A Jakabfy-antológia

 I'm sure everyone has seen at least once the periodically surfacing Chinese painting of a supposed "Hungarian nobleman", and of course we all had a good laugh at it, how his asianized depiction conforms to the (chauvinistic) stereotype of the "un-European Hungarians", but personally I've never seen the short accompanying text translated into English, so since one of my classes required me to read it, I might as well produce an English translation and share it. From the  Huang Qing Zhigong Tu (1751) Left side: Lady of Hungary Right Side: Man of Hungary   Higher resolution available at:  https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55010274f The image on the right has a short text in classical Chinese. The left side has what I assume is the same in Machu, but I cannot tell for sure. 

  Mihály Babits: Creative Imitation 1 Written in the June of 1938 Creative imitation . - No matter how much of a death-sentence this is on today’s literary market: I have to confess, that I too have imitated foreign writers. But not while unaware of it, like how everyone is usually under someone’s influence, at least in the beginning, because the act of self-creation and immaculate conception could be counted as a miracle. No, I imitated consciously and on purpose! All my effort went into being perfectly akin to my selected model, or at least akin to the image of them that lived in my mind. My only excuse could be the fact that this image hardly resembled the original. Because I imitated a bunch of writers who I’ve not read. As soon as I read them, it was possible that I didn’t find them interesting any more. But as long as only a name remained – mostly a pretty, elegant and enigmatic foreign-sounding name – and if I only read newspaper articles and heard fragmentar...

 This one is a quickie. Just found it in that miniature poetry volume and since @SonOfHanfei was lamenting the fact that there's few translations of Wang Anshi's poems, I decided to do it. Not much else to add. Gave it my all as usual, but just like before I say that it might or might not be perfect. Text source: 古典诗词200首，商务印书馆有限公司 2018年，北京 [ 200 Ancient Poems , The Commercial Press, 2018, Beijing]   王安石《元日》 Wang Anshi: New Year's Day  爆竹声中一岁除， The year passes amidst the sound of petards,  春风送暖入屠苏。 The spring wind mixes warmly with the Tusu-wine.  千门万户曈曈日， The sun shines upon a thousand gates, ten-thousand doors, 总把新桃换旧符。 Everyone takes the new peachwood talismans, and use them to replace the old ones.  The esteemed Wang Anshi, poet and stateman of the Song Dynasty

Yesterday I came across this chengyu in an anime about a calligrapher finding himself (don't know, only watched one episode) and I instantly got curious, because from my studies I could recognise all the characters, I could even translate them literally, but I had no idea how they all add-up into what the translation the translator decided to give, which was "surrounded by enemies on all sides".  After a quick search on zdic I found out why this was, and with a bit of work I realised that indeed it was yet another one of the thousands of chengyus any student of Chinese (be it classical or modern) will encounter.  The expression itself is used when describing an utterly hopeless and/or hostile situation. The story takes place in 202 BC during the Chu-Han Contention (楚漢相爭), where the Tyrant/Hegemon-King (霸王) Xiang Yu's army was besieged at Gaixia (in what is today Anhui province). Below is my attempted translation of the story behind the expression, from Sima Qian's...