whatever.
i treat my parents to seafood restaurant yesterday, then we all when thrift shopping. i eased my news of the day with lots of Anais Nin journal. boy do i feel better !
now to listen to Maria Callas' Norma, while reading Soul Mountain by Gao Xinjian.
yet another thrift shop treasure.
nota bene: the French version (which I am reading, btw ;) )
4 comments:
The Japanese version has a very fitting photo, really evocative of the novel's atmosphere. Excellent blue... The title is far more impressive too in vertical hanzi than it is as just "Soul Mountain" written across. That's how it was meant to be.
Are you reading it in French, Chinese Japanese, English...?
I am reading it in French ;)
I've chosen the Japanese cover, because I found it more "Soul Mountain" like, dare I say (I only reached page 35, so..it is a bit too early to get inside this book, I think ^^).
The second kanji (with three vertical sticks) is the one for "mountain"....What I absolutely loved in this picture, is that you can actually "feel" the title, more than in our somewhat restricted writing system.
I think that Japanese and Chinese writings always fascinated me because of their "double dimension": it is not only an arbitrar sign conveying a meaning, not only a sound, but also a visual echo of the word... And i guess that somehow, the system of thoughts must be influenced, if not being different, depending on the writing you use.
I could feel that in a minor way while studying Russian. I have always disagreed with my linguistic teachers saying that every languages are equal, in the sense that they are meant to convey an idea, a meaning. What differs is in the WAY they convey a particular idea..The syntax, the grammar, the shape itself tends to influence the mind into what it gonna express... OR maybe is it the mind shape that has influenced the language: on that , I know that there are many different opinions and philosophies..
'nuf digressing, though (or is it?) For your info, I added the French cover ^^ : it is the same as the Japanese one, but in more blurry and greener tones: adds a rather ominous impression to it all ^^
I'd like to see the chinese cover, haven't found it yet....
The biggest reason that I'm studying Chinese has originally to do with that double dimension as well. In Chinese Poetry Wai Lim Yip compares the bi-valence of word-image to classic cinematic montage (actually citing Eisenstein)--which is overall a very incomplete assessment of the writing system (English Imagist poetry seems to accomplish the same thing with moving from object to object in a way that implies changes of perspective or 'shot') but nonetheless a good idea.
As for the linguistics issue I think the differences you find really exist in the realm more of culture or philology than what is contemporarily called linguistics, which pretty much insists that it's a natural science allied with neuro- and cognitive science. A linguist who equates the expressive potential and phenomenology of language to its biological basis is pretty obviously falling prey to a genetic fallacy.
The thing about a pure phrase like Ling Shan is that it's not really language, yet, but somewhere in between image/symbol/sign etc. There doesn't appear to be anything you could call syntax to connect the two words, yet there are all kinds of energies that seem to flow between the two characters based on how they look, how they're arranged against one another etc. I love books that keep their symbols indefinite--Melville's white whale, Murakami's shadow, the village called Lingshan...
The Chinese version is actually just the Taiwan version (banned in PRC) which might make pics harder to come by...
I'm sorry about your job (now we are two unemployed!).
Books. Japanese... Chinese... French... English... Spanish. I love languages. It's sad they are like my ruin.
I don't know about that book.
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