An Exercise in Literary Chinese - Part 3

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Now that we've covered most of the background, in part 3, we'll focus mostly on translating the next 9 sentences.

Be sure to read Part 1 and Part 2 before this.

An Exercise in Literary Chinese - Part 1

Zhanguo Ce (Strategies of the Warring States), chapter 1.
It looks intimidating, but trust me, it's not so bad.

Instead of talking about manga, current events, or books I've read, I'm going to do something very different in these posts. You see, I once listened to a particularly inspiring presentation in which the lecturer did a combined history lecture/primary source analysis/language lesson on a passage from Shiji to an audience that largely knew neither Mandarin nor literary Chinese. So today, I'll attempt my own version of this. I'm going to assume you know little to nothing about Mandarin, literary Chinese, nor ancient China in general. And I'm going to decode that wall-of-text you see in the image above, line by line, while giving necessary background info and interesting historical tidbits. I've only actually started self-studying literary Chinese myself with no Mandarin background so I know I'm not the best teacher. Still, I hope this will be a fun post for anyone curious about ancient China or who ever wondered what kind of language literary Chinese is.

This will be a multi-parter, since it's too damn long to fit in one post.

Futago no Teikoku v2 (complete)

Here it is, a project I meant to start last year but ended up getting delayed until now. This is Futago no Teikoku (The Twin Empires), by Kitou Mohiro. I haven't really done any Kitou-stuff since I finished up Bokurano over 8 fucking years ago, with the exception of that very short Ekrano oneshot. That's partly because I wasn't really interested in his other works since then, with the massive exception of Owari to Hajimari no Miles. But for some fucking reason, Kitou blueballed us all by not continuing that (I have no reason why).

Fortunately, all was not lost as Kitou seems to have been playing around with the idea of flying naval warships and seaplanes since then, resulting in this manga. Or more accurately speaking, he's apparently been thinking about the storyline to this new manga for a whole decade before he finally started in 2015. As a fan of both sci-fi and history, I can't help but like the plot and setting, considering it basically involves  Imperial Japan Kou Empire's imperial expansion into China "the continent" set in an age where battleships dominate and aircraft-carriers are in their infancy (think 1920s~1930s). There's even an equivalent of the Washington Naval Treaty in the story! It's quite nice to see the pseudo-IJN be portrayed as the villains, unlike certain anime/manga/video games that just jerk off to battleships like the Yamato all the way to the bank. I expect I'll later end up doing a few other more historical series based around this time period.

The guy at Breading Bad scans was the first to pick this up, but I later got into touch with him(?) and he said he was more than willing to scan the raws, edit, and typeset while letting me translate. So here we are at last. There's currently 3 volumes out in Japan, with the 4th volume coming out in the near future. Breading Bad and I will try out best to catch up to Japan soon enough.

Download:
Futago no Teikoku v2 [Breading Bad & Hox]:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c07:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c08:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c09:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c10:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c11:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v2 c12:   Mega
Futago no Teikoku v1 [Breading Bad]:   Mega

Shiji v03 (complete)

Volume 3 is complete at last. Although Sima Qian deliberately selected his stories in Shiji to provide a moral lesson for future generations and so we should be somewhat skeptical of how certain events really happened, I love the ironic element in volume 3's stories. Especially Shang Yang's end. His rise and fall is sort of a parallel to Qin's own rise and fall, which is quite apt. As an aside, readers of the Book of Lord Shang will recognize many of the conversations in vol.3 chapter 4 are lifted from that text.

In any case, the stories about the reformers in this volume is one of the reasons that make the Eastern Zhou period such a fascinating historical period to read about. There are few examples in world history where there was a multi-state system marked by increasingly intense interstate conflict that led to developments in almost every aspect of society (warfare, philosophy, government, economy, etc) that would provide a civilizational foundation that would endure for more than 2000 years. Actually, if you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend checking out Dingxin Zhao's The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History, which I just finished reading and will probably talk about in a later time.

Download:

Shiji v03 c04:   Mega
Shiji v03:   Mega

Some Thoughts about Adults in the Room

The year is not even half-done, but I'm quite confident that Yanis Varoufakis political memoir, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment, will be one of my top-3 reads for 2018. Now I've been aware of Varoufakis since 2015 when Greece's bailout referendum was all over the news. So I was already aware of common arguments Varoufakis and other economists cited on why austerity was bad economic policy, or why the EU was making a colossal mistake in its handling of the Greek debt crisis. But to vicariously experience that fateful 2015 through the eyes of an insider as Varoufakis is something else entirely. So whether or not you're familiar with the Greek debt-crisis, I highly, highly recommend reading this book. Sure, given that it's a political memoir written by a "loser," it's hard to tell just how objective and truthful of a writer Varoufakis is, but if even only half of the things he tells in this book are true, it still makes for a shocking read. Like my other Some Thoughts posts, I don't mean to do a proper review or a convenient summary. Instead, I'll ruminate on some tangential ideas I had while reading this book.

Historie 103 and 104

Since I didn't do the Feb issue for Historie, here's a double release of Historie chapters, 103 and 104! With the would-be assassin's short introduction done, looks like the real fun is about to start with Olympias. It's gonna be painful waiting until June after this cliffhanger. Careful readers will note that the Eumenes' knife appears to be that of Eurydice's attendant.

Download:
Historie 103:   Mega
Historie 104:   Mega

Some Thoughts About Empires and Emperors

Empire (noun): Government-rank requiring at least 1000 development

What does an empire and pornography have in common? They're both hard to define, yet we all think we know one when we see one. Games such as EU4 and CK2 offer extremely simplified definitions that an empire must be ruled by an emperor, and it must be at least thiiiis big, which draw from a conventional idea that an empire should mean "a sovereign government ruling over multiple political societies." But then you have the academics come and scoff at the imprecision of such a definition. For instance, where do we draw the line at distinguishing significant "political societies?" Does a single city that has its own political identity and community count? And what does "ruling over" mean? Does it refer to only 100% control or is it compatible with large local autonomy? If state A exercises economic but not political control over state B, is B a part of A's empire? If state A gives freedom to state B on running domestic affairs, but partially limits its decision-making in foreign affairs, is B a part of A's empire?

Meanwhile, in more sophisticated academic definitions of empire, the empire is defined simply to aid in categorization for modern-day scholars rather than taking into account how peoples in the past have historically understood the term. So I thought it would be fun to point out ways in which both "empires" and "emperors" have been understood historically in Europe and East Asia that might run counter to common definitions today. It's not a topic that gets a lot of attention in popular history, so hopefully I'll cover stuff you hadn't considered before.

Some Thoughts on a Decade as a Scanlator

Let's see if I can go another 10 years before YHWH give me arthritis or some shit.

I wasn't planning on this post, but a 10 year-anniversary literally doesn't come every year, so allow me to ramble a bit today about my thoughts on the past 10 years as a scanlator.

Some Thoughts About Wombs

Chapter 42 and the epilogue are now out, meaning that Wombs is fully scanlated into English after about 1.5 years! *pats Happyscans and myself on the back* Really though, I should thank that one anon on /a/ who told me I seriously needed to check Wombs out back in early 2016, because without him, I would have overlooked this last gem serialized in Monthly Ikki before its unfortunate passing in 2014 (RIP).

Shirai Yumiko pictured upon receiving the Nihon SF Taishou Award

And that's just not my hot opinions talking, because Shirai Yumiko received the 37th Nihon SF Taishou Award for Wombs in 2017. That award means a fair bit, because it's the general category that is competing with not just sci-fi manga, but sci-fi fiction in general. So in honour of that, here's my little commentary on Wombs.

Download:
Wombs c42+Epilogue:   Mega
Wombs v5:   Mega
All previous volumes:   Mega

Historie 102

Ugh, if only these chapters could come out monthly instead of every other month...

Download:
Historie c102:   Mega