CH 33

The moon was bright in the serene night, the courtyard was like a reflection of moonlight in accumulated water, the shadows of bamboo and cedar lumping to cover the ground like a criss-cross of seagrass. There was a youth practicing his swordsmanship in the courtyard by himself, in the silence there was only the sound of the blade slicing through the wind.

The author has something to say:

The person to be moved first is the one who loses.

T/N: That was a nightmare chapter to translate, not least because it’s 50% longer than the other chapters. Next chapter is only 2.4k so hopefully I’ll get it out on schedule. Today’s is a little late for Mid-Autumn. There are so many different origin stories for this festival, who knows how it really came about. They say it was one of the Imperial family’s sacred rites, because in the Book of Rites it says “天子春潮日，秋夕月”, meaning to offer worship to the sun in spring and to the moon in autumn, and this festival was born out from the literati and common folk’s mimicry of the practices of offering worship to or celebrating the moon. As for why it is called 中秋; it doesn’t actually mark the middle of autumn, it is the 15th of the eighth lunar month, which means that it is second full moon of autumn. So it is suggested that this day is called 仲秋 (‘仲’ meaning second in order) and this got corrupted to 中秋. Anyway, whether you gather with family, simply eat mooncakes or reserve enough energy to shoot down the sun, I wish you a happy Mid-Autumn!

1. 怀里 – As with previous instances, this phrase is used to indicate placement tucked against one’s bosom rather than in one’s arms.

2. 渔翁之利 – reference to the same idiom mentioned in Chapter 22 (ref footnote 13 in that chapter)

3. 斩钉截铁 – literally ‘to chop nails and slice iron’, that’s how firm CSH’s answer was.

4. 径自 – without consulting anyone / without so much as a ‘by your leave’, though in this case he DID tell them to leave so I chose ‘unceremoniously’.

5. 故人 is one of those phrases hard to translate without enough context. The best over-arching term is ‘someone you used to know’, but whether that is an old lover or friend, whether you grew apart or lost the other person to death;; there’s like 5 meanings there. I interpreted it as an old friend that died since he was playing a ‘song of loss’, and you know, Mulahe

6. 听着困 – “listening to it (makes me feel) sleepy” but I wanted to make it literally 3 words like the original.

7. 荒郊野岭 – common phrases that fully translates to ‘desolate areas far from town, in the wilds of the mountains’

8.千叠山影 – reference to the line ‘山影酒摇千叠翠’ from Liu Yin’s poem 《高亭》.

9. 落地有声- literally ‘making sound once it hit the floor’.

10. 起弦风雅 – might be a reference to the song 华胥引

11. 万籁俱寂 – literally ‘ten thousand living things were collectively silent’.

12. 只言片语 – idiom literally meaning ‘few words and isolated phrases’

13.是喜欢着他吗 – contains the phrase ‘liking him’ but has an extra word so I took it as a colloquialism for being in love with him.

14. 喜欢吗？- these are meant to be echoes of Mulahe’s statement above, where SSY is asking himself, does he like CMY. So the most direct translation would be, “Is this like?” But then the last one would be “Is this not like?” and these just sound kind of awkward so I translated Mulahe’s words and this phrase to “love” instead. (You know they barely use the word 爱 in danmei anyway)

15. 沧海桑田 – literally ‘the blue sea turns into mulberry fields’, an idiom referring to how the world is transformed with the passage of time. This is just SSY’s internal voice being super dramatic I guess.