Want/Do not want

Dipping my toes in the waters of trying to get things published, I've learned some interesting things. My first pitch to Cracked got turned down, on the basis that its appeal would be too narrow. I understood that. Someone's got to look at the bottom line. But I realized something important.

I didn't want to publish that article.

I wanted it to be published, yes. But the concept was a little weak. The research was a little thin. Without the flag of a major comedy website to fly over it, I don't think I would have been willing to put it out there with my name on it. I wanted someone to tell me it was a good idea, but in a vacuum, I wouldn't have called it a good idea myself.

It will return as an item in a broader, better article pitch.

Now, yesterday, I was having a little fun. I was doing some of my obligatory writing for the day but at the moment I wasn't feeling right to work on Nenle and Death (I got to it later). I happened upon something I knew about already: a poem called "The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den."

It's a neat little poem written in Classical (i.e. 2,000-year-old) Chinese, made up entirely of tonal variations of the sound "shi." It was whimsical and amusing, but the translations I found were clinical and not much fun to read in their own right.

Having some time on my hands and needing to write, I adapted the translations I could find into my own "translation," which was less accurate but more fun, I thought. Now, I used the word "translation" enquotedly there because I can translate Chinese like I can translate Koala, which is to say that I cannot, even a little. I took the thrust of the translations I read and gave them a rhyme and a rhythm.

The end product amused me, so I decided to post it here. First, though, I checked something. I discovered, to my surprise, that while it's written in a 2,000-year-old dialect, the poem is from the 1900s, by a linguist named Chao Yuen Ren. He was illustrating the whimsical point that simple romanization won't work for Chinese languages. The point, though, is that the poem is not in the public domain, and, much to my dismay, I can't just do whatever I want with it. So, sadly, my adaptation, which I think has the potential to get a smile out of someone, can't legally see the light of day for 15 to 40 years, depending on whose copyright laws apply. It made me sad.

This was the same day my Cracked pitch got nixed. The difference in feeling was an interesting lesson in the difference between wanting to publish, and wanting to be published.