Igenlode Wordsmith

I have now finished rough-typing the first chapter of "Little Gentlemen" and have reached the tweaking stage; it is looking quite good to me at the moment, which is probably due to the fact that it is now about six weeks since I wrote this chapter :-p ( Length and chapter titles )
I thought I had a translation for the next verse of the nautical ballad -- which really ought to be entitled something along the lines of "The Little Cabin-Boy" rather than "The Tale of the Tipsy Gunner"; I can only assume that it's supposed to be a story being told by the narrator in his cups-- but unfortunately I came up with the solution while walking home in the rain, which meant that I couldn't safely get the manuscript out. And when I came to write it down I found I had managed to forget what the word I'd come up with to end the third line was :-p

( Read more... )

It is so jolly cold that I am back to using a bungee cord on the bookcase (hooked around The Collins Book of Best-Loved Verse, which is conveniently slender but rigid) in an attempt to keep the bathroom door shut, given that the bathroom window lives *open*...)

On the other hand I have managed to complete my third chapter, and just need to write the final epilogue snippet, for which I have some ideas bubbling away -- though I'm not quite sure how I'm going to actually end it, plus I need to check some dates on French foreign policy first :-)

I am still listening to the BBC Lord of the Rings( Read more... )

I actually wrote a good deal (about three pages) on "Little Gentlemen" today, mainly thanks to the fact that d'Artagnan's arrival scene consists largely of dialogue, which I always find *much* easier -- but partly due to the fact that I got back home after successfully writing a couple of pages, only to realise that I had completely forgotten to include the planned 'crossover dialogue', for which I had gone to the lengths of writing out the relevant canon passages in two languages upon a piece of paper so that I could take them with me and include that material! ( Read more... )

I've just realised, on checking back, with "Little Men", that I got Franz and Emil the wrong way round: Franz and not Emil is the elder brother, depicted as a sterotypical German of that era, "big, blond and bookish, also very domestic, amiable and musical". (Ironic to think how the condescending views of the Anglosphere about Germans morphed from the old trope of 'hardworking, simple and sentimental' to that of 'Teutonic stock villain'...)

Since I only have *one* Franz/Emil equivalent character in "Little Gentlemen" --I feel there is a limit to how many German-speakers I can credibly introduce into the household!-- I could in theory arbitrarily decide to call him "Emil", as I have been doing. But since I wanted to have him as the one who is sixteen and basically an adult (in Alcott's book he is functioning as an assistant teacher, and back in the seventeenth century he would definitely be verging on manhood; Raoul de Bragelonne takes part in his first battle at fifteen) it makes more sense to avoid confusion by using the name of the older brother. I have thus gone back and altered all the occurrences, and will have to mentally adjust my concept of the character after thinking of him as 'Emil' for the last month.

I have (finally!) just started upon my crackfic "Little Gentlemen" story (as with my usual crackfic, I envisage a total lack of humour :-p) And while checking on the description of the chateau at Bragelonne, I have just noticed that Athos appears to be in possession of some very unusual trees ;-)

In Chapter 15, we are told that as d'Artagnan approaches the house, he perceives it sur le fond d’un massif d’arbres épais que le printemps poudrait d’une neige de fleurs. Very picturesque, except that, constrained by history, Dumas proceeds to inform us some fifty-five chapters later that, after the passage of a relatively short period of time, the date at that point is January :-p

(But as we already know, consistency in dates is not the author's strong point...)

Edit: I have just noticed that there was likewise a magnificent display of flowers visible from the windows of Athos' dining-room, so at the time of writing Dumas evidently envisaged the scene as taking place later in the year! I don't *think* it can have been the previous autumn, as all the events of the novel (from Athos' arrival in Paris immediately following d'Artagnan's visit and Raoul's departure for Flanders and encounter with Mordaunt along the way, followed by Mordaunt's interview with Mazarin and departure from Boulogne ten days later, followed by King Charles' capture within a week of Athos and Aramis' arrival) seem to have taken place within a remarkable brief timespan...

εὕρηκα! I have it!
After being completely stuck on my last verse last night (I should have liked to rhyme 'angel' with 'salvation', but unfortunately I think Derbenov is actually referring to God when he talks about the Earth also having its own guardian) I got rhymes for all the translations on my way to market this morning: 'guardian'->'protector', 'stretch out'->'extend', 'invisible'->'undetected', and 'end'... simply 'end' ;-D

And from that I was able to work backwards quite quickly to fit in the whole thing...

Having told myself that I was *not* going to go on and translate the 'other chorus' that had struck me on first watching "Twenty Years After", I almost immediately started copying out the lyrics for that one on blotchy paper (surface not 'sized' properly to take flowing ink, I think) at half-past three in the morning, just in case I should feel inspired to attempt it :-p( And of course in the end I did )

First attempt at chorus (including the weird 'suspended' four syllables at the start of the second line):

My long-sworn opponent
  afresh vows to try me
And grind me to dust, down to dust where I fell
My angel still watches —
  this too shall pass by me
And all in the end shall be well,
All manner of thing shall be well.

( Translations )
I have obviously had to resort to introducing new elements at the end of the first two lines simply for the sake of the rhyme -- I haven't been able to find a way around that (how do you rhyme in a non-humorous way with "pass over"?)
And I made some very conscious changes to the end on the grounds that the original so very strongly chimed with Julian of Norwich with me from the first ("this too shall pass"/"all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well").

We shall see how I feel about it later on...

I am *still* struggling with Наша честь -- I managed to 'fix' the first verse by rhyming 'infinity' with 'misery' (the original lyrics only do half-rhymes for the 'off' couplets anyway, e.g. то ещё (tò eshcho -- 'something else') with сокровище (sokròvishche -- 'treasure')). I got a credible translation for the start of the second verse as "we've had a tough time of it", by means of repeatedly adding and removing different words when submitting the phrase to an auto-translator, and that is basically covered by the various variants I had there already, as opposed "we still have time", which means something very different!

But I was never very happy with the all-important chorus, and have been repeatedly attempting to find an alternative translation that manages to fit in more of the elements of the original( Read more... )

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 survivors of the overcrowded Oriental poppies that I actually sowed (which are far smaller than the various ones that self-seeded in other pots!) have now finally come into bloom. On the other hand, one pot of orange long-headed poppies from last year has completely died (first one plant and then the two others) -- I think it was because they were sitting in a puddle of water for too long after it rained heavily following a prolonged drought, and I didn't notice that the tray underneath was full, but it could be that they are not so perennial as I had thought. I have a seed-head on one of the other plants, but it is quite small and may be empty.
The tomatoes all have fruit on, which is beginning to turn colour; as before, I think the upper trusses stopped setting during the heatwave, but this may be just as well as the plants are already heavily laden. I have just been setting up tomato-strings to help support them.

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I started typing up the Porthos-fic after rereading it and finding that I was actually quite pleased with how it had come out; I don't think it needs major tweaking, although d'Artagnan's 'dream' passage doesn't really sound like his voice (but that is, implicitly, because he is echoing the story in Raoul's words and in the slightly mystical and high-flown language in which the boy recounted it to him). The title is probably going to be "Some Corner of a Foreign Land" (which is, of course, not "forever England" but presumably forever France!) in an echo of the original Brooke quote. The alternative would be "Think Only This of Me", which is also somewhat applicable to the scenario of thinking back over Athos and the past and was the one I was originally inclining towards using, but in fact I discovered that I'd actually put in a 'foreign land' reference early on in the text, which pushes me back towards the other choice :-)