对猫拉琴 – Playing the Cello to the Cat

人类说“对牛弹琴”，还不知道牛大哥每天给我们拉琴呢！——猫咪兄弟
Humans make fun of cows with the idiom ‘对牛弹琴’ (‘playing the lute to a cow’), but they don’t even realize that Lady Moo plays the cello for us every day! – Little Meowies

I got the little musical cow on a trip to Japan when I was still in university. The beautiful pair of cats was a gift from a student when he was on holiday somewhere. I thought these little friends were absolutely adorable and took a shot of them.

The caption ‘对猫拉琴’ (duì māo lā qín) (playing the cello to the cat[s]) is a variation by myself from the idiom ‘对牛弹琴’(duì niú tán qín), which literally means ‘playing the lute to a cow’, that is, ‘casting pearls before swine’, ‘addressing the wrong audience’.

dui niu tan qin

While translating the words of the cats, some differences between the two languages became quite apparent.

1. Generic Terms
In Chinese, we tend to have a general term for nouns. In this case, this is reflected in two words, ‘牛’(niú) and ‘琴’(qín).

‘牛’ is a general term for cow, it doesn’t specify whether it is male or female. To differentiate the sex, we add ‘公’(gōng) or ‘母’(mǔ) in front of ‘牛’, i.e., ‘公牛’ is a bull, while ‘母牛’ is a cow.

As for ‘琴’, it is again a general term for many musical instruments, usually stringed. In both the original idiom ‘对牛弹琴’ and my twisted version ‘对猫拉琴’, the same ‘琴’ can be used, though the ‘琴’ in the original idiom probably referred to the zither, while my cow’s ‘琴’ refers to the cello.

2. Brotherhood
Brotherhood is rather important in Chinese culture, as can be reflected by our lavish use of sibling terms in many instances.

In this case, I applied it to both the cow and the cats. Because ‘牛’ is a strong and huge animal, when referring to cows in a more endearing manner, we often say ‘牛大哥’, where ‘大哥’(dàgē) means elder brother. This became quite tricky to translate because in English, although often the word ‘cow’ is used casually as a gender-neutral term, a ‘cow’ is after all, strictly speaking, female!

Then for the term ‘猫咪兄弟’(māomī xiōngdì), again it is quite natural to depict the cats as siblings in Chinese, but it would probably be weird in English. (‘猫咪’, meaning cat, is more endearing than just ‘猫’,while ‘兄弟’means brother.)

[Update 2014/02/27] As I hinted in the caption, we’ve been pretty rude to the cows (and other animals in fact) with our idioms. We can see from the video below that cows, and many other animals, do appreciate music!

Enjoy the music with the cows!