Half-delirious, I finally locate a copy of Zhang Daqian's dual-language treatise on Chinese brush painting at Kinokuniya. The English half has that elliptical, overwrought and awkward charm which blooms only rarely, in what would strictly be considered inept translations. The rendering into an alien tongue of an allusive texture, a linguistic quiddity, an idiom weighted with folklore, a metaphor attuned to a native music, is almost never accomplished with both grace and fidelity, especially with two languages as temperamentally and semantically opposed as English and Chinese...but I revel secretly in the translator's gaffes. Of fish ZDQ writes (or is rendered as having written):

The secret of painting fish lies in the painter's ability to express the fishy gladness and freedom of motion in water. If the fish should appear to be out of water, so to speak, that would be tantamount to divorcing it from its natural instinct. The test of the painter's finesse is in the art of showing aquatic presence in the feeling and attitude of the fish, without having to delineate water.

Elsewhere the translator tries for grandiloquence and unwittingly ends up with burlesque:

Blessed with majestic elegance and splendour, the peony is hailed as the queen of all flowers, the reigning beauty of celestial fragrance. Hence, in the elaborate style of painting, it may be regarded as the representative of the floral kingdom.

What is that magical modulation? A clumsy tumble; a cadence which often shrieks but sometimes sings, resounding above the humdrum vernacular we have become dulled to.