GetBackers translation note, pedantic

[petronia]

So recently I figured out where "Rouran" was. My mother was watching a drama set in the Han Dynasty, and one of the female characters was a princess of Loulan. So I said, where's Loulan? And was told it was an old name for Xinjiang, which upon research was half right. It's a ruined city that lies in Xinjiang, between Kazakstan and Mongolia. (map)

Loulan, capital of the Loulan (Kroraina) Kingdom, was a small, prosperous commercial city on the famous Silk Road about 2,000 years ago... until it was mysteriously swallowed by the desert.

There's controversy over what happened to the Loulan civilisation, I think, similar to that over the Minoans. I suppose the GB backstory is that they picked up and left when the desert encroached, becoming the Chinese equivalent of the Romany. XD Or, well, any one of the nomadic tribes of the region: they were Caucasian, like the Uighurs or the Kazakhs, not ethnic Chinese.

The sense of major accomplishment in which I'm currently basking derives from the fact that I know what language Emishi's attacks come in now. The "robu no ruu" whatever furigana that bore no resemblance to the character pronunciations in Japanese or Chinese? Mongolian. It actually starts off "lop nur", like the name of the lake - it means "wandering", which in the case of the lake is due to the fact that it's not so much a lake as patches of salt marshes that expand and shrink. In the case of Emishi I suppose it means "wandering hither and to, pleasing only myself". The Chinese characters used to write that part of the attack are 彷徨 (pang2huang2), which actually has more the sense of "wandering about in circles like a headless chicken" but maybe the meaning's shifted a bit in Japanese. Or, yanno, Emishi.

Once again I don't know if I want to shake Aoki Yuuya's hand or beat him with a baseball bat.

Comments

[akatonbo.livejournal.com]

Ooh, neat.

...this information is going to have to make it onto the EmiAmon page I'm working on. With credit, of course.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Sure, take away. :D

[lisa-bee.livejournal.com]

That is so cool.

I mean, it helps quite a bit that I'm taking a course on Travel on the Silk Road, and so I've just been reading Sven Hedin's autobiography, in which he describes finding Loulan, but. Damn, that's cool. (btw, Hedin's book reads like an adventure novel: it's a total trip.)

Wow. And Aoki Yuuya just decided to throw that in? I'm all for shaking his hand. Or hugging him and telling him how damn cool that amount of detail is.

Also, the desert that swallowed Loulan? So nasty. Really damn dangerous place, even now. *total tangent*

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Sven Hedin wrote an autobiography? That does sound really cool. I would totally read that.

I'm more for shaking his hand too, but seriously, when I was translating that chapter I went nuts trying to figure out what was going on with that furigana. :P

Yeah, it's dangerous. There was a famous Chinese archaeologist who died around Lop Nur in the seventies, apparently.

[lisa-bee.livejournal.com]

Sven Hedin's Autobiography, on Amazon! (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1568361424/qid=1110390397/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/002-7467907-8753666?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)

I can only imagine how frustrating that must have been to translate. I get to sit back and go "oh, how awesome!" once you've done all the work of figuring it out. :P

Hedin almost died, too. It's a fantastic chapter. :D And my prof. got stranded around the edges of the desert a few years back and was eventually rescued by some guys and their donkey cart. We were amused by that story.

[pantswarrior]

This is further evidence for my theory that Ban and Ginji are really just self-inserts for Aoki and Ayamine. Aoki has random knowledge of obscure things that he tosses into the plot, while Ayamine basically sparkles all over the place with cuteness. (Unless, of course, Emishi really is Aoki Sue...)

Anyway, very interesting. Thanks for posting... I'll probably make use of some of this info at some point. ;)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, that is so true. XD

[incandescens]

That's fascinating. Thank you!

(I am again full of awe for the mangakas huge knowledge.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Aoki has one of those minds, I think; he's a bipedal fountain of trivia. :P

[incandescens]

I know, and I'm sooooo jealous.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Frustrated history major? Focusing on ancient East Asian history? (Even so, I shan't read it sir, so you are wasting your breath! I said good day, sir!)

I was stupidly thrown by the Rouran naming recently too. ¬_¬ When NHK ran the first episode of its new Silk Road special. (The second one was awesome.... And, speaking of which, Sabina dear, if anything in Get Backers is named after Buddhist wall-paintings? Run.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Economics major, actually. XD And it's not so much focus as throwaway references, but there are so many of them.

I wouldn't catch it if anything in GB were named after Buddhist wall-paintings, unless of course I recognize it from Mirage of Blaze. :D;;

[corneredangel.livejournal.com]

...and is things like these that make me *really* regret missing out on a chance to interview the both of them at AX'03 x_X

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Gah! Did anyone else do so?

[corneredangel.livejournal.com]

That being the summer of 2003, and GetBackers still being *way* outside the attention range of most of the people in the "press", no.

I suck.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Possibly connected- big exhibit at Tokyo's Nat'l Museum complex a dozen years ago of artifacts and mummies from Loulan. From which I stayed far away. Also famous novel of the same name from the late 50's by the popular author Inoue Yasushi, and another about Dunhuang (both somewhere in my basement neverputbooksaway she mutters.) Inoue died in '91, big exhibit was '92; doubtless coincidence given how long exhibits take to put together, but nice.

IOW probably an unesoteric reason why Aoki knew about Loulan. /Everyone/ saw the King Tut exhibition.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Ah, that would explain it. Furthermore it would explain why Aoki might have thought some segment of his readership would've actually understood the reference.

(You are... not fond of mummies? XD XD Coincidentally there's a display of Egyptian artifacts at the Montreal Fine Arts, on loan from the British Museum.)

Novel, really? Historical reconstruction à la Renault or how-we-rediscovered-the-lost-city?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

(I am not fond of mummies, though I seem to have gotten over the worst of my adolescent horror of them. The Lou-lan ones as seen on Asahi TV looked like dolls or carved figures; still kimochi warui when you realized what they were, though.)

OK- any excuse to put off work is a good excuse, especially when it unearths my copy of Mencius as well.

Inoue Yasushi-
Lou-lan and other stories, Kodansha ISBN4-7700-0960-7 This one is a novella and reads like an historical essay in the site's history far more than fiction.

Tun-Huang, Kodansha, ISBN4-7700-1086-9
Full-scale historical novel, but hardly as racy (or enjoyable) as Renault.

[lisa-bee.livejournal.com]

Awesome. *goes to look them up* I'm pretty sure I can get them at the library at uni... Ooh.

Thanks for the info!

[lisa-bee.livejournal.com]

Novel about Dunhuang? Really? Do you happen to remember the title or author? I am fascinated by Dunhuang -- it's recently become one of my pet historical/archaeological topics.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Info as above. I can send you my copy if it's OOP or unavailable, though I'd bet the Japan Society in NYC will have a copy.

[starlighter.livejournal.com]

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yes, precisely something along those lines. <3 (To be honest I don't think Emishi's tribe has seen Mongolia since before the Gypsies left the Indian sub-continent, but that's a matter of interpretation... Evidently they still speak the language.)