball? We win championships on inside play and defense. We need rebounds, strong play in the lane. Not hoisting silly three pointers.

Yah cheese-eating, fraid of the lane, monkey!Publish Post