And also important photos. Yes, those. Shooting Saturday, still setting up. I don't know whether to be excited or terrified.
"Foo Dog" is the bastardized western term for Chinese stone guardian lions. I did this quick sketch from an easy to find photo because I had been thinking about them. We used to have a set in my house. Interestingly, "shi shi" (stone lion) is part of a long poem by Yuen Ren Chao which phonetically reads in whole:- « Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
- Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
- Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
- Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
- Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
- Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
- Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
- Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
- Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
- Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
- Shì shì shì shì.
- « Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den »
- In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
- He often went to the market to look for lions.
- At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
- At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
- He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
- He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
- The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
- After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
- When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
- Try to explain this matter.
The implication is as in English riddle poems (how is this so, how can this be, explain this matter) when really no answer is expected.
Of course, written out in Chinese characters it is more easily read, because while they sound the same the symbols are understandably different, similar to our homophones, for example 'deer' and 'dear'.
Actually I took the challenge to solve the "riddle" of the poem quite literally and that Chao meant it to be taken so, or he would not have explicitly stated it as such in the final line of his English translation. More so when I saw how many people attempted to make sense out of the story and failed. The problem ("what can this mean?", "Try to explain the riddle?") was very easy to solve once the work was viewed as a poem, rather than an exercise in translation or linguistics. Indeed, I was able to generate three perfectly plausible solutions almost immediately. It is interesting that, while even linguists refer to the work as "a poem" or "verse", I've found no one, up to now, who actually treated it as a poem. I'm working on an essay now that treats "“The Record of the Poet who Tried to Eat Ten Stone Lions” as work of significant poetic merit. The essay includes my solution sets for the riddle of the work. if anyone wishes to know more, they can email me at red-at-holopoet-dot-com.
ReplyDeleteI would be interested in reading the possible solutions. I perhaps did not give it it's due credit when writing this blurb.
DeleteI would be worried that if I tried to unravel it myself that I might miss something in the translation. My mind jumps to rigor mortis, but that does not seem... very clever.