(hemming & hawing yet still-an-impulse purchase because dude, it's in frickin' chinese
Also, I've only seen one Wim Wenders movie.)
In Taipei, I bought a photo essay book by Wim Wenders. It was about 9.60 USD, with pictures & brief prose accompaniments. I figured it was originally written in German, then translated into the Chinese version I held in my hands.
In my grandma's living room that evening, I started translating the preface as best I could with the fragments of written Chinese I was able to claw up from memory mudbanks, and with the unexpected help of the truly awful tv program I was half-watching with my grandmother. Because, what was awesome about the truly awful tv program was that there were Chinese subtitles. So while the soap opera actor whose birthday it was tried to guess which person from his colorful past was speaking to him behind a brightly lit screen and through a vocoder
(it was his primary school teacher who taught him how to tie his shoelaces; said soap opera actor was moved to teary eyes when recounting this experience in pretty general language -- he still ties them the exact same way after 30 years you see -- and openly sobbed when she tottered out into open view, oh, but the greatest part was when this soap opera actor talked to his ex-wife, also a famous soap opera actor, via telephone, in split-screen -- they had a very public and harrowing divorce years ago -- and apologized for his past selfish behaviors, wished her good health and other moving things, and then the camera cut to the brightly lit screen behind him and we, the audience, could see that there she was! in silhouette! with something on her head! which turned out to be a BRIDAL VEIL. she walked out on stage, sobbing her eyes out, face striped with mascara, this sickly middle-aged faded beauty of an ex-wife in FULL BRIDAL APPAREL
but actually the security camera footage of a man stabbing his wife to death in her office -- shrill screams fully audible -- shown on every news channel probably trumped that. I mean jesus fucking wept),
I managed to pinpoint a few words that I'd heard before and knew the meaning of, catch the written form in the subtitle and match it to what was written on the first page of the book's preface. Total difficult words/phrases, broken through the language barrier: 5. Whoo!
Here's the English version, and here's the preface. Turns out it was published in 1993 in Italian, then 1994 in German. The English translation appeared in 2001, and apparently the Chinese version hit Taiwan shores a couple months ago.
I figure translating the entire Chinese version into English and then locating a copy of the English translation and comparing the former to the latter should occupy me for a pretty long time.
Nothing like circular projects sans a Point. I'll think of a point to this, give me time.
Awful pressure on my eardrums. They think I'm still on a plane.