Hello friends,

I’ve been deep in movement names lately, and have some thoughts to share about the names and how we translate them into English, after some schedule updates.

There are no taiji classes this week because the James Bay Centre is on Spring Break. The new session starts next week:

• Tuesdays at 10:15am, from March 31st to June 2nd.

• Thursdays at 5:45pm, from April 2nd to June 4th.

With a break on April 14th & 16th.

You can register online at the links above, or in person at the centre. Both days already have enough people signed up to confirm that they’re going ahead. And as always, if you register for one day, you’re always welcome to switch to the other in any given week if that’s more convenient.

I’m hoping to start taking the classes outdoors as the weather gets nicer, so come dressed accordingly. But don’t worry - we always have a room booked, and will stay indoors any time it’s raining, windy, or too cold.

Qigong at theDock is going on a slightly longer break, restarting on Monday April 20th. We’re also shifting the time to 1pm so a few more people can make it.

The next evening qigong workshop will be Tiger, at 5:30pm on April 22nd. No prior experience is needed, and if you do already know the Five Animal Frolics it’s a chance to get deeper into the feeling of one animal.

And with that, back to names. I recently added videos and a list movements for Old Frame 1 to my forms reference page. When I write out a form, I take a while compiling the Chinese, pinyin, and my preferred English translations, because I think the names themselves matter. But I don’t speak or read Chinese, so I can’t do any translating myself. I think of what I’m doing as more in the spirit of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dao De Jing, which she consistently described as “a rendition, not a translation”. I’m also constrained by not wanting to stray too far from the names I’m used to hearing in other peoples’ classes, even if there’s an uncommon variant that I think is clearer, because the names have to work as guide posts to help us be in sync with each other.

Some of the names are straightforwardly descriptive. 左蹬跟 (zuǒ dēng gēn) gets translated as “left heel kick” or “kick with left heel”, and either way it tells us exactly what we’re going to do in that step.

Some are more poetic, but still descriptive enough to be reasonably clear. 白鵝亮翅 (bái é liàng chì) usually gets translated as “white crane spreads wings”, and while that’s less of a clear instruction, if you watch someone do this move you can see how their arms represent the wings. I think “crane” is actually a mistranslation here, that would be 鶴 (hè) as opposed to 鵝 (é), but somehow it’s easier for English speakers to think of a crane than a goose as a graceful bird. Chinese poets seem readier to see the gracefulness in a goose, as in this lovely short poem from 13 centuries ago. But I’m sticking with “crane” in my rendition, because that’s so ubiquitous in English-language teaching that using something else would be confusing at best.

Another set are allusions that don’t mean anything without context. 懶扎衣 (lǎn zā yī) is translated as “lazily tying the coat” which seems to be fairly literal, but it really needs to be explained with a demonstration of the movement. I try to include that sort of context in teaching a step.

Then there’s a special final category, of names that reference specific characters from myth and legend. You don’t need to know the allusion to understand the movement, but the name never quite makes sense without it. The one I was stumped by for the longest is 青龙出水 (Qīnglóng chū shuǐ) in Old Frame 1. At first I heard it translated as “blue dragon emerges from water”. Then sometimes the dragon was green. Eventually I learned that 青 (qīng) is an archaic word that could refer to colours that English would call blue, green, shades in between, or even black. Sifu Viola started calling it the “teal dragon”. I started saying things like “dragon of indeterminate colour” until a fellow student got tired of this and said “stop worrying about the colour, we need to know what the dragon’s doing”. He was right, of course, and recently I learned another reason the exact colour is irrelevant: 青龙 (Qīnglóng) refers to an individual mythological creature, not just a dragon who happens to be a certain colour.

A few others that I can quickly gloss:

• 玉女穿梭 (Yùnǚ chuān suō) is usually translated as “Jade maiden works the shuttle”. I had to change the verb to “throws” because as a weaver that feels like a better fit for a movement that dashes in one direction only. I’ve also seen 玉女 (yù nǚ) translated as “Fair maiden”, which I think is valid for the words themselves, but the Jade Maiden is another specific character from mythology.

• Old Frame 2 has a 黃龍 (Huánglóng) stirring the water; that’s literally “yellow dragon” and is another mythological character.

• In 白猿献果 (Báiyuán xiàn guǒ) “white ape presents fruit” towards the end of Old Frame 1, 白猿 (Báiyuán) the White Ape is a symbol of longevity said to live for centuries.

And finally, most of the empty hand forms begin and end with 金剛捣碓 (jīn gāng dǎo duì) which I think is the trickiest translation of all. I’ve often heard it translated as “Buddha pounds mortar”, which feels at odds with the vibes I associate with the Buddha, and there’s nothing in that Chinese phrase which references the Buddha. This seems to bother other people too, because “Buddha’s warrior attendant pounds mortar” is also a common translation, and that feels more believable. In some places I see “Vajra pounds mortar”, and for a long time I thought that a vajra was a warrior guardian of the Buddha, but that’s not right at all - a vajra is a thing, not a person. I asked a friend who is much better versed in Buddhist literature than me, and we came to the conclusion that the person pounding the mortar is probably a Lokapāla, but what really matters in context is simply that it’s someone fearsome and righteous. After all that, I’m going back to “Buddha’s warrior” for my version because it’s a lot more accessible to people who aren’t steeped in Buddhist lore.

I don’t really have any big conclusion here, just that translations are complicated, they’re as much about cultural context as actual words, and part of being a conscientious teacher is always taking the time to understand these things more clearly myself.