Blog posts

This is done for a friend who wanted to know more about the Chinese myths in which the Earth was severed from Heaven. I translated three excerpts where this myth was attested, with the original texts attached. I hesitated about where to put this post, and decided against placing it under the section “Translations”, because it would have read out-of-place alongside the literary works.

If translation means re-creating the inner experiences of reading, we encounter a fundamental indeterminacy when translating classical texts. The timespan that makes a classical text classic also obliterates what is fleeting in time. However, among the ephemeral existences, it is the subtle mental realities that we aim to re-create by translation.