Dhondup Tashi Rekjong and I translated this song
about a year ago and sent it to High Peaks (HighPeaksPureEarth.com), the best
site for news, issues & commentary coming out of Tibet. Dechen Pemba really
liked it and wanted to put it up, and asked us if we could get an introduction
on Khoten. There wasn’t any information available online, in Tibetan or
English, so Dhondup Tashi asked people he knew inside Tibet to get some
information on Khoten. This is how he gets the info on most of the people that
Tibet Web Digest translates and publishes online.
Finally we got a brief biographical sketch and
then that information just slept in our inboxes (ok, fine, my inbox) for a very
very long time until someone on the web put up a translation of this song,
which was interesting but a little libertarian, (for instance: instead of ‘the
snow is not white’, I believe they had ‘it was not the white snow’) and so we
got out the intro and dusted it off, edited it and sent to Hpeaks. We have to
thank Dechen, who was so patient with us, and does such a wonderful and
necessary job with High Peaks.
You can simply read the song lyrics, but I really suggest watching the video (the lyrics are also embedded). It's an entirely different experience. Of course, the Tibetan audience is uncooperative as always. Maybe another time, I'll share my memories of Phurbu T Namgyal desperately trying to get the Boston Tibetans grooving to Jampa Dolma. They watched him like a documentary. Clearly, the Amdo audience is not much better.
Anyway, Khoten punched me in the heart with this song. I hope we have done justice to his lyrics. Do watch.
3 comments:
Hi Dickyi.
I am a fan of your blog. I would really like to see a writing about the 100 + self-immolations that have been taking place in Tibet. How should anyone make sense of them?
Hi, thank you so much for the comment. I have been trying for a while now actually to write something about the self-immolations and I'll try harder, but I don't know if I'll actually be able to produce something. I feel frozen with incapacity and confusion. I'll really try though.
Hi Tenzin,
I recently discovered the blog and I just wanted to thank you for the beautiful translations you are posting. I was wondering if you would be interested in sharing your posts and ideas on Glipho? I bet that our users would love to read your amazing stuff! It's a quite new social publishing platform, where you can connect to every social network accounts, really easy to use it and communicate with your followers and a good way to get exposure! In additional, you are able to import the posts from your blog in a super-easy way without affecting it at all. Please, have a look and take a tour to know more about http://glipho.com/. If you would like to set up your account, please do not hesitate to ask me for further information and I will send you an invitation.
I hope you will join our Glihpo community soon. :) All the best,
Maite
Post a Comment