Children’s Book – Peek in the Farm

Today, we do something different. We take a look at a children’s book that was originally written in English, and then translated into Chinese. Strangely, the translation into Chinese was done in a way that took the English and translated it into classical poetic forms that hark back to the Tang Dynasty. Journey with me to find out how deeply Chinese poetry has influenced the Chinese today. 

Here is the podcast:

Here is the link to the book in English. I have not been able to find the Chinese version online, though here is a photograph of my daughters’ copy:

Also, here is a copy a transcript of the podcast. Keep in mind, this is experimental and generated by AI, so it may get somethings wrong. But I am doing it because several listeners have requested a transcript with each episode.

Transcript:

 My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese literature podcast. Today, I’m not going to give you a whole big introduction on the texts that we’re looking at. Normally I start out by spewing a bunch of biographical historical information at you. Today, I’m just going to start and read it first in Chinese and then in English.

I know I don’t normally read in Chinese, but I think you’ll understand why I’m going to do this after I explained to you what I’m actually reading. Here is one of the poems we’re looking at today. In the morning, the rooster, um, uh, calls loudly, saying, good morning. In the farm, the animals get up early.

Have a delicious breakfast. Here’s the English. Early morning, the rooster, oh, oh, crows. In a loud voice, he says, good morning. The farm animals wake up. Delicious breakfast they eat until full. Did you hear the rhythm and rhyme in that, uh, original passage? Each line of the poem ends with a word that rhymes with owl.

And did you hear the structure? That structure is so common in traditional Chinese poetry. It’s called a qian jue ju, a seven syllable heptasyllabic line. I mentioned this last time in the. The podcast on Huang Zunxian. Each poem has a couplet where the first line in the couplet complements the second line in the couplet.

So in this poem, line two completes what happens in line one. So the rooster wakes up in line one and crows. What is he crowing about? We’re told about that in line two. So there’s this structure in lines one and two. Something happens in one and we’re told about it. about what it is in line two. Line four completes what happens in line three.

In line three, the farm animals all wake up. In line four, they are eating breakfast. This is all very typical in terms of Chinese poetry. If you were to read Tang Dynasty poetry, this would look very familiar. This is pretty much the same form as Tang Dynasty poetry. I’m guessing you already realized this, but we are not reading.

Poetry, what era is this from? Let’s take a look at another poem

in the shed, issues forth the sound of oo, who is it who lives inside? Take a look through the barn door and have a glance. This is a three line poem, but it’s pretty much that same structure. Each line has this 4 3 structure. So it’s a heptasyllabic poem that’s divided into the first part of the line has four characters, the last part of the line has three characters.

Very standard, very standard. If you were to look at Li Bai, Du Fu, you would see these kinds of poems. All over the place. This is not Levi. This is not Doofu. Have you figured it out yet? This is not a formal book of poetry. What I am reading to you is actually a children’s book. It’s a flip book where you have these pictures of life on the farm and you flip little things over and it will reveal something.

I’ll. I’ll try and find it online and put a link in the podcast on the web page. Uh, in fact, one listener has actually asked me to put more URL links on the web page if if I discuss a book. So I’m going to try and do that more. This book is fascinating and I wanted to do a podcast on it because I think a lot of times we forget that Chinese literature has this.

Long hold over China, much more so than I would say anything comparable in the West or really anywhere else in the world. I’m less certain of that statement in terms of India, but I think most places outside of China. You really don’t have the long hold that Tang poetry, that Song poetry has over China today.

How did I get this book? Uh, so I have kids, a close friend of mine and friend of the podcast, Brandon Foltz, actually donated this book to me when he was moving. It was his child’s book. And he was like, I can’t, I can’t take it with me when I move. So he, he gave me a bunch of Chinese books. The book is just called Nongchang, that’s just farm.

What I find so fascinating about this is that. This book, it was not originally a Chinese children’s book. In fact, it’s a British book called peep inside the farm published in 2015 by a use born publishing, and then it was translated into Chinese in 2018. So, think about this, this is not a book that was originally written in Chinese.

That would make sense if this, uh, rhyme was originally written in Chinese and, and they structured it in kind of a Tang Dynasty poetry style, but that’s not what happened. This is a children’s book that was originally written in English and translated into Chinese. So when they translated it, they went out of their way to translate it from English Ancient poetic patterns that have been with us for more than a millennia.

Now I have to admit these poems frequently break with that ancient poetic form. So you will have, uh, the writing in this children’s books. It’s sometimes written in this poetic form, which I mentioned is the heptasyllabic form, the qi yan jue ju. Uh, and then all of a sudden it will break from that form.

So it’s not like when the translators translated this book from English into Chinese, they translated everything into that poetic form. But I still do find it incredible that this English children’s book is being translated into Chinese using these ancient poetic forms. Let’s look at another poem. This one is written in a very simplistic three syllable or three zi per line form that was used to teach children the Confucian classics, particularly in the, the San Zi Jing, the three character classic.

If you’re going to milk a cow, you have to do it on a schedule, once in the morning and once in the evening. How about another one in that style, but this one’s going to be a little bit longer and in the middle it’s going to break that poetic form just a bit.

So, the tractor, it makes a loud noise. It softens up the ground and busily casts the seeds. Little seeds, they will grow big. They need sunlight and water. The wheat seedlings grow up fast. After you ripen, you will be ground up into flour and baked into bread. The tractor It is strong. I’m not going to bang on this too much longer.

The main point I had in bringing all this up is I’ve done a lot of podcasts on poems. I’ve talked about the structure of these poems occasionally. That’s something that I think a lot of translations don’t capture. I know to English readers, when you’re reading these translations, it can sometimes seem like something that’s not all that important.

What I want to say is that in Chinese poetry, it is important. These poetic forms still play a major role in how Chinese people hear their World, when they translate stuff, even a silly children’s book about being on the farm, they translate it into these forms. If you want to understand what China means to Chinese people, what forms of Chineseness keep popping up again and again throughout the decades, throughout the centuries.

What forms of being Chinese continue to be important to the Chinese people? It is These poetic forms, at least that’s one thing that’s incredibly important to Chinese people. It’s important enough that Chinese folks will translate a children’s book from English into these forms. These forms create patterns and that is how they Here the world these patterns are the grooves along which Chinese folks are inclined to think just as in English We’re inclined to think in terms of rhyme somehow if you say something in The form of a rhyme it makes it more true You can say the dumbest thing in the world, but if you say it in rhyme it will seem That is all just another way of saying culture, literature, these things, they never let go of us.

It’s incredibly difficult to escape the gravity. of culture. It pulls us in constantly. Culture and literature, they’re there with us. They cut grooves in our souls. When we are young, they are hard for us to break out of as we age. Today, I’m not going to end on a Cheng Yu. Rather, I’m going to end with the beginning of one of the greatest works of Chinese children’s literature.

It’s in that same style of those last poems that I covered. I mentioned it. It’s the three syllable classic, the sanji in pre-modern China. This was a poem that most kids started to memorize as they were studying the Confucian classics. This was the gateway drug to Confucianism. Essentially. Here it is

ing. In people’s beginnings, their nature was good. People’s essence is close to this, but it is by custom or practice that they get farther away from this. This formulation is one of the things that most kids in pre modern China would have memorized as their first Confucian classic. My first Confucianism.

Sort of a Fisher Price version of Confucianism. Okay, that’s it. I’m going to leave it here. It’s a shorter episode. If you have any thoughts on this, please send me an email at ChineseLiteraturePodcast at gmail. com If you want to support me, uh, financially, Show me some love on Patreon. I’m Chinese literature podcast at Patreon.

My name is Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese literature podcast.