Translate the Mulamadhyamakakarikas

New podcast is up. Unfortunately, I’m running short on verses in chapter 18; I have at least one other chapter translated somewhere, but it’s in a paper notebook, not in a conveniently typed textile-formatted file…and I’m not even certain where the notebook is.

::sigh:: 5 years ago

I tried to cut down on the “um”s for this one. 5 years ago

Here

I added a smidgen of historical material, and a chime. 5 years ago

For no good reason, I submitted MMKCast to iTunes. (Link) 5 years ago

Hey, two in two weeks. Excellent. With enhanced AAC feed. I would worry about the fact that I’m not including a straight mp3 feed, but as I don’t really have an audience…

http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/textpattern/article/podcast-182 5 years ago

I’m setting the MMKCast back up with slightly better production values and a snazzy-as-all-get-out enhanced feed.

http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/textpattern/mmkcast/mmkcast.xml 5 years ago

Okay, let’s try something a little different.

MMK will now be here

The new MMK Podcast may (if it survives) be here6 years ago

Here6 years ago

Okay, I’m working on Chapter 18 over on the wiki.

I think I’ve got a workable structure. I’ve also added a full breakdown on the vocab for verses 1 and 2. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. Comments welcome. 6 years ago

Okay, I take back what I said about switching to devanag. Why? I just put together a very, very crappy, but functional, diacritic keyboard. cf. here6 years ago

I haven’t put in a lot of any time on this for a little while now - I’ve been working, dealing with the minutiae of having a place to live and food to eat, and, when it comes to how I use my other time, I’ve been working on two other projects (new instances of a blog and a wiki), but those are, I think, starting to stabilize, meaning that if my skills haven’t totally atrophied, and if I can find the materials, and I can get going on this again. It’s not my only project waiting - far from it—but I’ve been getting envious of my more linguistically-oriented friend Andrew getting his translation on

My workflow is going to be changing somewhat, though. The biggest transition is going to be not working with the wonderful but sadly Windows-only Itranslator. Now, I don’t anticipate any serious problems in producing देवनागरी, given OSX’s fantastic language support (simple key combination to switch scripts, relatively intuitive keyboard shouldn’t take long to get fast with), but there’s no built-in romanized Sanskrit keyboard (not shocking, since it’s not a living language), so, while I may get around to rolling my own (it doesn’t sound as hard as some things, based on what I’ve looked at), it’ll probably be just देव and plain English to start with. (Yes, this will probably hurt me more than it does you, as I’m used to thinking in Roman (lazy), and I generally have to squint pretty hard to read देव on a screen.)

Note that since I have no idea what script नागार्जुन would have written in, there’s really no nerd points associated with choosing देवनागरी; but it’ll represent the sounds, which is after all what it’s for.

I’m also going to need to move out of the badly cobbled-together STX markup I was using before to new, badly cobbled-together textile. (Hopefully I’m just kidding—textile is much more powerful and less brittle than STX; worse comes to worst, I’ll just have to go all XML with it.) 6 years ago

Wait, four people want to do this? That doesn’t sound right to me. 6 years ago

Wow have I let this goal slide during my electronic hiatus. Well, the dandy devanagari unicode support my iBook should be helpful for this. 6 years ago

I just finished really crappy translations of Chapters 1 and 24 (that’s the pratyaya-pariksa and aryasatya-pariksa, or something like that—causal conditions and the four noble truths).

I’ve entered the text of my translation of 24—which is one of the most important chapters, presenting as it does a dialogue between Nagarjuna and an interlocutor critiquing sunyata, a stark elaboration of the two-truths doctrine (the reason why I got started on this chapter at this particular time is, in fact, that I wanted 24:8-10 for a Wikipedia article on the two truths that I started a few days ago), and other goodies. My translation is, as I said, pretty crappy, but I think it’ll be pretty good once I’ve polished it a bit. 7 years ago