我差点又掉进前人挖的坑里面了。翻译的时候总能碰见别人挖的“陷阱”。继“土著”“少数民族”“龙”与 DragonSafety 和 Security、“食品安全”与“粮食安全”英语改变汉字读音之后，今天又发现一对儿貌似的对等词：凤凰与 Phoenix。我所知道的“凤凰”，象征着吉祥安康、幸福美满。我还知道凤凰可以涅槃、浴火重生。于是，在看到一篇短文里说唐山是获得新生的“凤凰之城”的时候，并没有感到什么异样。可是，等我查阅了一些资料之后，才发现事情远远没有这么简单。



有人总结出世界上至少有这么几个国家和地区的凤凰：古埃及的凤凰（名字叫 Benu 或者 Bennu）、阿拉伯半岛的凤凰（涅槃、浴火重生）、日本的凤凰（名字叫 Ho-oo）、俄罗斯的凤凰（名字叫火鸟“Firebird”）、北美的凤凰（名字叫“Yel”）。


A mythical bird with gorgeous plumage, fabled to be the only one of its kind and to live five or six hundred years in the Arabian desert*, after which it burnt itself to ashes on a funeral pyre ignited by the sun and fanned by its own wings, rising from its ashes with renewed youth to live through another cycle.
（神鸟，羽毛艳丽。根据传说，这种神鸟只有一只，在阿拉伯半岛的沙漠中生活 500-600 年后，会在火葬柴堆上自燃成灰烬，火焰由太阳引燃，神鸟自己的翅膀煽动火焰。之后，神鸟从灰烬中重生，开始另外一个轮回。）

*很多网上的资料、参考资料和参考书中（比如维基百科、大英百科），“阿拉伯沙漠”（Arabian desert）都仅指阿拉伯半岛上的那片大沙漠，但也有不少的参考资料（比如韦氏词典、兰登书屋词典、柯林斯词典、中国的《辞海》、陆谷孙的《英汉的法词典》）列出另外一个地理区域，即埃及尼罗河以东、红海以西的那片北非沙漠。





In Islāmic mythology the phoenix was identified with the ʿanqāʾ (Persian: sīmorgh), a huge, mysterious bird (probably a heron) that was originally created by God with all perfections but had thereafter become a plague and was killed.

另外，根据维基百科，日本与韩国都把 Phoenix 翻译成“不死鸟”，而当地传说中的“凤凰”（应该就是中国凤凰传说稍加变化的版本）则用当地的名字（即当地字形的汉字“凤凰”）。


14 thoughts on “中国凤凰与外国凤凰，不太一样”

  1. 嗯，两者确实不大一样。产自中国的没有涅槃一说。不过中国的凤跟火和太阳貌似也有一点点联系，不过提及这一点的信息很少，语焉不详，只有一句“凤为火精”。
    亦作“ 凤皇 ”。 1.古代传说中的百鸟之王。雄的叫凤，雌的叫凰。通称为凤或凤凰。
    查“凤” 可得出

  2. 凤凰涅槃，确实为英语过来的成语。有篇文章曾将二战后成立的联合国（UN）比做：the phoenix rising from the ashes of the second world war

  3. 帝东巡狩，凤凰黄龙毕集 looks familiar to me – but what does it mean? The emperor needs to be in the right location to make things work ideally?

    1. “When the Emperor went on a hunting tour in the East, both phoenixes and dragons gathered around him.” Without the context, it should be ok translating it this way…

          1. According to some historians, before printing became a serious business, the literati in ancient China had to manually transcribe the books from the ones they had borrowed from someone else and sometimes such transcribing was one of their ways of studying the book.

            For your information, the shi ji, sanguozhi, hanshu and houhanshu are the best of the 24 shi. Typically, these four histories were each written by few individuals. In contrast, other members of the 24 shi are characterized by authorship and editorial power shared by lots of people.

            This reminds of so-called crowd-sourcing in the translation industry. If such sourcing can produce great contents, it would be a miracle.

            24 shi:

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