I decided to translate a few lines drawn from a chapter by 黄琦旺, "难以置信” in 《问学札记》 ed. 许德发。
“我羡慕许多人的学习像一棵树，壮健的干，舒展的树杈，整整齐齐一系统然后开花结果。我的学习杂乱如野草，根茎紧贴泥土繁衍，几乎纯粹是野生。”
I envy how the learning of many people is like a tree -- a sturdy trunk, expanded twigs -- neatly makes one system, then blossoms and fruits. My learning is messy like weed -- their rhizomes proliferating close to soil -- almost like a natural, wild growth.
"补遗而回到真实？我感觉自己没有设定坐标习惯的身份在知识领域里完全是一个遗失：族群，家国认同，语言，属性，性别 ... ... 熟悉而陌生。”
Returning to authenticity by filling in absence? My identity, unaccustomed to coordinatization, feels like a total misplacement within the knowledge domain: ethnicity, homeland identification, language, belonging, gender ...... familiar yet strange.
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By taking on translation, I allowed myself to read slowly and intently. I felt my wholeness once again, in trying to preserve the correspondence of the original and translated texts. I was going to say that I labored to preserve the integrity of the translation. But what is lost, in translation? Maybe in the act of translation, loss is inevitable. From my misplacement to translation, my wholeness to broken crumbs of textual meaning, loss has merely been displaced.
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