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Where are you Honey?

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Text, extensive translators note, and general remarks with a bit of meta under the read more

Text id:

Where have you gone

I’m looking for you in the night*

This night like every night

I want to still believe you.

Embrace you this one time**

this absolute last time.

lightning strike me***

I’ll be moving on at dawn

****

But where are you hiding,

I’m looking for you when it’s too late.+

Tonight as a last hope I want to finally catch you

to tell you what’s on my chest now++

to tell you all my mistakes now

to tell you how much I’m scared now+++

to tell you how many tears I’ve shed

I’m begging you

come back to drink them. °

Here there’s everything to see

Here it’s daytime you know

you can have more than just the night.°°

You won’t ever regret if you come back to sit here

where no one knows better than me

how to look at you°°°

Translator's notes:

*night in the og text is actually 'dark'.

** I'm deliberately mistranslating here, in french "embracer" means to embrace and to kiss, but commonly it just means to kiss

*** god this gave me a tough time. French is "promis juré craché" which basically means cross my heart and hope to die. The literal translation would be "I promise, swear, spit on it" and there is a kind of gradation to it. You can say promis or promis juré by themselves. It's also a bit childlike to say the three, which I think fits well the song, someone making a desperate, almost pathetic bid to get their lover closer to them. I didn't find a good equivalent in English, and I didn't want to use "cross my heart" bc I feel like it brings up images of boy scouts. What I used is what I found to be a rough equivalent in mandarin to the french version and then retranslated to English do with that what you will.

**** I deleted a full verse! But I actually have a translation for it :

I once again got fooled,

by your sugar-coated words

and your half backed promises

lulling me to sleep too early

I'm looking for you in the night

where the stench of all this sham

ends up on the boulevards,

in our hopes and without coats.

I didn't really see a point in including it and it was just more words to illustrate, but I did like the whole sugar-coated words (words with water in french) and the literal "bastard promises" haha. Let Lan Wangji be angry and resentful in his grief 2k21.

+ Literally, it's "I'm looking for you in the too late". It is also grammatically incorrect in french but it's even more awkward in English. Also in french it's just "I'm searching for you" but I liked the "looking" motif bc I thought it paralleled well with "seeing you"/looking at you at the end

++ In french it's "to tell you what's on my heart" which is what inspired the art for this specific illustration

+++ as someone remarked in the tags scared and scarred are very close in English, sometimes stuff just works out.

° Still not satisfied with the English for this. The singer for this song actually said he didn't want the lyrics for his song written down officially because he plays on homonyms a lot. Here the word used in french both means to recount a story and to count numerically. And 'boire' (drink) much like 'croire' (believe) is kind of an odd choice to end a singing phrase with? It's not really pretty, and it feels very raw, it really annoyed me that I don't think the rawness of it comes through at all in English.

°° also really stretching the og text here. In french it's "coup d'un soir" meaning literally "one night hit" but it means one night stand. @/pumpkinpaix and @/hunxi-guilai (who you should follow bc the work they do is extremely helpful and god I imagine so time-consuming and draining) both wrote a long post about the translation of 知己 zhiji in English, which you should read but I think the main idea was "the one who understands me" would be an accurate enough translation. I was actually working on this before I found those posts but I like how "looking"/"seeing" someone in English can be used to convey understanding the person (you see me for who I really am, etc). Idk I'm just fond of how "to look at you" means both in the physical sense "I want to see you" and also, no one else will know you as I do.

°°° last TN but I missed "au grand jamais" from the original text. It's just a superlative, it kind means, like never ever in any time or world or something in that spirit. But I really like that the song ends by looking.

In the spirit of things I really wanted to say a few words about the translation ha. I think maybe the first thing that I kinda miss from the french is that eddy de pretto (the singer) has a very uh, crude? way to sing. He is known for being both from a lower-class background (in french I would say from the "cité" which wordreference translates to ghetto) and homosexual. A lot of it is french "argot", which basically means french slang, but it's very difficult to translate because my knowledge of english doesn't necessarily include that much slang, and also it just doesn't hit the same haha. A lot of words are contracted, "r'viens" "j'te cherche" etc, which carry a sense of urgency.

This is maybe turning into a Lan Wangji meta post but I think a lot (or used to) about how he had to have his character growth mostly of-screen, in the years where he had to reconcile being alive and raising a son. One of my interpretations is that Lan Wangji was probably more aware of his feelings in the first place, but when we meet him (post 13 or 16 years whatever), we meet someone who has come to terms completely about who he is as a person, what he feels etc. Like this is a man who probably has lived through some of his worst-case scenarios (his home got destroyed, the person he loved died in front of him). And I'm always thinking of what it is to try to grow and reconcile your teachings while raising a kid and mourning you know? I think that's why Honey (the song) resonated with me in that light when I listened to it, just like. God man's had a rough life.

Also, I wanted to say I'm misinterpreting the point of the song, in context Honey is. Kinda complex (there's nuance), but basically the singer is talking about his partner, who's at the time of the song sleeping with someone else. Personally, I think it's unclear if the person the singer is talking about is cheating on him or if they are just in an open relationship, but the singer overtly yearns for a deeper connection for that person.

Omg not me editing a post that's already too long for people to engage with but I forgot! what the whole point of doing a TN was! It's to show ppl how much gets lost or missed on purpose between two languages that are super close. And it's like, maybe 10 sentences! And yet I some stuff I genuinely could not translate correctly. And not only I am a native french speaker living in an English-speaking country but I've done like, actual translation before. It terrifies me sometimes to think how much is lost, and how much is added, in the translation process, which is rarely examined as even being relevant. (edit edit: it was pointed out to me that it is a very active field of research haha, I meant specifically in fandom spaces it's deffo being examined in academia)

I adore this AU. Kinda wish this one was on AO3, just as it is, each post it’s own chapter, just so I could download it easily and keep it forever. But I love it, and I like Permissive Presumption, which is how I found this in the first place.

rebuttable presumption masterpost

by popular demand, ta-da! 

if you’re new to rebuttable presumption, here’s a quick 10 point summary to the verse.

quick answers to FAQs: 1) idk if i’ll ever put this up on ao3. it’s going to be a nightmare to edit, and, unfortunately, i don’t have that sort of time on my hands; 2) if you want to play around with this verse (e.g. write any of the aus that i’m not writing ahahaha), go for it; 3) i know there’re still bits y’all want to read (e.g. wangxian wedding) - there’re still prompts i’m keeping in drafts, and will be occasionally dropping extras, but for all intents and purposes, the main timeline is done and any extras shouldn’t affect that timeline, so i’m marking rp verse as completed. 

current as at: 23 march 2021

status: completed (unscheduled extras will be added from time to time)

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Still not over this…

Hello! First of all, I'd like to thank you for all your thorough explanations and translations of the Chinese in CQL! As a history, literary, and linguistics/language nerd, what you do is something I really appreciate! So I feel like you can answer something that I've been curious about for a while, the exact word/meaning of what LWJ often said to WWX during their time at Cloud Recesses: 无聊. I've seen it translated as "boring" and "pathetic," and see that it can also be defined as (1/2)

okay, okay, I started writing an answer to this ask, then scrapped it because it hit 1000 words and kept going with no end in sight, so I’m starting over with what will hopefully become a readable answer and maybe some version of that ask will make its way into a sleep-deprived post in the nebulous future

the way I’ve understood Lan Wangji’s catchphrase has honestly been less a matter of language and more a matter of character. Knowing literary/classical Chinese doesn’t really give you a leg up, here; 无聊 wuliao certainly has different meanings (completely different meanings oh my god) in classical contexts, but none of them are really applicable in any of the dialogue in CQL.

Colloquially, in modern Mandarin? 无聊 wuliao definitely means boring. I use it to mean boring. My friends use it to mean boring. Lan Wangji certainly uses it to mean boring. 无 wu means to lack, or lacking. 聊 liao, in this case, is (probably? maybe? I know so little about anything that happens after 200 CE?) being read in its modern vernacular usage of 聊天 liaotian, to chat, gossip, shoot the shit, etc. Literally, 无聊 wuliao would translate as “nothing to talk about,” which is a quick and easy trip and fall into “boring.”

But if you take that literal meaning and stretch it to fit different situations (as Lan Wangji absolutely does), it can be a declaration of judgment – “not worth talking about.” So for Wei Wuxian, who’s constantly trying to get a rise out of Lan Wangji, calling his increasingly more ridiculous actions 无聊 wuliao / not worth talking about/commenting on/responding to is really just egging him on.

tl;dr 无聊 wuliao is a binome that primarily means ‘boring’ but can become an all-purpose dismissal of someone’s actions and words, so it can easily take on the valences of ‘senseless’ or ‘silly’ or ‘dumb.’ 

It’s my personal understanding of Lan Wangji’s character that he was raised with more books for company than kids his own age, so the way he speaks is highly inflected with a literary register (seriously, it’s like he grew up learning how to talk from a book rather than a normal human). Someone like Wei Wuxian is so unprecedented in his life that he doesn’t really know how else to respond to Wei Wuxian, so even when it doesn’t make sense – for example, when Wei Wuxian offers to carry him on the Xuanwu hunt and Lan Wangji just rejects him with a terse 无聊 wuliao, I don’t think Lan Wangji actually means what he says, literally or figuratively; he just doesn’t know what else to say, and falls back on his script (which is also why Wei Wuxian sees right through him and doubles down on the concern).

Oh but one of my favorite exchanges in the entire show ends with 无聊 wuliao as the punchline! In episode 8, when Wei Wuxian catches up to Lan Wangji and basically handcuffs them together with one of his talismans, we get this:

Wei Wuxian: 这是我自创的符咒， 能让人无法离你两丈之远。怎么样？好不好玩儿？/ This is a talisman I invented myself – it makes it so that no one can move more than four meters away from you. How is it? Isn’t it interesting?

Lan Wangji: [turns away with the most exasperated deadpan oh my god]

Wei Wuxian: 要我给它取个什么名字好呢？是同袍？还是无衣好啊？… 我看都不好。要不然叫它… / If I were to name it, what kind of name would be good? Should it be ‘comrades-in-arms?’ Or… ‘penniless and shirtless?’ … I see, none of those are good. How about I call it…

Lan Wangji: 无聊。/ Boring. [yanks on the string and bodily drags Wei Wuxian after him]

There’s actually a great deal of punnery happening here: Wei Wuxian suggests both 同袍 tongpao and 无衣 wuyi as names; the former, literally means “the same robes” and the latter, literally means “unclothed.” You get from these literal meanings to their translated meanings by:

同袍 tongpao –> lit. ‘the same robes’ –> derives from battlefield anecdotes of soldiers who became so close on the front lines that they would share their clothes with each other in the winter/in hard times, insert heteronormative discourse about male camaraderie here –> ‘comrades-in-arms’

无衣 wuyi –> lit. ‘unclothed’ –> becomes a shorthand for someone who is so poor that they literally have no clothes

Wei Wuxian both of these have to do with a lack of clothing where is your head at you salacious truant

The wordplay, here, happens between 无衣 wuyi and 无聊 wuliao since they both share their first character. In a sense, Lan Wangji is beating Wei Wuxian at his own game of punnery, since the name he suggests both adheres to the (unofficial) rules of a pithy, two-character name for Wei Wuxian’s new talisman, and also roasts the everloving heck out of Wei Wuxian.

(I’m going to end this ask here, but you mentioned Lan Wangji’s ‘poetically concise’ speech, which I have MANY thoughts and feelings on, I’m not ignoring that part, stay tuned!)

EVERY DAY IS EVERY DAY

Manhua artist Mao Tuan Xiao Jian Jian-laoshi serves up the last part of WangXian's papapa scene from chap 111 of the novel (what would've been chap 256 if the world was a perfect place). Go to their Twitter @maotuanxjj for all the missing goodies 🍆 and to send them some love.

Missing 🍆

🔥🔥🔥

Again, I love this sexy gremlin so much 😭😭

Hornee Lan Zhan is adorable.

😭😭😭💖

And that's it for WangXian's first full papapa scene! There are of course more ppp scenes in the extras chapters of the novel...the most famous of them ofc courtesy of the Incense Burner (WangXian's wonderful adventures in the Library Pavilion and Bichen's amazing journey up Wei Ying's 💮, for example), but again that's not ALL that the extras are about! They're really the happily ever after moments of WangXian and a lot of it is so freaking sweet and romantic! And while their dreamworld sexcapades may get a bit too adventurous for some, they're all bourne from their immense love and healthy lust for each other and we should all hope that we are blessed with what they have. Not to mention, one of the extras even gives us a flashback involving Jin Guangyao and Xue Yang, so again, it's not all just about the sex so don't be misled into skipping them!

Mao Tuan XJJ-laoshi has already illustrated the Incense Burner Library Pavilion scene a while back but I do hope they will continue with illustrating the Gusu Lan banquet extra and all the other extras in this unofficial way. I am deeply saddened that because this is all unofficial we will never see these scenes as a part of the official English release of the manhua, but I hope everyone will still support the Eng volumes by purchasing them, as a way of showing our support for MXTX-laoshi.

To purchase English releases of all of MXTX's novels, go to Sevenseasdanmei.