Re: live cultures (was: Promoting Lojban)

[Lin Zhemin <ljm@ljm.qqjane.net>]

Fri, 19 Feb 1999, zo Robin Turner(robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR) cusku di'e
> la kris. cusku di'e
> > I doubt how effective culture-neutral poetry could be. Without culture or
> > history, metaphor is impoverished and symbolism in non-existent. Doesn't
> > sound much like poetry to me.
> {zo'osai} the fact that people _do_ write poetry in Lojban!  {pe'i} Lojban is
> culture-free in the sense of not being confined to any particular culture, not
> in the sense of being culturally sterile.


I know that western literature depends on metaphors very much. However,
metaphor is just one of the three fundamental methods of making up a poem in
Chinese literature. The methods are Fu4, Bi3, Xing1, which can be simply
(and rudely) translated as "indicate", "compare and parallelise",
"metaphor and making imaginative relation". It is very impressive to
Chinese, that poems can be like this famous one: (C = Chinese, D = Directly
translated, T = Translation)

	C: guo puo shanhe zai, hengchun cao mu sheng. (1)
	D: country destroy mountain river exist, spring grass trees born.
	T: The country is overwhelmed but the land still exists;
	   and in the spring, grasses and trees grow and born.

In (1), there is no metaphor. It's totally written in indicative form,
very easy to translate into lojban. (1) is not culture-neutral. Eventually
if there is someone who isn't ever moved by patriotism, (s)he won't
understand this. But I think that's a biological experience. It's of human
race.

	C: gan shi hua jian lei, hen bie niao jing xin. (2)
	D: Feel time flowers drop tears, hated leave birds afraid heart.
	T: When beings are emotionally moved by this sight, even the flowers
	   drop their very tears. And as I'm forced to leave my country,
	   the birds are afraid of my strong hateness.

In (2), Xing1 appears. It can be translated as long as we insert some
auxiliaries, as what we've done in English. 

This kind of poems appear in large amount in Chinese literature. However,
there are naturally cultural dependant poems (which modern Chinese may even
not understand w/o explanation). I just don't think culture-neutrality could
ever be a problem understanding/appreciating a poem. You just need some
explanations.


-- 

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