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The Husky and His White Cat ShiZun v1

(English 7Seas version) Notes 1 of 2

I finished book 1 of the Seven Seas' 2Ha! (Pronounced "er-ha" or "R-Ha", for those of you who don't actually speak Chinese ;p)

It was great. The translation is smooth and easy to read, and I feel like it conveys the story really well.

As I prepare to hand this book over to my non-Chinese friends, I do have a few notes.

(Audio recordings and book-note images under the cut)

1 ) Go ahead and skim through the Name Guide, Pronunciation Guide, and Glossary. In addition, here are how the names are supposed to sound:

2) Next! Book images for Pages 1-182.

So, I think the translators did a great job on this.

Even so, there are a few places where I think my background may differ from that of the translators, so the tone of a word or phrase felt wrong to me even though it was technically correct.

And I like how they kept the Chinese for a lot of words that don't translate well, but they didn't always put footnotes for those words or names, so I penciled a few in.

I hope this makes your reading experience even more enjoyable!

Arg. Sorry that the Vol 4 and Vol 5 MDZS are taking so long to post notes on.

Since flying through two volumes of 2Ha in absolute awe of the gorgeous translation, I’m having the hardest time getting through even Vol 4 of MDZS. I spent days wondering how to better translate 乌合之众. I fumed for too long over the choice to use “why don’t you” as the translation for 不如 —- it’s not wrong, it’s just…

I wish that 7 Seas had chosen a more experienced team to translate. I’m glad that they got someone familiar with fandom, but a lot of these word choices are killing me.

Here is Part 4 of my annotations of First Edition MDZS, Volume 1, pages 210 - 263.

Yet more reasons for Why I Love Chang Geng

(even if he is a possibly-evil genius and love-crazed lunatic)

Stars of Chaos 杀破狼 ch 43:

When asked why he was hanging out everywhere but at the capital for the past 4 years, Chang Geng replies

“我……我想看一看，”长庚道，“了然大师以前跟我说过，心有天地，山大的烦恼也不过一隅，山川河海，众生万物，经常看一看别人，低下头也就能看见自己。

“I….wanted to see,” Chang Geng said, “Teacher Liao Ran had told me before, the heart encompasses the sky and the land; even a mountain-sized worry can only occupy one small corner. Mountains, valleys, rivers, oceans; millions of living creatures; often, through looking at other people you can look down and see yourself.

没经手照料过重病垂死之人，还以为自己身上蹭破的油皮是重伤，没灌一口黄沙砾砾，总觉得金戈铁马只是个威风凛凛的影子，没有吃糠咽菜过，‘民生多艰’不也是无病呻吟吗？”

If you’ve never cared for someone with a grave illness who is on the verge of death, you might think that your broken skin was a major injury; if you haven’t drank a mouthful is yellow sand, you would forever believe that a powerful army was a reflection of awe; if you’ve never eaten chaff and swallowed greens, ‘the peasants have difficult lives’ is only a hollow sentiment.”

(Or something like that. This is a crazy novel that I can’t translate, but I do love it so!)

Anyway, it’s gorgeous to see Chang Geng start to take his place in the world.

And it’s so funny to see Gu Yun constantly surprised at him and wondering why it feels so awkward when they’re touching or alone together or touching while alone together ❤️

Terry Pratchett's 2001 Carnegie Medal Winner Speech

I’m pretty sure that the publicists for this award would be quite happy if I said something controversial, but it seems to me that giving me the Carnegie medal is controversial enough. This was my third attempt. Well, I say my third attempt, but in fact I just sat there in ignorance and someone else attempted it on my behalf, somewhat to my initial dismay.

The Amazing Maurice is a fantasy book. Of course, everyone knows that fantasy is 'all about' wizards, but by now, I hope, everyone with any intelligence knows that, er, what everyone knows...is wrong.

Fantasy is more than wizards. For instance, this book is about rats that are intelligent. But it also about the even more fantastic idea that humans are capable of intelligence as well. Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewellery into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking. The fantasy of justice is more interesting that the fantasy of fairies, and more truly fantastic. In the book the rats go to war, which is, I hope, gripping. But then they make peace, which is astonishing.

In any case, genre is just a flavouring. It's not the whole meal. Don't get confused by the scenery.

A novel set in Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26, 1881 is what– a Western? The scenery says so, the clothes say so, but the story does not automatically become a Western. Why let a few cactuses tell you what to think? It might be a counterfactual, or a historical novel, or a searing literary indictment of something or other, or a horror novel, or even, perhaps, a romance – although the young lovers would have to speak up a bit and possibly even hide under the table, because the gunfight at the OK corral was going on at the time.

We categorize too much on the basis of unreliable assumption. A literary novel written by Brian Aldiss must be science fiction, because he is a known science fiction writer; a science fiction novel by Margaret Attwood is literature because she is a literary novelist. Recent Discworld books have spun on such concerns as the nature of belief, politics and even of journalistic freedom, but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.

This is not, on the whole, a complaint. But as I have said, it seems to me that dragons are not really the pure quill of fantasy, when properly done. Real fantasy is that a man with a printing press might defy an entire government because of some half-formed belief that there may be such a thing as the truth. Anyway, fantasy needs no defence now. As a genre it has become quite respectable in recent years. At least, it can demonstrably make lots and lots and lots of money, which passes for respectable these days. When you can by a plastic Gandalf with kung-fu grip and rocket launcher, you know fantasy has broken through.

But I’m a humourous writer too, and humour is a real problem.

It was interesting to see how Maurice was reviewed here and in the US. Over there, where I've only recently made much of an impression, the reviews tended to be quite serious and detailed with, as Maurice himself would have put it, 'long words, like "corrugated iron."' Over here, while being very nice, they tended towards the 'another wacky, zany book by comic author Terry Pratchett'. In fact Maurice has no wack and very little zane. It's quite a serious book. Only the scenery is funny.

The problem is that we think the opposite of funny is serious. It is not. In fact, as G K Chesterton pointed out, the opposite of funny is not funny, and the opposite of serious is not serious. Benny Hill was funny and not serious; Rory Bremner is funny and serious; most politicians are serious but, unfortunately, not funny. Humour has its uses. Laughter can get through the keyhole while seriousness is still hammering on the door. New ideas can ride in on the back of a joke, old ideas can be given an added edge.

Which reminds me... Chesterton is not read much these days, and his style and approach belong to another time and, now, can irritate. You have to read in a slightly different language. And then, just when the 'ho, good landlord, a pint of your finest English ale!' style gets you down, you run across a gem, cogently expressed. He famously defended fairy stories against those who said they told children that there were monsters; children already know that there are monsters, he said, and fairy stories teach them that monsters can be killed. We now know that the monsters may not simply have scales and sleep under a mountain. They may be in our own heads.

In Maurice, the rats have to confront them all: real monsters, some of whom have many legs, some merely have two, but some, perhaps the worse, are the ones they invent. The rats are intelligent. They're the first rats in the world to be afraid of the dark, and they people the shadows with imaginary monsters. An act of extreme significance to them is the lighting of a flame.

People have already asked me if I had the current international situation in mind when I wrote the book. The answer is no. I wouldn't insult even rats by turning them into handy metaphors. It's just unfortunate that the current international situation is pretty much the same old dull, stupid international situation, in a world obsessed by the monsters it has made up, dragons that are hard to kill. We look around and see

foreign policies that are little more than the taking of revenge for the revenge that was taken in revenge for the revenge last time. It's a path that leads only downwards, and still the world flocks along it. It makes you want to spit. The dinosaurs were thick as concrete, but they survived for one hundred and fifty million years and it took a damn great asteroid to knock them out. I find myself wonder wondering now if intelligence comes with its own built-in asteroid.

Of course, as the aforesaid writer of humourous fantasy I'm obsessed by wacky, zany ideas. One is that rats might talk. But sometimes I'm even capable of weirder, more ridiculous ideas, such the possibility of a happy ending. Sometimes, when I'm really, really wacky and on a fresh dose of zany, I'm just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances, Homo Sapiens might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we've tried everything else.

Writing for children is harder than writing for adults, if you're doing it right. What I thought was going to be a funny story about a cat organizing a swindle based on the Pied Piper legend turned out to be a major project, in which I was aided and encouraged and given hope by Philippa Dickinson and Sue Coates at Doubleday or whatever they're calling themselves this week, and Anne Hoppe of HarperCollins in New York, who waylaid me in an alley in Manhattan and insisted on publishing the book and even promised to protect me from that most feared of creatures, the American copy editor.

And I must thank you, the judges, in the hope that your sanity and critical faculties may speedily be returned to you. And finally, my thanks to the rest of you, the loose agglomeration of editors and teachers and librarians that I usually refer to, mostly with a smile, as the dirndl mafia. You keep the flame alive.

please wait outside the one meter line

eat when you need, but don’t waste the food

please don’t bring in any external food

works/construction in progress

sichuan style hot&spicy chicken dish

marinated wheat gluten with peanuts and black fungus

watch your step/be careful not to slip

ethnic park

please contact with our salesperson before trying it on

detection dog/sniffer dog

i can’t say this one is wrong……

Chinese 🤦🏻‍♀️

Just this once, I wish they had not simplified a character. I keep mixing up the words for “old friend” vs “enemy”.

Like, really? One stroke difference?

Friends are old 古 but you want to…lick your enemy 舌?

posting on twitter feels like throwing something you worked on for hours, days, weeks into a river, hoping it'll get swept out to sea for many people to experience, only for it to immediately crash into some rocks and explode. its gone now. if no one sees it in the 0.00003 seconds it exists on their timelines, no one ever will

posting on tumblr is like carefully placing your work in the middle of a dark abandoned factory, and slowly a bunch of weird little goblins manifest from the shadows and touch your work all over with their little raccoon hands and share it with each other. sometimes they find your thing again many years later and excitedly share it again

the weird goblins are much more enjoyable

Stars of Chaos 杀破狼

Volume 3, pages 1-84

First, let us all show our appreciation for the illustrator who put horrified soldiers in the background when Gu Yun is about to play a little song on his jade flute:

(sorry my color balance is all wacky. Please pretend you see the lovely blue sky and the snowy white robes.)

(The "yet" confused me, so I changed it to an "And.")

...to land in a kneeling position, all cool-like.

In Chinese, the phrase equivalent to "snatch from the jaws of death" is "从阎王那里抢回了..." = "snatched back from (the Ruler of the Underworld) Yan Wang (or Yanluo Wang)."

In English, it's "harbor improper intentions," but that makes me feel like someone is going to seduce and then abandon someone else; whereas in Chinese, the phrase is "心怀不轨,” which is more along the lines of "intentions that do not follow the proper rules." 'Cuz god-sons are not supposed to think romantic thoughts about their god-fathers.

The “bei" here is the word for "North". 北。

And does anyone else like to laugh at how Chang Geng's new title, 雁王 Yàn Wáng, is now a homophone of the Ruler of the Underworld 阎王 Yánwang ？

天地没良心。 Heaven and Earth do not have a conscience / kindness.

It's super minor, but I was a little confused until I re-worded this in my brain to be "My actions here are not done out of my filial obligation to you; these actions are just me doting on you."

Chang Geng is not being disrespectful by denying filial piety to a godfather, but, rather, he is showing that he is doting on Gu Yun as a lover.

急行军 is translated as "forced march" in my pre-installed iphone Dictionary, but the Chinese explanation is "in order to complete an urgent task as quickly as possible, act with the utmost speed."

So I understand "急行军中实在被他们弄得基恩恼火” as "it was infuriating to have to deal with them while we were in such a terrible rush."

My DanMei Literary Adventure Masterpost

Stars of Chaos - All Notes Links

I finally found an English-Language explanation of What Happened in the novel 镇魂 Guardian by Priest! It had been hidden in video…and I had refused to watch any reviews until I had finished watching the drama…

So! If you happen to be as confused as I was after reading (loving!)(confused loving!) Zhen Hun, here’s another person to commiserate with about how unfathomable (illogical) the plot of the novel truly is (but we still don’t care. We just want more WeiLan).

https://youtu.be/jfOH0kFvDuQ