Aventurina King

Today marks my first venture into contemporary Chinese poetry,  it is less enigmatic then those parchment-ancient Tang dynasty odes, but still cryptic enough to scare me into bringing down my hefty Chinese-English dictionary to the local coffee shop.  The goal of my caffeine jolt was to read my newly purchased Chinese Contemporary Poetry Anthology.  Trusting a fellow buyer, the poet Xu Zhimo shines among the firmament of contemporary Chinese poets. I hear attempt to properly unfold his masterpiece (Bidding Farewell to the Bridge) into English. 

Softly I leave
Just as softly I came
My hand traces an ethereal fermata
As I bid farewell to the prismatic mist.

Willows gild the river’s banks
As young brides do the evening glow
And the shimmering colors within their deep reflections
Dance upon the surface of my thoughts.

Innocent water plants
Caress the tender mud under the grass sprouts
and undulate into the water’s down
Under the bridge, they silently dance in the blossoming waves.
Oh how willingly I would dance among them.

The stream that whispers under the bowers
Is not an enigmatic crystal, it is a heavenly waterfall of hues
softly shattered among the swimming green
precipitating into rainbow tinted dreams.

Are you a dream seeker?
Grab one of those mighty oars
and row towards the deepest green
igniting a shimmering trail of stars
and cast your song in that aqueous trail.

But I cannot cast my song
for silence is adieu’s hymn
and gnats silently hum for me
in the silence of the godlike bridge.

Silently I leave
Just as silently I came
I give my sleeves the shake of a staccato
to make sure I do not take with me a fragment of that heavenly prism.

Yesterday, I succumbed to the lure of the Armageddon threats, I registered for Second Life.  The first thing I noticed during the registration process: almost immediately after I received my screen name, the game gave me the option to purchase 250 Linden dollars for a fraction of the same price in dollars (1 us dollar for 280 linden dollars.)  I shied away from that option.  After the registration process was finished, the site prompted me to download a program to tap into the Second Life world. 

Once inside, amazement is served in small chunks of 20 second slight rises in adrenalin blood level.  The first is when you actually start walking, graphics are clunky, but you can make out other people’s silhouettes with their avatar’s names floating on top of them.  There is brilliant green grass, bluish transparent current frozen in the river bed, a wave-less sea and a setting red disk in the sky.    You can even change your appearance with options ranging from anorexic to obese, a puffy right eye to a puffy left eye and an ankle length skirt to a miniskirt that’s missing the whole front part … Another boost of adrenalin (and this one the strongest) when I realized my avatar could fly, and it wasn’t more complicated than holding up the Page up key.

 On the whole, the experience bore the dull sting of comical disappointment.  What I saw of the game during my one hour venture was very much empty.  Yes at the starting point, there is a whole group of people fervently changing their appearance and walking into trees, but as soon as you teleport yourself to Korea or fly across the next-door sea, not a soul in sight.  In their stead, the tacit greeting of empty buildings and space stations.  I almost forgot the scattered army of red empty sports car clones, evidence that many are spending their Linden dollars in useless ways.  I can imagine myself buying a virtual car, driving around with it for ten minutes to show off I actually spent the money, and then getting tired of it and discarding it on the side.

I have spent the last three paragraphs bashing this game, it is therefore my duty to come up with some praise or  constructive criticism.  Let’s roll in the praise:  you can actually make things……..and for free.  An over-simplified 3ds max rip-roff on the top left allows you to create 3-d objects and leave them lying around for people to see.  That’s good, but it is not really encouraged as much as spending money on real estate and red sports car clones.

Second Life has raised a cloud of questions in its trail: Will people go in and never come out?  Another Matrix?  Will there be a One?(maybe not the last one, but still worth thinking about.)  As the game stands, I would only tap in, maybe once a month when I felt a craving for a clunky-graphic flight.  I guess in the near future, graphics will be enhanced, merge with movie quality and then gradually become indistinguishable from what we see around us in everyday life. 

But even then, my feeling is that people wouldn’t forsake their real lives for Second Life.  Why? Because Second Life by then, will have become a clone of real life, rife with the same disappointments, sufferings and stings of loss. Why? Because it is a reduced mirror image of our economy.  Those who have the most Linden dollars, ie, the most us dollars will thrive.  They will buy villas, expensive boats, and islands and they construct their own personalized sports cars.  On the other hand, those who don’t have those Linden dollars will be left out of it, reduced to flying around and salivating in front of one of those red sports cars.  Then there will be hackers, the virtual thieves.  There will be financial risk, overcome or undergone.  Money wasted, money lost.  Second Life does not insulate someone from reality’s lash, it pushes them towards it.  People will soon realize Second Life is unable to perform even the basic functions of a narcotic, that it is still incomparable to closed-systems such as films, drugs and art.  Someday a game might inextricably entangle a human being in its reality, Second Life isn’t it.

“That’s not really what they said.”

I remember sitting in the back of film class laughing to myself at the inaccurate subtitles in French films.  Obviously, I thought to myself, the rest of the class has lost so much in translation.  But after three months of translating subtitles for Chinese films,  I discovered that, in fact, “gained in translation” is really the appropriate phrase. 

In the past few months, I learnt that subtitle translation must be inaccurate.  And that’s specifically why Chinese-to-English script translators earn so much money (pay can vary anywhere from one month to a half a year’s New York standard salary), because they are basically rewriting the whole movie. 

It doesn’t matter whether the Western audience understands precisely what is going on in a Chinese movie scene.  What matters is that that scene has the same emotional impact on a Western audience as on its native Chinese audience.  Translating meaning requires skill.  Translating emotional impact requires something more.