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Sun 9 Jan, 2011 12:07 am
Context:
Petition on Taking the Field (Romance of Three Kingdoms)
Permit your servant, Liang, to observe: the late sovereign was taken from us while his life's work, the restoration of the Han, remained unfinished. Today, in a divided empire, our third, the province of Yizhou, war-worn and under duress, faces a season of crisis that threatens our very survival. Despite this, the officials at court persevere in their tasks, and loyal-minded officers throughout the realm dedicate themselves to you because one and all they cherish the memory of the exceptional treatment they enjoyed from the late sovereign and wish to repay it in service to Your Majesty.
It seems to me that "third" here means "our part (out of three parts)". It is a not necessarily an exact fraction, that is the three parts may not have exactly the same size or population. You may come across "part" used in a fractional sense, for example "My father had three million dollars. He left me a (or the) third part of his fortune (one million dollars)." That is not the meaning here. The piece you are quoting is a translation, from the original Traditional Chinese of Luo Guanzhong, by Moss Roberts.
@contrex,
contrex wrote:
b] That is not the meaning here. The piece you are quoting is a translation,[/b] from the original Traditional Chinese of Luo Guanzhong, by Moss Roberts.
Did you mean the translation sounds not natural in the ear of a native English spaeker?
The English in the translation is fine. Contrex is correct, in this case, it refers to what will become one of the three kingdoms which arose after the collapse of the Later Han dynasty. By the way, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is not only, arguably, the world's first historical novel, it stands as a work equal to or superior to any historical novel ever written in a European language.
@oristarA,
oristarA wrote:
contrex wrote:
b] That is not the meaning here. The piece you are quoting is a translation,[/b] from the original Traditional Chinese of Luo Guanzhong, by Moss Roberts.
Did you mean the translation sounds not natural in the ear of a native English spaeker?
No, I just added the name of the translator for the sake of completeness.
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