Fun with kanbun.

[sechan19]

For those of you who might be curious as to what some of my course work entails this term, I thought I might share some of my kanbun practice.  Kanbun as a literary style comprises a number of different types of writing.  The lingua franca of the early Japanese bureaucracy was Chinese, and an annotation method for reading those texts as Classical Japanese was developed and indifferently implemented over the course of time.  Ultimately, texts came to be written in a kanbun-esque format that was actually just a fancy way of writing Japanese.

I won't get into all of the annotation marks and what they mean, but here's a sample sentence that we worked on this past week that really struck a chord with me.  It gives you an idea of the process.


不入虎穴不得虎子

As Chinese grammar is very similar to English grammar.  A straight translation of the words serves to give a basic impression of the sentence's overall meaning.  The characters are, respectively:

not enter tiger hole not get tiger child


Works pretty good for a translation, ne?  But for Japanese that's not enough.  They structure their sentences in a completely different fashion.  Hence the annotation style, which looks something like this:

　_{レ　　　ニ　　　　　一　　  レ       ニ                一}

不_ンバ　入_ラ　虎　穴_ニ　不　得　虎　子_ヲ

Now the reading becomes:

tiger hole enter not tiger child get not


Read in Japanese:

Koketsu ni irazun ba, koji wo ezu.


And in English:

If you do not enter the tiger's den, you will not get the tiger's cub.


Essentially:

Nothing ventured; nothing gained.


One of Teva Jones's personal favorites.

Comments

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

And what, pray tell, are we planning on doing with this tiger cub?

I'd advise against keeping it as a pet. This one guy kept a tiger in his Manhattan apartment, and one day it attacked him. What an idiot.

[reteva.livejournal.com]

Well, presumably we're planning on eating this tiger cub. ;> But that is a pretty amazing article. I never understand why people want to keep wild animals... I mean, aside from the fact that they're just stupid. Or in that guy's case insane. Too bad he's still in the gene pool.