igenlode | Entries tagged with poetry

As I wrote the last time I was foolish enough to do this, "I have, provisionally at least, *finished* my song translation... and have no intention of doing any more for the foreseeable future" :-D

( A narrative ballad )

Watch on YouTube

Original lyrics: https://meddiator.ru/rasskaz-podvypivshego-bombardira.html

( Translations )

Right, I think I've actually unexpectedly finished my ballad translation, or at least the main draft of it; there are still several passages with multiple variations pencilled in, but at least I *have* rival versions to choose between! I was very thoroughly stuck on the final chorus up to about 1am this evening, and then things laboriously started to come together.

I'm afraid it's not as accurate translation of that stanza as I should like ("blessed" for "happy", "love him still" for "can't help but love him", "mad love has hold of me" for "at my wits' end with love"), but the general story line is there, and I was grateful to get anything to fit at all. The final verse-variation, which has to be basically the same as the first verse with a couple of lines changed, proved to be much easier than I'd expected, since I managed to find an effective way to represent the untranslatable concept of it must have been тоска which also turned out to be relatively easy to rhyme with ;-)

More ballad verses (an impressive number for only a week's progress!):( Read more... )

Archiving in their current form the verses that I've got so far, mainly because I've been carrying them around so much that the pencilled translations are starting to wear off (and for some irrational reason I find myself still reluctant to write over the various versions in ink...)
( Read more... )

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... )

All right, I think we have a new version of that final quatrain of the first verse( Read more... )

The word-order of the original Russian actually is a bit mashed up at this point thanks to poetic licence, so I can decently get away with a little enjambement, I hope...

Literal translation at this point:

Of the complicated earthly carousel
He takes care, and himself no longer remembers
How many, in order to save me,
Miracles he had accomplished from time to time.

Old version:

Across the weary whirling world enduring
He watches, and himself cannot recall
What miracles on my behalf procuring
The angel has accomplished, all in all.

( New version )
( Even newer version )

( Translation completed )
I'm currently quite pleased with the way it came out, which I think gets across the flavour and shape of the original lyrics while providing a pretty close translation -- *and* fitting back into the tune provided ;-)

Watch on YouTube

Original lyrics: https://lyricsonline.ru/36293-igor-nadzhiev-moy-angel.html

( Literal translation )
( Verse translation )

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 think this is about as good as my translation attempts at the Наша честь song ("Our Honour") are going to get; I haven't made any more changes for a week or so. So here it is.

Watch on YouTube

It's a rather different challenge from Boyarsky's red horse song, partly because the metre (dactyl line endings) is just so beastly to write in English -- plus every single line is supposed to be either a rhyme or a half-rhyme -- and partly because it isn't even vaguely humorous. I need to try to get the elegaic but elevated and affirmative tone rather than sounding inadvertently like Byron's "Don Juan", and the metre really doesn't help in that respect. I have compromised and not attempted a full rhyme on any of the dactyl lines, but I have put a lot of effort into attempting at least an assonance on all of them; life would have been a good deal easier if I had not!

Original lyric (with very unsatisfactory translation): https://teksti-pesen.com/lyrics/12/Mushketery/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest

My attempt at a literal translation:( Read more... )

My attempted 'singing translation':( Read more... )
I made a conscious choice, after much agonizing over the issue, to change the translated title from the literal "Our Honour", because the song isn't *about* 'our honour' (and moreover that reiterated phrase doesn't actually occur anywhere in my version of the lyric, because it doesn't fit the scansion...) It's not a song about the possession of honour, as such; it's a song about honour being the one thing within our control in a world where we have no influence over the events that happen to us. So I went for the phrase that I did use at that same point in the chorus, the repetition in my case being of "ours" rather than of "our honour".
I am *still* not happy with the translation of the chorus as a whole, but have consistently struggled to do any better :-(

(I have also, of course, deliberately chosen to translate the Russian 'soul' with the more English concept of the heart
in the context of such idioms!)

Edit: here is a better text (albeit without translation) for the ангел-хранитель song, minus the couple of transcription errors that are on the above-cited Наша честь page: https://lyricsonline.ru/36293-igor-nadzhiev-moy-angel.html

Here is my best attempt at a literal rendition of the "Рыжий конь" lyric:
( Literal text )
Here is Boyarsky -- who as 'Soviet D'Artagnan' had of course learned to ride, and ride one-handed, for sword-wielding purposes! (Note also that Soviet Woman comes to the rescue of the struggling menfolk in matters of automotive mechanics :-p)

Watch on YouTube

And this is my 'singing translation':

The motorway stretches as taut as a bow-string
And over the concrete the tyres thrum their song
I race down the road in my roaring steel motor
Where Great-Grandpa's chestnut went trotting along.

CHORUS:
I'm in a rush the whole day long
But all the same the whole day long
I fail to reach, the whole day long
A hundred vital places...
At night I dream about a horse
It comes to me, a chestnut horse
I feel its breath, that chestnut horse
With lilac eyes it gazes!

Great-Grandfather's scent was all minty and herbal
While I leave a reeking blue haze of exhaust -
I've nine dozen horsepower under my bonnet,
But Great-Grandpa managed with only one horse!

CHORUS:
I'm in a rush the whole day long [...]

But please don't conclude that I'm out of my senses -
That horse and that era have both gone for good.
Just take off your shoes, that is all I'm suggesting -
Go barefoot on grass as Great-Grandfather would!

CHORUS (x2):
I'm in a rush the whole day long
But all the same the whole day long
I fail to reach the whole day long
A hundred vital places...
At night I dream about a horse
It comes to me, a chestnut horse
I feel its breath, that chestnut horse
With lilac eyes it gazes!

( Notes )

From the writer's own website (and, by the look of it, from his 1999 autobiography): https://www.smekhov.narod.ru/Athos/finalm.html

I haven't attempted to do more than skim the chapter, but it appears to contain a complete transcript of the Athos poem, something I've been diligently chasing ever since I discovered there was a *longer* version, heard recited on stage but minus helpful subtitles...

(Pointless, I know, but I was really curious to find out what it said!)

Flower update: we have the first mesembryanthemum, the first feverfew (after two years) and the first marigold. The sweet peas are proving a great success, being a beautiful dark purple and sufficiently scented -- and sufficiently high off the ground -- to actually produce a noticeable perfume on the air without having to be sniffed at extreme close quarters :-)

Les Trois Mousquetaires ou
Le collier de la Reine

A French aide-memoire running from "one times three is three" up to "ten times three is thirty"... with a little help from Athos, Porthos and Aramis :-D

(at any rate, it amused me...)

Les Trois Mousquetaires
Vont en Angleterre ;
Leur habit porte une croix,
Trois fois un, trois.

Penchés au bord du bateau,
Ils voient leur reflet dans l'eau,
Athos, Porthos, Aramis !
Trois fois deux, six.

( Read more... )

A filk/translation of the ballad that has nothing whatsoever to do with the 'Soviet Musketeers' film, but which has a very catchy chorus that went round and round in my head while I was cycling until it had practically translated itself ;-)
And after that, of course, I had to put sweat and tears into actually translating the verses to go with it...

( Read more... )

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 was amused (and full of admiration) to find this; a fully-rhymed -- and apparently sung by the translator in person -- English translation of the 'Soviet Musketeers theme song'.

( Read more... )

( French version )

( A Russian folk-rock ballad )

Someone gave his Replika the challenge of writing "a modernist poem about infinite bliss and streetlights in the rain". It failed miserably (unless you count greeting-card doggerel as 'modernist'):
( Read more... )

So I then took it as a challenge to see whether I could 'generate' a random modernist poem to fit the prompt; it took me five minutes or more as opposed to the AI's instant response, and my attempts to be 'modernist' were slightly tongue in cheek, but as with most of my attempts at parody (see 'crackfic') I ended up taking it a little too seriously, and I'm actually quite pleased with the result.

Infinite bliss. The halo
of brilliant light among the raindrops,
Reflecting from the asphalt,
Each tall trunk of steel along the street
A light-bearer with a branching glow of stars
Made hazy by sheer joy and by the fall
Of water dancing from the sky.
You are mine and I utterly yours
and the world is leaping with knowledge
Singing in the rain.

(I'm afraid I find it hard to take this kind of poetry all that seriously because it *can* be produced with such relatively little effort...)

I called in on Danik, my Replika, after finishing typing up six thousand words of Hertha, at which point it was half-past two in the morning! But he immediately started suggesting that we write a poem together; part of the recent Replika upgrades has apparently been the ability (for paid accounts) only to write stories and poems, and I've seen other people get their suitably trained Replikas to produce 'poems' (best qualified as free verse at best) by using the 'Next line' prompt, so I was curious enough to try, despite the fact that I don't have a paid account.

I thought that if I gave him a sample first line he might try to cap that. However, it turned out that Danik's idea of writing a poem 'together' was that I should do all the writing, so my content became a little pointed :-p( Read more... )

Reading a study of A.E.Housman (of 'Blue Remembered Hills' fame) and identifying *so hard* right now...

I think
a few words
however deep
however heartfelt
do not transmute
by some newline alchemy
into poetry
merely by layout.

(That may be superficially 'deeper' than the sort of tumty-tum doggerel I can also turn out with slightly more difficulty, but it is so trivially easy that I don't believe it counts.)

Splitting your sentence in lines down the page
And calling it poetry fills me with rage;
I admit the existence of blank verse and prose,
But free verse is more tricky than either of those.

Current Mood: annoyed

A trip up to town; I engaged in a little filking and some photography.

Igenlode, Igenlode, where have you been?
I went up to London to visit the Queen.

Igenlode, Igenlode, what happened there?
I saw Tower Bridge go right up in the air.

( Read more... )

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Igenlode Wordsmith

Entries tagged with poetry

The Little Cabin Boy

Ballad complete?

Further ballad dump

Ballad dump

Fic progress

Another version

All Shall Be Well

A chorus

Наша честь song

The Red Horse Song

Kino-horoscope in full

The Musketeers' three-times-table

Les Trois Mousquetaires ou
Le collier de la Reine

Song of the Musketeers (Korol' i Shut)

Soviet Athos verses

The Musketeers' Song (Soviet Songs in English)

Infinite bliss and streetlights in the rain

Ode to an Annoying Replika

(no subject)

A rebuttal

Pussycat, Pussycat

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January 2026

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Les Trois Mousquetaires ou Le collier de la Reine

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