I've been reading some of the poems on Siyuan Tian's blog. Well, I say 'reading', but as I neither read nor speak any form of Chinese that is not quite the right word.
I have been feeding some of the poems through an online Chinese-to-English translator. The results are captivating... though of course I have absolutely no idea what correspondence they have with the originals.
They range from the wistfully impressionistic to the frankly surreal... so (given the tortuous medium) I am guessing that the former is a testament to Siyuan Tian's originals, and the latter more likely a function of the translation engine.
素面倚栏钩，娇声出外头。
若非是织女，何得问牵牛。
"Outside the solid colored relies on the fence hook,
the sweet and delicate voice leaves.
If not is the female weaver, what asked pulls the cow."
红罗袖里分明见，
白玉盘中看却无。
疑是老僧休念诵，
腕前推下水晶珠。
"In the red silk gauze sleeve sees clearly,
in the Baiyu plate looked does not have actually.
Doubts is the old monk rests reads aloud,
in front of the wrist pushes down the crystal bead."
Posted by racingsnake
@ 02:33 PM GMT+00:00
Asymmetric warfare or PR stunt: two sides of the same coin.
There's further media comment today about the 3 suicides at Guantanamo Bay, prompted by the revelation that one of the dead prisoners 'was due for release, but had not been told so'.
From the BBC news article:
"Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi [...
...] was a member of a banned Saudi militant group, the defence department said.
The other two men who died on Saturday morning were named as Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 28, from Yemen, and Yassar Talal al-Zahrani, 21, another Saudi Arabian.
Ahmed was a mid- to high-level al-Qaeda operative who had participated in a long-term hunger strike from late 2005 to May, and was "non-compliant and hostile" to guards, the Pentagon said.
Zahrani, 21, was a "front-line" Taleban fighter who helped procure weapons for use against US and coalition forces in Afghanistan, according to the department."
In a slightly odd bit of role-reversal, the US State Department displayed enough tact to describe multiple suicide in detention as a "good PR move to draw attention", leaving it to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense to adopt a more measured tone:
"What I would say is that we are always concerned when someone takes his own life, because as Americans we value life even if it is the life of a violent terrorist captured waging war against our country." (Cully Stimson)
And that neatly encapsulates the whole increasingly abhorrent problem. The capture of an alleged terrorist in a third-party country is a compelling reason to engage the mechanisms of international law, not discard them.
Posted by racingsnake
@ 11:47 AM GMT+00:00
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