AtD translation: the title

Mike Jing gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com
Sat Jan 5 21:32:41 CST 2019


Thanks, Joseph, for the suggestion and encouragement.

I do have some ideas as how to go about it, and the constraints are pretty
clear. It will most likely take the form of a Chinese idiom of four
characters, which will be consistent with the titles of the other four
parts of the book. Common Chinese idioms are generally taken from classic
Chinese writings, and the majority of them are in group of four characters.
For example, "枕戈待旦", literally "sleep with one's weapon as a pillow and
wait for the dawn". Based on your suggestion and that of others, it's
probably going to involve characters such as "日", which means "day" in
Classic Chinese (and incidentally is the same character as "the sun"); "待“,
which means "to wait for" or "to expect"; "备",which mean "to prepare
(against)"; and so on. There doesn't seem to be anything readily applicable
in the dictionary of such idioms, so most likely it has to be coined
specifically for this purpose. Coming up with phrases like this is an art
in itself, and one I'm not particularly good at. I will probably ask for
help from friends who are better versed in Classic Chinese.


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