Historie 106

Ughh... Maybe I should just translate Historie every two chapters as well.

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Historie c106:   Mega

Some Thoughts on the Roman Republic's Weakneses

It's been close to a year since I last wrote on a topic from European history, so with my 5-part post on Classical Chinese done, I think now's a good time. And since I just began translating Ad Astra, I'll go mainstream and talk about Rome for once. But rather than talk about how strong Rome was thanks to its military, I'm going to talk about how weak the Roman Republic was as a state and how this contributed to its fall. Just a heads-up, this post is really just a book summary in disguise which — I know, I know — is a lazy thing to do. But I do think the book brings a perspective many supposed Romaboos who only ever read Osprey military books don't quite seem to be aware of.

Historie v10

So I promised this a looong time ago, but I finally got around to it and spent a weekend on it. This is the tankoban release of Historie v10. For people who don't know, there are mainly two differences between the tankoban and magazine versions. One is the slightly different chapter arrangement. This volume covers from the second half of chapter 89 to the end of chapter 97, but due to the different chapter arrangements, they are listed as chapters 81-87 in the tankoban version. The second difference, and the more important one, is that all the incomplete artwork is finished up for the tankoban release. Three examples are posted below.

Alright, enjoy the volume then! If you spot any typos, let me know, and I'll fix them in about a week's time.

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Historie v10:   Mega
Previous Historie volumes:   Mega

Ad Astra v6 (complete)

I was fortunate enough to have Nixbrod the editor quickly respond to my help-wanted post, so here it is. Chapter 32 of Ad Astra, which starts off volume 6. My planned pace is just to do one chapter a week until we wrap up this series, so we can't beat the frogs who will very soon have the final 13th volume translated officially in just a few months. Still, it's better than having this series be stuck without a translator for the English-only speakers.

*I am resuming work on Kamui-den so don't think I've forgotten about that series.

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Ad Astra v6:   Mega

Ad Astra v6 c32:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c33:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c34:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c35:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c36:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c37:   Mega
Ad Astra v6 c38:   Mega

Ad Astra Help Wanted

I remember being asked to translate Ad Astra, the manga about the 2nd Punic War, a looong time ago when only the 1st volume had come out and there were no English translations. At the time, I had my reservations about the series quality (not really a fan of its art style) and I also didn't feel like picking up another ongoing manga. However, since it's now complete in Japan at 13 volumes and there seems to be a lot of history fans wanting to see this get picked up by somebody ever since Turnip Farmers dropped it, I thought I might give it a shot. So if there's someone experienced/competent at cleaning (with the occasional redrawing) and typesetting, contact me here or via email if you want to help out.

Historie 105

Sorry this chapter took so long for me to do. This was actually last month's chapter, meaning the next chapter will come out in Japan around this time of the month in August. But yeah, exciting chapter. Can't wait to see what future chapters will hold.

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Historie c105:   Mega
Previous Historie Chapters:   Mega

Some Thoughts on Diplomacy and War (An Exercise in Literary Chinese - Part 5)

At the end of part 4, we finally managed to cover the Zhanguo Ce chapter in which Yan Lu's diplomatic finesse managed to save Zhou from a Qin invasion and protect the nine-ding. I assume for many people, their first reaction to this story might be a minor nod of interest and then to move on. However, I think there's a bit more to mine from this story on the relationship of diplomacy and war. Or at least, I'm going to over-analyze it so I can fill out this post. So for the conclusion of my 5-part series on literary Chinese, I'll make an argument that to conceive of diplomacy and war as mutually exclusive alternatives to each other is to limit the effectiveness of both.

An Exercise in Literary Chinese - Part 4

Alright, I was initially planning to end this series with the 4th part, but it looks like it'll be a 5-parter. For this part, I'll quickly wrap up translating the remainder of the story. By now, I've covered most of the main grammatical rules we need to know so I'll be covering the sentences much more quickly.

The concluding part 5 coming later this week should be much more interesting as I turn away from the grammar-lessons and comment on the intersection of diplomacy and war in history in order to appreciate this story.

*For any nerds interested in learning more about literary Chinese, or are planning to major in that area, there are a lot of readily available resources to be found on the internet. You can very easily find pdfs or ppts put up by university professors as part of their classes on google. I will upload a zip file containing 5 helpful textbooks that I'm slowly working through myself.

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Literary Chinese text/workbooks:   Mega

An Exercise in Literary Chinese - Part 3

Open this in a new tab to look at it while reading this post.

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.