eye_rony

Can someone tell me what the attached text says in English please?


Many thanks,
Rony

Attached Thumbnails

 

hande

b5rBy 1835 he probably had his first telegraph model working in New York University building where he taught art. Being poor, Morse used in his model such crude materials as an old artist’s canvas stretcher to hold it, a home-made battery and an old clock-work to move the paper on which dots and dashes were to be recorded.

pluiepoco

The Chinese character in the picture are
閔損單衣順母
褔州居士
東昇氏作
The work is absolutely a false one, because the Chinese characters in it both have simplex and complex forms, that is very strange, because these kind of works should only be scratched in complex Chinese.
Nevertheless, the words mean as follows,
Mercy Loss Single Clothes Obey Mother (really nonsense)
By Fuzhou Lay-buddhist
Mr. Dongsheng (the name of the lay-buddhist has both simplex and complex Chinese, so strange!)

eye_rony

Very interesting pluiepoco, thank you so much, I've known this picture all my life & often wondered what it says.
Now I have a better understanding what it's about.

Your translation does make a little sense in relation to the painting (which shows a boy bowing to a man who has his right hand raised, while off to the right a mother sits facing away with two younger children)

It's just a sequence of words then, not a proper sentence? Is this usual? Does it sound like it relates to any traditional Chinese story you know?

thanks again,
Rony

pluiepoco

I don't know whether there is a similar Chinese story relating to the characters or the painting, but since it's buddhist works, maybe 閔損is the buddhist name of the boy in the picture, the 單衣is a mis-spelling of 禪衣 which means monk's robe, while 順母means to obey his mother or stay around mother to raise the family but not retreat in a temple as a monk. This understanding maybe in conformity with the fact of a lay-buddhist褔州居士, since a 居士lay-buddhist is a buddhism practitioner staying at home enjoying normal human relations.

東昇氏作

eye_rony

So "Mercy Loss" could be the Buddhist name of the boy.
The part referring to clothes is quite difficult to make out due to the handwriting.

Your explaination could well be it - thanks very much for your knowledgeable insight.

Yau

It's not false at all, but it tells a famous chinese story recorded in The Book of Filial Piety ( 孝經 ) and The Analects of Confucius ( 論語 ) .

周閔損單衣順母 should be read like this

周閔損 : It doesn't refer "Mercy Loss". 閔損 (Min-Sun, around BC500-400) was a student of Confucius in late Spring-Autumn Period during Zhou Dynasty.

單衣: It means a cloth in poor quality. Pluiepoco is right that 單 can mean 'single', but here it means thin, flimsy.

順母: it means to show filial piety to his mother.

The legend says Min-Sun's stepmother tortured him all the time, and never made him a good cloth. After an accident, his father found the suffer of his lovely son. He was so angry and wanted to divorce with the stepmother. Min-Sun begged his father not to do it and whatever his stepmother did to him, he still showed the filial piety to her.

Confucius made the story famous after he praised the behavior of Min-Sun. And for good or bad, Chinese learnt how to honour and love their parents by studying several stories on filial piety in the past 2000 years and Min-Sun was one of must-reads. (Students in my father's generation still had to read this story in the school).

Also, although the piece of Chinese caligraphy is written in Traditional and Simpilfied Characters, we can't say it's right or wrong. 王羲之 (Wang Xi Zhi, around 300AD), possibly the most calligraphist ever in chinese history, always adopted some simplified form of characters in his masterpiece and it became a tradition for the creation of calligraphy.