UBC #15: Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee

[truepenny]

UBC #15
Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. [Dee Goong An or Ti-kung-an, depending on which transliteration system Van Gulik is using]. Transl., introd., notes Robert Van Gulik. 1949. New York: Dover Publications, 1976.

Apparently, what I have come away with from this book is irritation at Van Gulik for dumbing down the transliteration of Chinese names in the text. His note at the end uses the Giles system--I know absolutely nothing about Romanization of Chinese characters, but I gather from context that this was the standard system in 1949--but the text itself prefers the Chinese For Dummies method, with the result that all the names look vaguely like they belong in a children's Saturday morning cartoon.

I am theorizing that my reaction is based on the doubled vowels. Judge Dee, Ma Joong, Bee Hsun (and especially his mother, Mrs. Bee), Candidate Hoo--I think my subconscious spent the entire book looking around for Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, and Roo. But in the Translator's Note, these personages appear as, for example, Judge Ti and Pi Hsün. I actually find this much less distracting, even if more "difficult"--but probably Van Gulik's intended audience was not science fiction fans.

(I hope this also makes it clear that it isn't Chinese itself that is getting the reaction; it's the deliberate choice on the translator's part, without quite enough consideration of English's own patterns of usage, to use a naïve transcription system.)

The text itself is an interesting anthropological artifact, both of 18th century China and of mid-20th century Western attitudes toward same. And also entertaining.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

A doubled vowel in Japanese transliteration means something very specific: a longer vowel of the same nature. Bee would be Beh-eh, not Bi, if it appeared in Japanese.

Sadly, this seems to be entirely irrelevant to Chinese transliteration as far as I can find out, so there's really no excuse. Sigh.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Ah, Chinese Transliteration. One of the banes of my existence. I had to read "Judge Dee" in high school (Asian Studies - I grew up in Hawaii) and the nomenclature drove me up the wall, not least because it made the Chinese sound like children.

The Wade-Giles romanization system is vastly superior to whatever "system" was used in the text of Judge Dee, but Pinyin is both simpler to read and more accurate in representing the sound of the language. (Mandarin dialect, of course - China has had millennia to develop class distinction and provincial snobbishness into an art, as my grandmother's attitude towards Cantonese attests.) The only thing to keep in mind with Pinyin is that it was based on cyrillic, so "Cao Cao" isn't prounced "Cow Cow", but "Tsao Tsao". That's an edge case where I feel Wade-Giles actually is superior for English-language readers.

[db2305.livejournal.com]

Van Gulik is a Dutch writer, and when I read the novels in Dutch, long ago, he was called Judge Tie. So I wonder whether it's van Gulik or the translator who picked the dumbed-down names...

[sovay]

I'm actually working my way through van Gulik's own Judge Dee novels at the moment. They're one of my forms of comfort reading.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

PDF chart of Wade-Giles to Pinyin, by syllable (http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/library/chineseconversion_py-wg.pdf)

Wade-Giles (1940s) doesn't seem to vary much from Pinyin (most popular current method) on the vowels, although it does a lot on consonants. I know I sometimes have difficulty reading Chinese names aloud, because the Pinyin orthography isn't always an instinctive match to English (e.g. he uses a schwa, not a long E like the pronoun), but going cartoony is not the answer!

There's no excuse for using different spellings between a text and a note on the same topic. The poor indexer had to have screamed bloody murder, indexing each person twice.

Ugh. It would be like indexing Tolkien, with all his variations and nicknames. (I think Tolkien indexed himself, and he did a terrible job of it.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Wade-Giles is a Victorian system most widely used worldwide until the People's Republic developed & introduced Pinyin, which has a more logical structure and does come somewhat closer to representing the language in Roman characters - as witness Peking becoming Beijing - though it is still not close. Taiwan - for political reasons - retains Wade-Giles, with all its charming inconsistencies (the same road on the same map can be Jen-Ai at one end, Ren Ai at the other, with or without hyphens in either instance). There's a third system, Yale, that is still taught and used I believe in America.

But the point of all this is that none of these uses those doubled letters you complain of. Judge Ti in Wade-Giles would be Judge Di in either of the others, and so on. Where this bastard form came from, I have no idea; but like you, I do not like it. Though I am still going to read the book.

[the_rck]

If you find Judge Dee interesting, you might also find something worthwhile in Deception by Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri. Dee is one of the main characters in it (the authors note at the end that they call him 'Dee' rather than 'Ti' in the text entirely because that's the name under which van Gulik made him famous in the west), but it also deals with a much broader historical landscape.

I can't speak to the accuracy of the history or culture shown in the book, but it was, as I recall, a fascinating read.