百事生

[Pedroski]

Happy New Year on this beautiful sunny new day in Nanjing!

 

A guy was asking on the German Chinese site about these 2 sentences.

 

They are from 《饥饿的女儿》，作者：虹影，出版年1997

 

I would be interested to see how you guys might render 雨下得人心烦百事生 in English.

 

“细雨下起时，石板的街面全是泥浆，滑溜溜的，没一处干净。雨下得人心烦百事生，看不到雨停的希望。”

 

雨下得人心烦百事生，看不到雨停的希望。

Ohne Hoffnung auf ein Ende des Regens werden die Menschen immer deprimierter.

 

Without hope that the rain will end, the people become more and more depressed.

 

Does that really catch the sense of the Chinese sentence?

 

'百事生' (approximately) 'many things happen' which seems to have become 'depressed' perhaps as a short form of 'imagine all kinds of bad things'

 

If I hadn't seen the translation, I would have guessed something like:

 

雨下得人心烦百事生

Under the (endless) rain peoples minds are perturbed, many bad things appear to them,

 

[skylee]

It would be better if the phrase were 心煩百感生. That would be very clear. 心煩百事生 means the same to me. The rain is so depressing that all kinds of (bad) thoughts / memories / feelings emerge.

[Tiana]

Without hope that the rain will end, the people become more and more depressed.

Does that really catch the sense of the Chinese sentence?

 

No, not at all. It has reverted the cause and effect in the sentence. For a rough idea, I'd put it this way: It was a vexing kind of rain and there was no hope of it ending any time soon.

[Pedroski]

I, as an unqualified beginner, also think 心煩百感生 is clearer.

 

The German translation is from a professional, Karin Hasselblatt. Personally, I think, maybe under pressure to do it quickly, she cuts corners. I just quickly translated her German as directly as possible so you could see what she came up with.

 

In 'It was a vexing kind of rain and there was no hope of it ending any time soon.' how do you deal with '百事生‘？ You just left it out? Or that is 'vexing'?

 

The author is from 重庆。Someone suggest this expression might be from there.

[imron]

心烦百事生 is vexing

[Lu]

I agree with Tiana. But sentences like this inevitably lose something in translation. The languages I know don't have a grammatical feature as neat as 下得 in this sentence.

[Tiana]

Yes Lu, translators are often faced with the lack of equivalent expressions in languages. In those situations, I'd ask myself how I would express the same thing idiomatically in the target language.

Pedroski, the German translation may be good or even more appropriate in the wider context of the novel. My attempt above was more for the purpose of understanding the structure and learning the language, so the end results can be quite different.

[Pedroski]

Have to disagree there, in my opinion, 心烦百事生 is not 'vexing'. 烦 is 'vexed' but '百事生‘ is the instrument of vexation 'by many worries which arise'

 

vex: from Latin vexare "to shake, jolt, toss violently;" figuratively "attack, harass, trouble, annoy,"

 

In '雨下得人心烦百事生' what is so neat about '下得‘ except that '人心烦百事生‘ is not easy to render directly as an adverbial in English?

 

他跑 得 很快.

He runs quickly.

[Altair]

 

Have to disagree there, in my opinion, 心烦百事生 is not 'vexing'. 烦 is 'vexed' but '百事生‘ is the instrument of vexation 'by many worries which arise'

 

I think that 心烦百事生 consists of two elements (i.e., "parataxis"): 心烦 and 百事生.  As is typical for Chinese, the grammatical relationship between the two is not explicit and so you must rely on word order rules to understand the likely meaning.

 

Chinese word order rules generally follow sense experience.  One implication of this is that elements that indicate the tools of an action must normally precede that action, since the action cannot result without the prior existence of the tools.  This rule means that 百事生 cannot be interpreted as "instrument."

 

I think that 心烦 and 百事生 cover a similar lexical field and so one possibility is to interpret them as parallel statements of the same general situation.  It is also possible to interpret 百事生 as the result of 心烦.  English can use coordination to cover both possibilities, and so you could understand the two phrases together as "you will be vexed and a hundred concerns will arise."

 

 

In '雨下得人心烦百事生' what is so neat about '下得‘ except that '人心烦百事生‘ is not easy to render directly as an adverbial in English?

 

他跑 得 很快.

He runs quickly.

 

I do not recall the terms, but I think these are two different uses of 得.  The latter is normally the equivalent of a regular adverbial phrase in English.  The former is an expression of extent.

 

One translation of the phrase might be:

 

雨下得人心烦百事生

It rained to the extent that everyone was quite bothered and a hundred cares came to mind.

[陳德聰]

I think it's formally called a complement of result. It is indeed totally different from the adverb equivalent.

[Valujira]

Hi there,

 

Guys...don't make it more complicate than it is.

Simply see the 得 as a kind of 因为/原因...and try to understand such sentences/phrases with mentality and not by trying to use words from English....

 

Because of the rain/the rain causes the people to think about many many bad thoughts/stuff/affairs (etc.). 

 

Good night

[陳德聰]

Yeah except that's not really usable English now is it.