SQUAWK! i just read something incredibly cool! i was coming out of bryan hall (our english department building) to catch a bus, and up came professor nohrnberg from the carpark. what ho! i say to him. are you late for class? am i ever on time? he asks. oh, here's something you might want to read. he fishes out his new copy of "spenser studies" and points out an article on translating spenser into chinese verse(!!!!) and i thought oho, how dubious but no, this fellow turns out to be really good! instead of putting spenser into chinese classical metre he does it the way modern chinese poetry, you know the kind i'm talking about, xu zhimou and so on, which is really really smart and so much more suitable for narrative poetry. and he manages to follow the meter of the original, line by line! how the heck can he do that, since chinese is just one sound to one character? by using logical thought breaks (like how, if you look in your duben and the way they insert pinyin, some are logically spelt as one because they represent one concept? eg. zhonghua renmin gongheguo, rather than 7 separate words, or as one long string?) and natural rhythm breaks (like say a shang sheng followed by a qingsheng, the qingsheng naturally doesn't get stressed, yes?) in the chinese line as one foot! isn't that an unbelievably smart way of doing it!!! so it doesn't matter really whether you count it a break after 2 or 3 characters, and everything sounds perfectly natural and syntactically there's no strange arm-twisting involved! and what does he do about the rhymes? well technically you can rhyme in chinese, can't you? when you ya1 yun4, that's a rhyme surely. and although we don't have some equivalent sounds in chinese and english, i think its fair for him not to use the exact rhymes that spenser used, so long as he follows the rhyme scheme (ababbcbcc), and that's just what he does! and yet he uses the chinese convention of rhyming, so that it doesn't come across as an exact rhyme to non-sinophones, but to us, we know it's perfectly legitimate. sort of like the way people use eye-rhymes and half-rhymes! eeek! i can't believe anyone can do this. i really must stop hyperventilating but argh this guy is so bloody good at this! it almost makes me think the chinese translation is better than the original! this makes no sense whatsoever i am not explaining it well but i think this is so brilliant because it's sensible but doesn't compromise either the original or the translation, he's uses the conventions of chinese poetry but replicates the spenserian form and rhythm, even the visual arrangments of the lines on the page. if he had done it in classical verse form he'd have to stick to five or seven characters a line, and that would be stiff and not at all spenserian, but here he's got it all down, meter, rhyme, aaargh isn't that just the coolest ever thing. i pei fu him till i wu ti tou di. arggghhh. i could never have done that in a million years. so much for being the next spenser translator. prof nohrnberg will just have to be famous for being my teacher for something else.