A magnificent piece of writing
Mar. 12th, 2006 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbFor anyone who does not know her, cette_vie, age 17, from Beijing, Boston and points between, is one of the most extraordinary of my f-list members - an amazingly talented, hard-working, fun-loving, literate and charming young woman who is currently deciding which of the US' top universities is going to have the pleasure of having her. She writes immense journal entries in superb English about every subject under the sun. But this one, about her former hometown, Beijing, is her best yet: http://cette-vie.livejournal.com/386989.html. I do not hesitate to say that here we are faced with immortally brilliant writing, high literature in the true meaning of the term, the more superb because it is so unselfconscious. At 17, she is at the age where Mozart and Mendelssohn unfurled their wings and wrote their first masterworks, and I feel we just may be observing a similar phenomenon. Read, too, her truly beautiful Englishing of some Chinese lyrics; being wholly ignorant of Mandarin, I cannot judge the original, but her translation is lovely. Any of you who like good writing or enjoy enlarging your experience, go there and read.
cette_vie, age 17, from Beijing, Boston and points between, is one of the most extraordinary of my f-list members - an amazingly talented, hard-working, fun-loving, literate and charming young woman who is currently deciding which of the US' top universities is going to have the pleasure of having her. She writes immense journal entries in superb English about every subject under the sun. But this one, about her former hometown, Beijing, is her best yet: http://cette-vie.livejournal.com/386989.html. I do not hesitate to say that here we are faced with immortally brilliant writing, high literature in the true meaning of the term, the more superb because it is so unselfconscious. At 17, she is at the age where Mozart and Mendelssohn unfurled their wings and wrote their first masterworks, and I feel we just may be observing a similar phenomenon. Read, too, her truly beautiful Englishing of some Chinese lyrics; being wholly ignorant of Mandarin, I cannot judge the original, but her translation is lovely. Any of you who like good writing or enjoy enlarging your experience, go there and read.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-03-12 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-12 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-12 09:38 pm (UTC)Since you're interested in Harry Potter, you might like this website. Especially check out the brilliant Japanese translation of the Mirror of Erised inscription. Anyway, it shows how hard it is to translate things like "Tom Marvolo Riddle" --> "I am Lord Voldemort" in character-based languages. (IIRC, the French version renamed Riddle to "Tom Elvis Jedusor" and tied it into a pun about "jeu du sort")