Saw this in Itaewon as I was taxiing home with my frozen peas:
I tried to look the Chinese characters up on Naver. I got these results:
浪: 물결 랑(낭) rang/nang = wave漫: 흩어질 만 man = scatter
If you look up both characters together to see what word they form, you get:
「로망(roman)」을 일본(日本) 음(音)으로 적은 한자어(漢字語).
Which apparently translates to:
A Chinese character word for “roman” written in Japanese pronunciation.
But if you type the word (浪漫/낭만, nang-man) into Google Translate, you get:
Go figure. Are we looking at "virus romance"? Or "virus lovers"? Is this a command to love the virus? I have a feeling that my usual resources have failed me, and that the graffito means something totally different from everything I looked up.romance
Sorry for the messiness in the fonts. When I copied and pasted text from Naver, Blogger went haywire, and my fonts are now all over the place, and I can't change them.
Firstly Naver screwed up becausenit isnt Roman but romang, which is of course one of several korean ways to express the road romance (see 내로남불).
ReplyDeleteI take this phrase as a whole to be something akin to the phrase happy virus that Koreans also bandy about and thus nothing to do with the virus that has afflicted us these past few years.
Since this graffito has got us talking about different interpretations, i guess that makes it a work of art.