| Chapter 1: | Comets |
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1.2. Notes on the Translations
In this volume, we use pinyin transliteration to transcribe Chinese; the Hepburn system to transcribe Japanese reign periods, book titles, and proper names; and the Revised Romanization of Korean (2002) to transcribe Korean book titles and proper names. Original Chinese technical terms such as the sexagesimal day-dates, names of asterisms, and the like are left in pinyin transcription. An expanded finding list of star names giving the western equivalents of Chinese stars and asterisms is in appendix A.
The technical terms for comet most commonly encountered in the records are kexing, “guest star” (anomalous astral body, either comet or nova); huixing, “broom star”; xingbo, “fuzzy star” (i.e., a tailless comet); and changxing, “long star,” which are uniformly translated this way. In the past, some scholars have been perplexed by the compound xingbo, which appears to defy Chinese grammatical conventions by having xing “star/celestial body” modify bo “be fuzzy/bristle.” However, bo has a verbal sense here, meaning “to become fuzzy or bushy.” This is entirely consistent with cometary records where it is generally used to describe the appearance of tail-less comets or the changed aspect of a comet that has grown a tail. This usage appears in some of the earliest records and probably derives from a conception in which stars were thought to be capable of spontaneously becoming fuzzy, growing a tail, and moving about. Rendering xing bo as “bushy star” by analogy with hui xing (“broom” plus “star”), which is quite properly translated “broom star,” is misleading in that it obscures the possibility that bo may imply a change of appearance. Thus, when one reads in a record of the comet of 9 January 595,
) in Xu [LM 11] and Wei [LM 12], and then reached Kui [LM 15] and Lou [LM 16]. (Sui shu: Tianwen zhi, ch. 21, 612)