Igenlode Wordsmith

Dates and ages (probably mutually inconsistent)

Athos tells Raoul on their arrival in Paris that he spent seven of the sweetest and yet most bitter years of his life in his old lodgings on the rue Férou (including the further years after d'Artagnan's promotion?)

He appeals to Porthos during the confrontation at the Place Royale on the grounds that "we slept ten years side by side", presumably referring to the length of time over which the two of them served together as musketeers.

( The age of Aramis )

( Oliver Reed's careless fencing )

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On my second expedition I successfully managed to purchase a new slide buckle of the right size to fit my secondary clothes line, thanks to a very helpful Indian lady whose haberdashery stall turned out to be well-stocked with all sorts of components as well as the glittering sari fabrics and accessories. I tested it out this afternoon on a batch of washing, and it seems to function exactly as effectively as its predecessor (which is to say that it is no longer bar-taut after a few hours when you take the washing down again, but doesn't sag enough to cause a discernable problem while the weight is on it).


( New cycle computer )

( Documentaries in Russian )

What I *haven't* done, having been submerged in documentaries, or at least having had them playing in the background while engaged in other things, is actually finish watching "Twenty Years After", which I have already encountered 'spoilers' for in places ranging from TV Tropes (yes, the Soviet Musketeers have their own TV Tropes page...) to random Aramis fanvids and AU fan-fiction. Although I did, on my first (pedestrian) expedition to try to buy buckles, manage to start that third "Twenty Years After" Porthos-fic of my own...

Apart from anything else I got caught up in rereading the earlier parts of the book in the French version to see what else was missing in terms of detail, which turns out to include little scenes like the one in which d'Artagnan gives Raoul a fencing-lesson during his visit and praises Athos on the boy's swordsmanship (C’est déjà votre main, mon cher Athos, et si c’est votre sang-froid, je n’aurai que des compliments à lui faire) -- this entire conversation being omitted from the English edition, which cuts straight to Mazarin's recall message!

YouTube just bestowed upon me a recording of the poem by Venjiamin Smekhov (who played Athos)...

( Source of the clip revealed )

However, what the longer context *does* provide is an explanation for the more obscure references in the poem: Smekhov mentions that he wrote it because they were filming in Lvov (now renamed 'Lviv' to reflect the tight Ukrainian accent, which still strikes me as akin to relabelling Glasgow as "Glasgae" ;-p) in August at the time of his birthday. It's a 'kino-horoscope': Lvov, the City of Lions (as in Lev Tolstoy, sometimes Anglicised to Leo) under the European astrological sign of Leo in the Chinese astrological Year of the Horse 1978.

YouTube just bestowed upon me a recording of the poem by Venjiamin Smekhov (who played Athos) that showed up in the background soundtrack to one of the many, many Russian-language documentaries I have been watching recently about the making of "D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers", the actors involved, and various other subjects ;-) I remember being impressed at the time because it only very gradually started to dawn on me that the voiceover at that point was in poetry: there are precious few people who can 'speak verse' and make it sound so entirely natural that you only realise they are doing it when things keep starting to rhyme! Smekhov in particular really does have a beautiful stage-trained voice, as all the fans (and in Russia there are still a lot of them) kept saying. It's what you would describe as 'Shakespearian' training when talking about English actors, but I don't know what the Russian equivalent would be; whether they actually have classical verse plays, as the French do (Pushkin maybe?)

Anyway, I heard this poem drifting past in the middle of a half-hour documentary and couldn't make out much of it apart from the fact that it probably wasn't entirely serious (and was likely to have been written by Smekhov himself, whom I had heard writes verses), and involved a lot of things 'flying' in all directions, musketeers included :-D And then a couple of weeks later YouTube suddenly decided to bestow on me unprompted a video of Smekhov actually reading it out to his fellow cast-members... *with* on-screen subtitles, so that I could actually interpret what it said.

https://youtube.com/shorts/XYlxuqXFaMY

I finally bit the bullet and decided I really ought to look up the cursive Cyrillic alphabet again so that I can actually write things down in Russian (even if I can't type them). I used to be able to write long essays in this stuff -- I never did get terribly fluent in blind touch-typing in Russian, an absolute requirement since you could switch the computer keyboard layout you were using but not the physical keycaps, but handwriting was rather faster.

Anyway, I found a calligraphy chart and copied it out onto a bit of paper, and apart from a bit of remaining confusion between the cursive 'd' and 'b' (looks rather like an English 'd') and uncertainty about how to form the 'f' (a pretty rare letter, which is probably why it doesn't seem to join or write fluently) -- and an ongoing mental blank as to which way to loop the pen to form the little hitches at the bottom of the 'ts' and 'shch' -- it has mostly come back very quickly :-)

Capitals might be another story, as there are just a few that differ from their minuscule versions, and one doesn't get a lot of practice in them. And of course there is the ancient problem of differentiating the 'i', 'm' and 'l' (exactly the same issue that you get when writing 'm', 'n' and 'u' in a strict italic hand in English calligraphy, and the reason why I was taught to put dashes on my Ms and Ws in German... and still for my own benefit try to do so for the 'T' and 'SH' in Russian!)

( Cyrillic calligraphic chart )
My own handwriting with an ordinary (i.e. non-italic) nib; I can see I'm having trouble joining the 'o' and 'm', and the 'i' and 'ch', while nothing ever does join to a 'b'. Actually, apparently it does in the calligraphic example given, explicitly entitled 'Azbuka' (alphabet) :-p
The actual practice text *blush* consists of what I was reading/looking at last night, which is the YouTube hashtag "trimushkyetyora" (misspelt!), a quotation from a transcript of an interview with the actor who played Soviet Porthos (Valentin Smirnitsky), "I don't like to watch my own films because all I can see is the mistakes", a pretty common sentiment among actors, I think, and (upside down in pencil) an earlier attempt at transcribing a snatch of lyrics from the song I've been translating ;-)

The one-shot that was inspired by a slight mis-remembering of the farewells beneath the scaffold, and by a line that is for some reason omitted from the translation I had from Project Gutenberg... I have worked grit-covered ropes in bitterly cold weather; my pen-calluses weren't of much help. Athos probably has sword-calluses, but it's canon that those didn't help much either ;-)

(Aramis does in fact embrace both Porthos and d'Artagnan immediately afterwards on his own account before going off on what he has every reason to believe may be a suicide mission, another line which was left out of the English translation, which simply reads "Aramis again presented himself at the bishop’s" in lieu of "Aramis les quitta comme il avait quitté Athos, c’est-à-dire en les embrassant; puis il se rendit chez l’évêque Juxon".)

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If I Should Die

At dawn on the day of the English king’s execution, Athos takes precautions for the future and contemplates those to whom his life is bound — both by love and hate.

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“Donc Athos déchirait ses belles mains si blanches et si fines à lever les pierres arrachées de leur base par Porthos...” Vingt ans après, Chapitre LXX, “Les ouvriers”

The January wind stole across the stones of Whitehall, and fluttered the sombre drapes beneath the gaunt new structure that stood there. It had been a bitterly cold night, and Athos had worked without respite, under cover of the labour going on all around them to complete the King’s scaffold— a thing horrible and unheard of, not that a King should be murdered but that the deed should be carried out with this travesty of the forms of justice. But they had given their word, he and Aramis, to Madame Henriette of England. Given their word to guard her husband the King and to bring him safely back to her, even if it should cost both their lives.

( Read more... )

After getting distracted by "Aramis no Bouken" I plunged into the final part of the Soviet "Twenty Years After" with a certain trepidation (oh no, it's going to come to an end) and no idea what to expect, having no memory of this part of the novel at all.
(It does strike me as being slightly worrying that I have now managed to write two fanfics for it without actually having finished the story myself, but unless further big chunks of backstory appear in the remaining section it shouldn't invalidate anything in what I have already written, all of which takes place at an earlier point in the plot than this!)

It looks as if the last part of the serial is going to be all about how the protagonists back in France get themselves out of the political consequences of their actions in England. We saw d'Artagnan and Porthos get arrested at the end of the last episode, and now Aramis and Athos are wondering what became of them. ( Read more... )

Edit: well, that turns out to be almost *all* the remaining chapters of the book (the duel of Aramis and Athos being mixed up with a vast chunk of armies and political manoeuvring in canon). But the book does at least explain why Mazarin is apparently walking around in a greenhouse; d'Artagnan and Porthos are shut up not in a mediaeval tower as shown on screen, but in a pavilion wing in an orangery, and not for months but for a grand total, according to d'Artagnan, of eighty-three hours of frustration ;-)
(And I am also touched to find out that in the book it is Aramis who is outside the walls with horses, whereas I was beginning to fear in the film that he had simply gone to ground to save his own neck as the final survivor...)

YouTube apparently thinks my search history has contained too much Athos-related stuff recently (I wonder what piece of writing could have caused it to get that idea...?) and decided to show me an incredibly obscure fanvid: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kvm3hCwWzRw

It isn't even particularly good, but what immediately intrigued me was that the soundtrack sounded subliminally familiar. It dawned on me that the creator had mashed up the finale of the unfairly obscure George Stiles musical "The Three Musketeers" with the images from Sous le Signe des Mousquetaires (or, more likely, from the original Japanese anime). But after all, I suppose there is no reason why other people should not have dug deep enough to discover both ;-)

I am, however, slightly taken aback to find that these various ancient fanvids for the Japanese version appear to contain footage that I simply don't remember seeing in the French-Canadian one (and I also get the impression that there is a slightly different art style getting mixed in). ( Feature film? )

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Edit: well, that didn't take too long to find once I knew it existed :-)
And it turns out it's on YouTube *in French*, so I couldn't have asked for better! Being in French probably does help it stay beneath the copyright radar (ceci est fait par les fans pour les fans...)

Having pretty much mentally written off my attempt at planting some more, very belated, towel-tomatoes, I was surprised to find first one and then two seedlings popping up, despite the heat and the pot drying out! (And another one coming today, by the looks of it; two weeks to the day with outdoor germination.) It will be an interesting experiment, given that the survivors of the first batch currently all have flower-buds on... I have successfully re-homed the two smaller Roma tomatoes that didn't get larger pots, so we are down to the single adult plant that is required (or desired).

( Chillies )

Both the chives and one of the spring onions are now in flower, as is a love-in-the-mist which self-sowed in the buddleia pot.

( Water-carriers )