I saw this book in Barnes & Noble's foreign language section.
The author calls it a “dictionary”; I would call it a “Chinese Gibberish Complication Guide for Idiots”. The only Chinese character on its cover is “book” (書，or simplified version: 书) is indeed upside down! This is a truly pathetic attempt by the pubisher to squeeze another $27.95 from the dumb and stupid. Now I know where the tattoo artists get their “hanzi” (汉字) from.
Note: Wolfram Eberhard was one of the early greats of China scholarship...was, as in he died in 1989. The author of 35 books who ended his career with a nearly three-decade run on the faculty of U Cal-Berkeley, A DICTIONARY OF CHINESE SYMBOLS was his last work. (thanks to an Anonymous, aka Chengdude, comment posted here)
oh my God. thats the saddest thing ive ever seen ... *shakes head*
ReplyDeleteim glad Mohammed sent me this link .. go tian!
Sara
Hey Tian remember me Eboni..with the shoes..
ReplyDeleteAnyway..thats just freakin sad. I look at those books and Im like if only it were that easy..Im glad sara sent me this link!!!
you definately have a right to be bitter about this...
Meiguoren! heh.
Hi Sara and Eboni, Mei Guo Ren (美国人) indeed. But this type of thing does not limit to the Mei Guo Ren, it happens everywhere in the Western culture, just no one has ever tried to point them out. Most Chinese (and Asian in general) would just brush them off, after all , what do they know, they are just another Lao Wai (老外).
ReplyDeleteHey Folks,
ReplyDeleteYou need to ease up a bit: Wolfram Eberhard was one of the early greats of China scholarship...was, as in he died in 1989. The author of 35 books who ended his career with a nearly three-decade run on the faculty of U Cal-Berkeley, A DICTIONARY OF CHINESE SYMBOLS was his last work. The edition you have pictured is obviously a brand-new printing, so any blame for bad Hanzi should rest squarely with the publisher's art department, not with the deceased author. Did you even open the book?
Ok, I would like to take back my blame on the author. Instead I would like to point out the bad job pubisher's art department has done.
ReplyDeleteAnd the author would have been saddened by the publisher's half-baked result and pathetic lack of effort.
ReplyDeleteI agree with an earlier comment: you could go a bit easier on Eberhard. The guy probably forgot more during his life about Chinese than most of here have remembered. And what's more, the book in question is a gem.
ReplyDeleteThe cover, however, is not. Eberhard published the original in German, so the English version is a translation (which was not done by Eberhard). I have a copy of an earlier edition than the one shown above, and I'd never noticed the inverted character. Could I really have missed it? But looking at the photo I felt something about the entire cover didn't look right. I took a closer look and I'm surprised no one else here noticed it. Take a closer look: the whole damn thing is inverted. Look at the fish! Sure enough, when I checked my older version, the cover design is up the other (correct) way. And there's no Chinese character on it all.
Routledge deserves condemnation for this. Compounding their stupidity is the fact that 书 is actually included inside (it's a nice little entry, BTW), so the publisher needed only open the book to see how it should look.
You did well to spot this. That a big publisher inverts an entire cover design, doesn't spot it, and leaves it on the shelves is an insult to Eberhard. You should write to Routledge.
its the authors fault for being such a dumbass i meen cumon why make a book about chinese symbols and do it wrong?thats not rite...
ReplyDeletelana...
lol, that inverted 書 does have meaning, if you're crazy and perceptive. It could mean 'shu dao le' or, literally, "the book has arrived (in your hands!)." HAHAHA.
ReplyDeleteGood job, Publisher.
It might fool naive Westerners or 3rd generation Chinese but to native Chinese who are well versed in the metaphysical meanings, it can be quite funny.
Damn, I'd buy that book.
What bothers me about this isn't even the upside down character, but rather that, for someone who knew so much about the culture and had written so many books on it, that he chose (or the publisher chose?) to entitle the book with the word "Symbols" rather than "Characters", which would be proper...
ReplyDeleteG. Val Hart said: ...he chose (or the publisher chose?) to entitle the book with the word "Symbols" rather than "Characters"
ReplyDeleteHe didn't. He entitled it "Lexikon Chinesischer Symbole". I am far from fluent in German, but I believe the word sits quite comfortably there (as Charakter is pretty much reserved for personality and moral courage). The lazy publishers just took the easy way.
Another one of those "Don't judge the book by its cover." Book covers are done by "artists" who know next to nothing about the book's contents and treat everything in their Photoshop canvas as an "image" that can be flipped and rotated as they please. I am an Eastern-European immigrant-to-be, and the recent movie "BORДT" has me cringing every time I see the title: the Cyrillic "Д" does not sound like an English "A" but is pronounced as a "D" making it sound like... "BORDT?" They thought it would be clever to pick a "foreign" letter that looks like something in English for some artistic flare or whatever it was they aimed for. I'll stick with "Toys Я Us." (By the way, Я is pronounced "Ya" and means "I, me, myself") ^_^
ReplyDelete-Halyna