M-Dash, the new literary journal from Autumn Hill Books, is running a series called “The Untranslatables” — “about those words or phrases that give us pause as translators, that stump us and then, sometimes, enlighten us.”

To inaugurate their feature, they invited me to contribute something from my translation of Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito. I wrote about my translation of the line there is a crowd of commoners as purple as red cabbage 有一群百姓像白菜一样翠绿. Here’s a teaser:

The line deals with the essences of Chinese, but with a twist. While many scholars have codified the Chinese aesthetic as metonymic and literal, the poetry of Xi Chuan’s line operates by revealing the fiction in the Chinese language’s conceptualization: white cabbage is not white (that it is modified by the quintessentially Chinese “jade green” twists the twist with even more torque) … In this instance, though, I sacrificed the insinuation about Chinese in particular to imply that all languages may contain such falsehoods and misnomers: as purple as red cabbage, because, of course, red cabbage is not red. And to reproduce the poïesis of Xi Chuan’s alliteration, such as with the chiasmus of /b/ and /x/ (IPA [ɕ]) and the repeated /c/ (IPA [tsʰ]) in yǒu yìqún bǎixìng xiàng báicài yíyàng cuìlǜ, I preceded it with, there is a crowd of commoners.

Click the image above to link to the full piece.