“意不称物，文不逮意”
Chinese idioms, rich in imagery and theatrics, are often derived from classics, different formats of essays and poetry throughout the dynasties, and annotations and rewrites. For the modern reader, they are delightful historical assemblies that express complex thought patterns not by way of language alone but via reference to a historical occurrence, fable, a line or phrase within a poem, or even subsequent citations. They embody the wholesomeness of conveying meaning via symbolism.
Rationales for my personal preference for the lyrical conciseness of the Chinese language did not occur to me until I began organizing book notes on a treatise of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
Propositions were capable of modelling and, so, describing reality, but they could not simultaneously describe how they describe it, without being self-referential and consequently meaningful.
The problem on which Wittgenstein embarked was that of constructing a general critique of language capable of showing, at one and the same time, both that logic and science had a proper part to play within ordinary descriptive language, by which we produce a representation of the world analogous to a mathematical model of physical phenomena, and that questions about “ethics, value and the meaning of life” by falling outside the limits of this descriptive language, become - at best - the objects of mystical insight, which can be conveyed by “indirect” or poetical communication.
These sentence languish under their own weight, yet manage to convey the notion — that when attempting to express the inner self, be it an exclamation of life’s beauty, pain, or meaning, idioms invoking imagery, story, and context are rotund, where mere words fall flat. The lack of direct equivalence of such symbols in a foreign language effect that much more be lost in translation.
Last year, a friend began to read an English translation of Lu Chi’s “The Art of Writing”, but did not deem it a particularly worthy read. Out of curiosity, I picked up the original version and began to work through these seventeen hundred-year old words — an essay roughly seventeen hundred characters long. Equipped with a dictionary and weekends, I copied, annotated, and read aloud stanzas for months. With each re-read, the self-referential meta of an essay attempting to describe the precise process in which language fails to convey exact meaning, grew more vibrant. How brilliantly these phrases capture the joy and frustrations of the creative process! I often repeated sentences and phrases under my breath, unable to verbally explain the resonance I felt within.
The process of reading, writing, and thinking inspires us via recontexualization of experiences and what we previously thought we knew, every new occurrence an invigorating affirmation of a puzzle piece — of unknown size — that has fallen into place.