Oh don't stop! I'm having too much fun with this and Mandarin Tools.
Far off the beaten track doesn't sound /too/ cliche'd to my ear, though I see what you mean. Alas, 'the backwoods' also has American connotations of crackers and inbred hillbillies and traveller-raping sodomites a la the film Deliverance. 'Deep in the forest' goes better to my ear, or 'far off the woodland track. But is the sense that the shack (shack is giving me problems too BTW: also an American associated word; hut is more universal English to my ear)-- sorry, is the sense of 路深處 that the building's *away* from any kind of road or that it's on a narrow woodland path that leads to an isolated place? 'On a lonely forest path' sort of thing?
Any way of mapping 江湖 and 江山 onto lowlands and highlands? Plains and mountains?
D: But the cadence. And choice of word. And stuff. Tone deaf doncha know.
Clearly you haven't been force-fed a diet of "inspirational" management guru talk. "We bring you off the beaten track! Make you think out of the box!" etc. etc. *grows hives* Oh but er hillbillies. Hmm. Yes, 路深處 is more the latter, more of following a small path into the middle of nowhere. I got it down in one of the earlier drafts but lost it in the edits.
Any way of mapping 江湖 and 江山 onto lowlands and highlands? Plains and mountains?Mmm. Not that I know of. 江山 can be translated as "empire" with very little lost except the "mountains and lakes" image. It's very much a term used in association with the ruling class; generals who conquer cities and land for the founder of whichever dynasty are said to be helping the emperor "打江山", which I'd translate as "building the empire
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Interesting and informative. And doesn't map onto anything English, no. 江山 would be the realm, possibly, but its antithesis doesn't really exist except as Robin Hood and his Merry Men, outlaws of the green wood. England is so much *smaller* than China, basically, that any revolution got put down in short order- Wat Tyler, Jack Cade- and never turned into groups of people lurking in the countryside, harbouring rebellious thoughts and becoming part of folklore. Except for Robin Hood and suchlike sturdy beggars.
Yes, and not to mention China was big enough for the central government to be irrelevant if it was weak enough and the area was remote enough. The thing about 江湖 was that it didn't have to be actively against the authorities; sometimes it was, but sometimes the authorities were just ignored and the whole 江湖恩怨 (jiang hu... grudges and gripes?) thing was just rivalry between different factions. Because of wuxia novels by Louis Cha and Gu Long and whoever the modern concept of 江湖 has a definite martial arts edge to it. The hostility is often concieved as being between rival matial arts schools; some of this seems to have found its way into Western pop culture anyway. The most famous (semi-fictional?) schools I can think of being E-Mei, Wu Dang (Wu Tang, the rappers?) and sigh, sigh, Shaolin.
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Far off the beaten track doesn't sound /too/ cliche'd to my ear, though I see what you mean. Alas, 'the backwoods' also has American connotations of crackers and inbred hillbillies and traveller-raping sodomites a la the film Deliverance. 'Deep in the forest' goes better to my ear, or 'far off the woodland track. But is the sense that the shack (shack is giving me problems too BTW: also an American associated word; hut is more universal English to my ear)-- sorry, is the sense of 路深處 that the building's *away* from any kind of road or that it's on a narrow woodland path that leads to an isolated place? 'On a lonely forest path' sort of thing?
Any way of mapping 江湖 and 江山 onto lowlands and highlands? Plains and mountains?
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Clearly you haven't been force-fed a diet of "inspirational" management guru talk. "We bring you off the beaten track! Make you think out of the box!" etc. etc. *grows hives* Oh but er hillbillies. Hmm. Yes, 路深處 is more the latter, more of following a small path into the middle of nowhere. I got it down in one of the earlier drafts but lost it in the edits.
Any way of mapping 江湖 and 江山 onto lowlands and highlands? Plains and mountains?Mmm. Not that I know of. 江山 can be translated as "empire" with very little lost except the "mountains and lakes" image. It's very much a term used in association with the ruling class; generals who conquer cities and land for the founder of whichever dynasty are said to be helping the emperor "打江山", which I'd translate as "building the empire ( ... )
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