Igenlode Wordsmith

Have I ever mentioned that I really, really dislike writing with no idea where I'm supposed to be going? :-(
( Multiple attempts towards an ending ) Not one of my best last lines, but it will do for a fic that basically doesn't have a storyline, the message being that Venya arrives as a 'waif and stray' and has now carved out a foreseeable place for himself in future at Bragelonne.)

I think I have finally almost finished my Athos crack-fic (which, as usual, is of course completely lacking in any crack humour save for the initial bizarre concept, being written entirely straight). I am not particularly happy with it; the balance of the various parts is, I suspect, distorted by how much trouble I was having in writing them respectively, which means that what I thought was the main section, consisting of the introduction and arrival of my OC, is probably now overshadowed by the much longer following sections between the canon characters, making the beginning seem a bit pointless -- even if the only point of the OC was in effect to provide a handle by which the entire AU scenario could be established.( Read more... )

*checks on AO3*
There is no separate "Little Men" fandom, as it gets rolled into the general "Little Women Series" category; checking on characters from that fandom who don't appear in any of the earlier books (e.g. Nan, Dan, and Jo's sons Rob and Teddy) suggests that many of the stories that are set within that book don't bother to use the two or three variants on "Little Men" tags that do exist and are mapped to "Little Women", but I'm guessing that there are maybe twenty or so of them out there.

I am currently not doing the sink full of washing up because I am wearing a jumper with long dangling cuffs that would get horribly dirty and matted -- or at least, that's my excuse...


I have carried out half the Great Changeover, emptying and refilling the smaller trunk, as usual, in order to get at my thermal underwear (and then finding my bed still occupied by a heap of winter clothing at 5am when all I wanted was to roll into it and sleep until the alarm went off at nine :-p)

I decided to plant one clove of the garlic that did, for once, successfully bulb up this year, in with the tulips in order to give it a chance to overwinter. We still have no idea what the 'mystery bulb' is, since it didn't flower, and died down long ago -- whether it is still alive or has rotted in the recent rain I have no idea.

( Clocks, watches and fic )

Since I now have another batch of real quinces (after making japonica jelly last week) I made a recipe from my Russian cookery book -- technically speaking now a Soviet cookery book, I suppose, since it takes it for granted that you will be interested in recipes from all the now independent parts of the Soviet Union!

Azerbaijani bozbash bears a probably not coincidental resemblance to Persian cookery and to lamb plov, ( Read more... )
(Similar recipe online: https://bestrecipes24.com/recipe/azerbaijani-style-lamb-bozbash-soup-with-chickpeas )

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"Little Gentlemen" is coming along quite nicely, although the style is in danger of becoming stilted and verbose -- not very Dumas!
I have now successfully introduced my young OC Venya (playing the 'Nat Blake' role, with Raoul taking on the role -- and vocabulary -- of the cheerful Tommy Bangs who introduces him to everyone and everything) into Athos's house, which is at least fifty per cent of the material envisaged, and am attempting to finish the scene in which Athos reads the accompanying letter (also establishing AU material). ( Read more... )

Well, I thought I'd finished, but... I discovered that I'd misinterpreted a word in my translation (сложный means 'difficult' in the sense of complex or intricate, rather than in the sense of exhausting or hard work), and since that was unfortunately the word I'd used to rhyme with, I need to rewrite not only that line but also the one that dovetails with it, and possibly amend the entire quatrain.

As it happens that particular pair of line-endings were 'extra' in the first place, in that they were made up of excess syllables caused by English for once being more concise, so changing the other end of the rhyme is not necessarily a major problem. I remember that I struggled massively with it in the first place and was not all that sold on the result, so a rewrite might be no bad thing, depending on how it comes out...

I managed to get the first four lines of the second verse of All Shall Be Well today relatively easily, compared to my extreme struggles with the second half of the first verse (and I'm still not entirely happy with the outcome of that one, looking back on it). But the next quatrain came fairly quickly once I'd worked out that I could rhyme "sombre note" with "underfoot" -- which is frankly no more approximate than some of the rhymes in the original and sounds perfectly fine in the context of the music. And unsurprisingly it's very much easier to work backwards from the rhyming ends of lines than forwards (as in the previous verse) by translating the meaning of the entire line and then trying to fill in the spare syllables with something that rhymes and doesn't mangle the sense...

I had some trouble with the first line, not least because I'm still not quite clear about the function of Пусть there -- *not*, I think, the "Let it be so" that it normally represents, but more along the lines of "what if"/"even if". At any rate I have chosen to use 'poetic licence' to treat it as such!

First attempt at the first line:
"Though seemingly existence nears its ending"
Subsequently improved to
"Though life may seem upon the point of ending", which is a nice example of how you can translate the same thing twice in the same metre using the same rhyme-scheme and come up with multiple differing versions :-)

I realised this morning, on coming across a copy of "Jo's Boys", that I couldn't actually *remember* the crackfic idea that I'd had for a crossover of something or other with Jo's school set-up in "Little Men" -- who were the couple I'd vaguely envisioned as filling in for Amy and Laurie as the generous rich relations, and what canon had it been?

Light suddenly dawned again in the middle of my singing practice tonight (concert in a week and a half, alas). It was of course the crackfic idea about Athos' school for gentlemen( Read more... )

How can it be *this* difficult to translate four lines of poetry? :-(

( Rhyme and reason )

(Meanwhile I'm listening to an interview with the lyricist, Leonid Derbenov, who is cheerfully talking about turning out four or five new songs in appropriate styles on command...)

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Translators' humour: https://russievirtuelle.com/textes/humour/traducteurs.htm
(from someone who has translated a *lot* of Russian lyrics, including the entirety of the musical Собака на сене featuring Mikhail Boyarsky's song -- but hasn't attempted this one!)

1. Donne-moi d'abord le contexte.

2. Il me faut le contexte.

3. Non, c'est pas possible de traduire ce mot-là sans le contexte, donne-le moi enfin!
( Read more... )

On reading the French version of the earlier chapters (this being the rather tediously lengthy chunk of Fronde activity which the film omits entirely :-p) I noticed somewhat to my embarrassment that d'Artagnan explicitly *does* take Raoul 'home' with him to his lodgings on the rue Tiquetonne after the boy gets mixed up in the rioting, and leaves him shut up there in Madeleine's house for some time in order to keep him out of trouble. Since he does this without a moment's qualm almost immediately after Athos leaves for England, it clearly doesn't make much sense to have him embarrassed subsequently by the mere idea of lodging Raoul beneath his mistress' roof ('what would the Comte de La Fère have thought?')

So I probably need to go more explicitly for my original image, which was the idea that what d'Artagnan considers and rejects is the expedient of having Madeleine 'mother' the bereaved boy on his behalf ("I don't know how to give him what he needs now" -- but a woman's touch possibly might).

I *think* I've finished my Porthos-fic (which is of course going to need a title, although its filename is clearly going to be 'Porthos'!) I'm not sure that I've entirely captured Porthos' 'voice', either in speech or in thought-patterns, although there were intermittent bits that I was pleased with in that respect -- I may need to go through and try to simplify my convoluted syntax a *lot*...

I'm thinking of running this together with "If I Should Die" as an AO3 'series' under the name of "To Save the King", since they are basically both in the same continuity, although this one is much more obviously AU -- ironically enough, given the genesis of the fic, I'm afraid that in this situation Aramis probably *doesn't* ever carry out his commission to pass on Athos' farewells, because the story turned out to be very much about a rift between d'Artagnan and Aramis that hadn't even existed at the point when I set out to write it, and which would have made any such interaction feel impossible :-( I did know that Aramis was busy 'having a life-crisis moment', part of the idea for this fic being that maybe you could 'save' Aramis, in the same way that I did for Javert, by inflicting a canon trauma -- in Aramis' case, losing a friend -- on him at a much earlier point in his character arc, when he still has the moral and mental flexibility to change. But I didn't 'know' (until d'Artagnan unexpectedly threw it into conversation...) that this was because the Gascon was blaming him for not having prevented Athos' death :-(
( Aramis' faith )

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( Fic length )

As predicted, I found myself somewhat adrift after Porthos finishes his anecdote about how he and Athos first got to know one another, because I simply hadn't thought up any more to the sequel past that point; normally I only start to write down a fic when it comes to a good end, and with this one I had instead stopped short in the middle of the 'telling myself a story' stage. And I only had four pages left at that point, with no idea where the story was going to go :-(
But d'Artagnan then came out with something completely unexpected (for the second time), and I had a fresh development that tied satisfactorily into what had gone before, and could --on the very last page of the notebook! -- both be linked back into Porthos' previous memories of Athos in his very first days in the musketeers, and sort out some of the extra complications I'd set in the way of a happy ending. The main trouble is that it *is* a pretty random reaction, even if it was genuinely something that came up without planning as an in-character response, rather than the author desperately trying to perform a segue to an arbitrary plot point...