Shui Hu Zhuan: literal translation?
One of the books I'm currently reading is a translation of Shui Hu Zhuan, one of the four classical Chinese novels. It seems to have an amazing number of titles in English translation: Water Margin may be the commonest, but I've also seen Outlaws of the Marsh, All Men Are Brothers, The Marshes of Mount Liang (the title of the version I'm reading), and others.
I'd like to know what the Chinese title actually "means": that is, stipulating that there are philosophical problems about translation, (a) what is the closest we can come to a literal English translation of the words of the title in the sense in which a Chinese reader would take them, (b) what English phrase or sentence with those words would be syntactically equivalent, and (c) what, if anything, do the words connote or allude to that's important to getting what the phrase means?
I have tried to figure this out by the crude expedient of pasting either the hanzi or the pinyin transliterations into online dictionaries-but of course that gives me long lists of possibilities. My best guess would be that the words are the ones that mean "river lake biography," because that would fit in with a phrase that keeps turning up in the novel, "the fraternity of the rivers and lakes," meaning the outlaws the novel is about, rather as if someone wrote a novel set in medieval England called "Greenwood Tales." But I could be all wet; it isn't as if I had actually studied Chinese, let alone older forms of Chinese!
Can anyone enlighten me?
I'd like to know what the Chinese title actually "means": that is, stipulating that there are philosophical problems about translation, (a) what is the closest we can come to a literal English translation of the words of the title in the sense in which a Chinese reader would take them, (b) what English phrase or sentence with those words would be syntactically equivalent, and (c) what, if anything, do the words connote or allude to that's important to getting what the phrase means?
I have tried to figure this out by the crude expedient of pasting either the hanzi or the pinyin transliterations into online dictionaries-but of course that gives me long lists of possibilities. My best guess would be that the words are the ones that mean "river lake biography," because that would fit in with a phrase that keeps turning up in the novel, "the fraternity of the rivers and lakes," meaning the outlaws the novel is about, rather as if someone wrote a novel set in medieval England called "Greenwood Tales." But I could be all wet; it isn't as if I had actually studied Chinese, let alone older forms of Chinese!
Can anyone enlighten me?