Verse translation

I'm busy translating Mikhail Boyarsky's "Рыжий конь" (or to be more accurate, the Dobrynin/Derbenov song that happened to be a hit for Boyarsky in 1986) -- backwards, for no entirely good reason other than that I not only started with the chorus but then translated the last verse first :-) (And what *is* it about Russians and running barefoot over the grass? Is it some kind of atavistic folk-memory? At least I now recognise the phrase in question...!)

Naturally one does tend to translate rhyming couplets backwards, because there is no point in getting the perfect rendition of the first half only to then realise that there is no earthly way of getting anything to rhyme with that...( Read more... )

Four more lines to go. Now I remember why I didn't start with the first verse; this is the one where I don't actually know what any of the words mean and shall have to go away and research them first. (My motoring vocabulary is sorely lacking, even if I do know two different words for 'horse' and two for 'sword' respectively :-D)
( Parallel French text and grammar )

The woes of trying to do translation when all you have going for you is a really good command of English and just enough of another language to scratch out the meaning...

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Since I now have two long and narrow empty margarine tubs suitable to balance on my windowsill, I have tried planting up some of the kale and beetroot that went to seed, to see if it will grow (and eat as 'baby leaves' if it does). The kale is nice little round black seeds in dry white pods; the beetroot is pretty much invisible among the general black muck in the bottom of the paper bag, if there is any actual seed in there at all. However I did get unexpected germination from my previous attempts to plant from this collected seed-spike...

I also sowed some more mesembryanthemums ( Read more... )

The wind is in the east

The wind has swung round from its prevailing southwesterly direction (about 80-90% of the time) to blow pretty much dead east. Which may mean a welcome change in the weather, although the forecast is for more stiflingly hot days, but unfortunately means that there are now low-flying aircraft making their final landing approach every two to three minutes, which is sufficient to render spoken Russian at least completely unintelligible -- I simply can't fill in the 'missing bits' the way that I automatically do with English. And I can't very well shut the windows, because it's boiling hot indoors and I'm desperately trying to flush the day's accumulated heat out now that the sun has at last gone down outside.

It gives you an insight into the level of educational disruption proverbially experienced by pupils of schools under a regular flightpath :-(