If Chink history and culture is so interesting then why have I never read Chinese literature and why does all the...

Pol Pot made having attended a foreign university, being able to read a foreign language, and wearing glasses punishable by death.

He learned about Marxism while attending a French uni and wore thick rimmed glasses while engaging in his lifelong passtime of reading French poetry.

Communist leaders being horrendously corrupt and hypocritical is the rule.

It's not necessarily hypocritical to make exceptions.

Right, because those who have properly internalized Communism, as bastions of morality like Mao and Pol Pot had, are allowed to be more equal than the common peasants.

All people are equal, some poeple are more equal than others

>two eyes good, four eyes better!

Does anyone know Mr.FUGI &
Mr.FUKETU ?

1. Never heard about it
2. 2 disney movies about chink literature? big woop
3. >fountain of youth is a chinese creation.
Wow so impressive. I betcha the majority of people today can't even name you one chink writer alive today. Unless maybe jackie chan wrote a book.

>that one emperor who destroyed all chinese texts that didn't adhere to his chosen school of philosophy
And then Mao probably got people to burn half of what was written after that incident.

Then what about Sun Tzu's Art of War?

>why have I never read Chinese literature
You're in charge of that, playboy
>why does all the poetry/aphorism sound stupid?
Because pretty is heavily dependent on the language it's written in and you're reading translations of the general ideas rather than the totality of what the author was trying to convey.

A translated work will never have the same impact as it did in its original language for a number of reasons. And that's pretty sad if you think about it. Every person on the planet is essentially locked out of the true cultural impact of anything originally written in a language they don't speak.

> sound stupid
Probably because elegance is lost in translation. Some phrases just sounds stupid in english.

pretty much this

for some reason this phenomenon seems more relevant for chinese in contrast with say greek or sanskrit. classical chinese poetry has a peculiar style.

OP: i've heard good things about the romance of the three kingdoms.

So much this

It's because all Western languages are so intertwined.

Once you get into Eastern languages it's a whole different ballgame. Same with Native American languages. Translations for place names come off as cumbersome as all hell but it's a three-syllable word in the native language.

>man composes, heaven disposes

Don't act like democratic rulers can't be hypocritical as shit too.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras

>hurr everybody look at me im a huge retard

1/ read Dao De Jing
2/ compare all available translations
3/ ????
4/ profit

ichingonline.net/

Their literature is obtuse and hard to digest by wesrerners, therefore no one in the west cares to put sinitic writings in schools or advertise their literature. Communism also makes it hard because school boards might think its subversion. Id suggest Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Water Margin

As for their poetry and aphorisms its hard to explain since chinese written language really cannot be translated properly. It loses nuance and deeper meaning. For example, poets may hide poems within poems by using the radicals of characters to also make a poem that gives meaning or context to the obvious poem.

The Chinese nowadays don't give a shit about anything except money desu.

They don't care about gay shit like 'sounding stupid'.

Also, the Chinese language is ambiguous as fuck, and almost impossible to translate 'objectively' or 'accurately' you just have to feel it, mostly.

Eventually, they will eat us all alive.

t. 7 year expat in China

English translations of Chinese works neuter the original text. It's near impossible to capture the nuance of a word in Chinese.

I'll give an example. In Dream of the Red Chamber, there's a character name Xiwang Feng. She make's a remark to the main character, and the main character says something like "I wish she would blow away." The name 鳳 (feng) is the same phonetically, but not tonally as 風 (feng) which means wind. It's a play on words, but that's just one example of a possible difference.

Also this
Tonals fuck everything up

If i ever learn chinese im learning the characters then pretending to be mute because fuck that

this

>japanese

Mr.FUKETU=World- famous calligrapher.

>Also they destroyed a good deal of their culture during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution anyway.

It still is thriving though. the cultural destruction in China is pretty small compared to the complete ones that others had where there is nothing left at all.

>A translated work will never have the same impact as it did in its original language for a number of reasons

there's translated works that are pretty baller as fuck. You just need a killer translation team. It's not because it''s translated but because there's no DEMAND for a translation.

This. Only white people can destroy cultures

...

epic

pretty sure translations can surpass the original

beautiful translated work is a meme.
artistic word choice , rhyming in chinese, symmetrical couplet and stuff are mostly lost in translation.
if you seen such thing as "beautiful" translated text, that is second hand creation from translator.

Anyone got any book recs for history/lit?

Got Lao Tzu, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the Water Margin

Because you aren't interested in China? There's nothing inherently wrong with that but that on the flipside it doesn't really say anything about their culture or hitory

Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber

Because you can't read?

You do realize you are basically advertising how much of an idiot you are, right? Why are you on Veeky Forums

>Why are you on Veeky Forums

Because this is the board for people who put the barest effort into their posts.

I mean, the average debate on here is nothing more than kiddies making one line posts and spamming Wikipedia links they googled.

Nobody on here gives a shit about history, they just like shitposting about history.

Because Occidentals don't read Orientials. We're more likely to read sub-saharan african literature than we are Chinese, unless the writer is Tao Lin.

>sub-saharan african literature

did SSA even have writing systems outside of those from colonizers?

>t's not because it''s translated but because there's no DEMAND for a translation.

user, a few years back I started reading the Old Testament in the original Hebrew. There's a metric fuckton that I missed out on, and I read multiple translations. There's been a lot of demand in the western world for a good biblical translation; and the fact that there are still nuances that escape even things like study bibles makes me think the problem is endemic to translation, and not to not having people want it enough.

Because you're uneducated.

Christfag retards on Veeky Forums should be banned, no exceptions.

>Translations for place names come off as cumbersome as all hell but it's a three-syllable word in the native language.
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chidí_naaʼnaʼí_beeʼeldǫǫh_bikááʼ_dah_naaznilígíí

They used Ajami script

Plenty of high schools teach Achebe, bruv.

>Eventually, they will eat us all alive.

What about their social support system breaking down? A graying population without numerous children to care for the elderly inside the family unit. Wouldn't this lend to a government supporting the old folks?

Are you trying to agree with me or not? I can't tell. My point is that unrelated language groups will often translate extremely roughly.

That specific example is a description of a tank in Navajo, because the word "tank" rarely comes up in conversational Navajo and literally every Navajo speaker on the planet is also fluent in English anyway. So they'd probably just say "tank" even when conversing in Navajo.

I'm talking about place names primarily in the Northwest where modern towns and cities often retain a bastardized form of the name they were referred to by tribes in the area.

And a lot of the time it's a 3 or 4 syllable word that translates into English as a complete sentence describing the place's features and relationship to the tribe in question.

According to various chinese shills that's not a problem))))))))

Thats why theyve been trying to relax 1CP for years before dropping it more or less entirely. But the problem is 1 billion people is a new normal even for China, and was never going to be sustainable. The big challenge is how to manage a population plateau and not let it become a cliff.