ELISA ENGLISH's Blog 英語園地

Feeling Guilty

One of the reasons that I have resisted having a pet is to avoid the feelings of guilt. If you have been reading my articles lately, you will know that a stray cat came to our deck two and a half weeks ago. It has been with us ever since the day that my husband let it in when asking if my son wanted to see a cat. We are keeping the cat since we couldn’t locate the owner. Even though this cat doesn’t demonstrate any trait of a feral cat, there is the possibility that he could be one, a descendant of a domesticated cat that has returned to the wild, rather than a stray cat which is a pet cat that has been lost, an explanation to why nobody came forward to claim him.

In Denial

You can probably read between the lines that I am in denial.  YES, I AM IN DENIAL.  I have not totally convinced myself that I am ready to be a cat owner even though the cat has been with us for about a week since we found him wandering on our deck.  I am still patiently waiting for the cat owner to show up.  It is hard for me to believe that the owner would just dump the cat on the street.  If the owner no longer loves the cat or is able to afford to keep the cat, wouldn’t it make more sense to give it to the shelter?   At least by doing so, there will some traceable records about the cat.  The new owner will be able to know if the cat has been spayed/ neutered or vaccinated or if there are any medical conditions and treatments.   

I decided to post another entry about the cat. 

The cat is still with us.  Nobody has approached us to claim the cat yet.  It has been more than a week since we found him.  We found the cat wandering on our deck around 10am on Saturday, 4/30/11.  I later found out that some other people had also seen him that morning as well.  One is our next door neighbor who saw him near our neighborhood and the other is a woman who saw him at the school while walking her dog.   That woman mentioned to me that she was contemplating of adopting the cat in the event that the cat is a stray but gave up the idea in fear that her cat would not get along with the newcomer.  Our neighbor who posted the fliers and kept him for two days also indicated that they could not adopt the cat because they have a declawed cat at home.  The mystery of a declawed cat!

I have said in the past that nothing is absolute.  Now I want to say that unpredictability surrounds everywhere. 

Can you imagine running into snow shower as late as the end of April?  Can you imagine witnessing sleet in early May?  You probably can’t imagine all of that, but I did experience all of it.  We had a solid six months of winter, an extremely long winter.  Just two days ago, I was finally able to take off the outer layer of my snow jacket and wear the inner fleece jacket instead. 

Last Saturday, a cat dropped by our house out of the blue.  By the way, I am not a pet person. I did not grow up with a pet.  To be honest, I don’t think that I can handle pets.  I can’t stand the odor, the shedding of animal hair, the damage of the furniture, the peeing and pooping accidents, and etc.  The list just goes on.  We have walked away from adopting dogs when we visited the pet store to buy pet fish.  Yes, I do keep pet fish as a compromise.  It is easy and cheap to keep an aquarium.  You only need to clean half of the tank once a week and they are confined to a small fish tank.  You don’t have to take them to the clinic to get shots or worry about them getting lonely.  I am able to keep six tiny fish in a ten gallon fish tank.  In addition, you don’t have to worry about leaving them home alone for two or three weeks.    

My rambling thoughts after attending the school concert

My son asked, “Do I have to go to the concert?”  We questioned, “Are there kids not going?”  My son replied, “XXX is not going.”  I argued, “If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to.  But you may miss out the fun.”  Above are the conversations we had with my son a few days ago.  The night before the concert, he told us that he wanted to attend.  By the way, our school’s concert is called “The Box”.  "The Box" is a musical celebration of the boundless imagination found in every child-imagination that can turn a piece of brown cardboard into a world of possibilities. 

Nobody interprets a poem exactly the same even in its original language, let alone translating it into another language.  There will always be a certain degree of meaning lost in translation due to the difference in culture, linguistic and metaphysics. 

What I attempted to do is to capture the essence of the original verse as much as possible, while trying to maintain a correct, coherent and understandable version of target language. 

Nobody interprets a poem exactly the same even in its original language, let alone translating it into another language.  There will always be a certain degree of meaning lost in translation due to the difference in culture, linguistic and metaphysics. 

What I attempted to do is to capture the essence of the original verse as much as possible, while trying to maintain a correct, coherent and understandable version of target language. 

I decided to talk about copyright issue as possible plagiarism of my work was mentioned after I translated a Chinese poem.

Someone recently informed me that there is a translation contest hosted by National Taiwan University.  Not knowing about the contest, I have recently translated Bai Juyi’s《因望月有感，聊書所懷》and posted my translation of that poem on my website.  One of my readers was afraid that someone who is about to enter the contest might plagiarize my translation work.  To counteract plagiarism of my work carried out by anyone entering the contest, I have already sent my translation of that poem along with the links to my blog articles to National Taiwan University for their reference.  This way, if they do find anyone plagiarizing my translation, they can disqualify that person's entry.  Beware, National Taiwan University has indicated in its website that the plagiarist's real name will be revealed to the public if plagiarism is found.

Someone has asked me how I would translate some of the verses in Bai Juyi's poem 《因望月有感，聊書所懷》.  I decided to give it a try and translated the entire poem.  This is my translation.

白居易《因望月有感，聊書所懷》

Would I recommend the book “Room” written by Emma Donoghue?  If you are looking for literature value, this is not a book worth reading due to its poor readability and passages filled with ambiguity, wordiness, grammatical errors, poor organization and incorrect sentence structures.  There are novels employing child narrators without sacrificing the literature value such as “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, “The Book Thief” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”.   

The story is not as dramatic as one would have anticipated due to the way it was narrated, by a five-year-old boy.  The author’s effort to constrain the tone and sentence structure to a five-year-old boy by purposely inserting errors into the sentences to make it sound like a five-year-old boy makes the entire novel hard to follow and distracting to a degree.  It is sometimes hard to get beyond pages and pages of broken English rambling by the five-year-old boy and the inconsistency of language used throughout the novel.  By the way, I am a mom with a five year old and an eight year old but I do strive to teach my kids to speak clearly and to use proper language, so others can understand.