Thousands of Ways

In my meanderings over the wilds and wastelands of the Intertubes, wandering like Cain in "Kung Fu," I came across an article mentioning Baidu.com, the Chinese search engine rival of Google. The name "Baidu" is from a poem written in the Song Dynasty (960-1279). 


The article further mentions:




"The poem is about a man searching for a woman at a busy festival, about the search for clarity amid chaos. Together, the Chinese characters băi and dù mean “hundreds of ways,” and come out of the last lines of the poem: 'Restlessly I searched for her thousands, hundreds of ways./ Suddenly I turned, and there she was in the receding light.'"




Pretty cool stuff, I'd love to read the complete poem in translation, haven't had much luck so far. But part of what fascinated me was a fact mentioned later:




"The Romanization of Chinese into a phonetic system called Pinyin, using the Latin alphabet and diacritics (to indicate the four distinguishing tones in Mandarin), was developed by the Chinese government in the 1950s. Pinyin makes the language easier to learn and pronounce, and it has the added benefit of making Chinese characters easy to input into a computer. Yet Pinyin, invented for ease and standards, only represents sound. In Chinese, there are multiple characters with the exact same sound. The sound “băi,” for example, means 100, but it can also mean cypress, or arrange. And “Baidu,” without diacritics, can mean “a failed attempt to poison” or “making a religion of gambling.” In the case of Baidu.com, the word, in Latin letters, has slipped away from its original context and meaning, and been turned into a brand."




That's one crazy language, where one set of symbols, nigh-imperceptible to the untrained eye, can mean "hundreds of ways," "a failed attempt at poison" and "making a religion of gambling." You know some other poet is furiously scribbling away right now, working on a piece trying to link those three things together.


..........


Ah-ha! A little more sneaky searching and here's a translation in full. If this doesn't move you the way old Hollywood melodramas can make one swoon, you're either heartless or dishonest.

The Night of the Lantern Festival

Xin Qiji

At night the east wind blows open the blooms on a thousand trees,

And it blows down the stars that shower like rain.

Noble steeds and carved carriages - the sweet flower scent covers the road;

The sound of the phoenix flute wafts gently;

The light of the jade vase revolves;

All night the fish and dragons dance.

Decked in moths, snowy willows, and yellow gold threads,

She laugh and talks, then disappears like a hidden fragrance.

Among the crowds I have sought her a thousand times;

Suddenly as I turn my head around,

There she is, where the lantern light dimly flickers.