Igenlode Wordsmith

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...)

Oof -- now compared to that first half, that was intense... ( Read more... )
I do remember the final line from the book: "I have a son, and therefore I wished to live"...

(And the episode is still not over, apparently -- but that's about as much as I can take in one chunk!)

I'm still struggling with "Twenty Years After": the film managed to cover a vast chunk of the book in a few scenes, although the adaptation must have been made slightly more tricky by the fact that they had decided to omit both Planchet and Grimaud from the first film and therefore could not use them here, at a point where in the book their roles are actually rather significant! Sadly this means we also miss out on Rochefort escaping and being rescued by Planchet after being wrongfully imprisoned by the Queen -- quite a turn-around for the characters, and a point at which we get to appreciate the reality of the throwaway comment at the end of "The Three Musketeers" about Rochefort and d'Artagnan eventually becoming genuine friends. ( Read more... )

What I did, however, manage to find was the lyrics to the two songs which occur in these first couple of episodes, which enables me finally to understand the context to the intriguing lines of the chorus that I did succeed in catching by ear alone :-)
https://textys.ru/lyrics/12/Mushketery/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest
(Always tricky, because my keyboard won't let me *type* Cyrillic -- hence the need for a 'real' dictionary! -- but only cut and paste it, which makes searching online very awkward indeed.)

The song about honour (Наша честь) was so catchy that I thought it must be a repeat from the first film, and spent some time going through the various war and friendship songs there trying to identify it in the hopes of locating the lyrics in the subtitled copy! But it isn't; it seems to be a genuine original for this film, and I managed to track it down online.
The translation here is pretty awful so far as I can tell, but it's enough to prompt me through the important bits of vocabulary so that I can more or less parse it on sight myself without the use of the dictionary.( Read more... )
And the other chorus that struck me was the oddly optimistic one that plays as d'Artagnan is saddling up and preparing to ride out in search of his long-lost friends: "И кончится все хорошо". It turns out to be about a guardian angel, and very poetical -- it's not surprising I couldn't make out the context.
"И кони ржут, и кровь рекою льется" -- the horses, of course, are not laughing but neighing, and the blood flows in rivers... but in the end all will be well. The angel does not sleep, and all this will pass -- and in the end all will be well.

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( Your top genres were: 24% 'Russian pop', 23% 'Russian chanson', 5% 'classical music', 5% 'New Age music' and 5% 'Russian rock' )