Igenlode Wordsmith

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...

---

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... )

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... )

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'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.

---

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

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... )

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.

Looking up my Russian pie recipes, I note that my cookery book (written and published by an Englishwoman in 1989) takes it absolutely for granted that the Ukraine is at the heart of Russia, e.g. "The Russian tradition in bread is said to be at its strongest in the Ukraine, the country's proverbial breadbasket"...

I have been singing 19th-century русские романсы from an old book I picked up somewhere, and had a lot of trouble deducing from the Internet that the 'A Tolstoi' who was credited with the lyrics was in fact neither the famous Tolstoy of "War and Peace", nor the Alexei Nikolaievich Tolstoy who wrote "Aelita", nor even Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy, who wrote ballads and historical drama in the mid-nineteenth century (and all of whom were distantly related; here's an interesting vampire story that the latter wrote -- in French -- in 1839, long before "Dracula": The Family of the Vourdalak). Due to the fact that Russian song credits are given in the genitive, with the words or music being 'of the author', I eventually realised that the lyricist is actually implied to have been a woman, "A. Tolstaya".
( there were clearly far too many assorted Tolstoys running around Russia )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCzPx32ufDo


Whoever did write it, this is a simple and beautiful lyric:
( lyrics )

Margaret Drabble on learning German:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/11/14/german-lessons/

What I was writing when I was actually in my teens (after which, owing to circumstances, I more or less stopped writing poetry altogether).
Lyrical verse:

The midnight moon rode full and clear
Above the sleeping hills; and bright
It laid its cloak of gleaming light
Upon the country far and near.

At dawn the birds began to sing;
And growing glory in the East
Shone golden through a pearly mist
To gladden every living thing.

Now day is fine and fair to see,
A sun-drenched spring-like Easter morn;
But after such a night and dawn
How could this beauty fail to be?

( Read more... )

Middle school poetry (ages eight to eleven), transcribed with difficulty from a pencilled notebook rapidly becoming illegible.

Not my most shining years, I think; it starts off juvenile and tends to the pretentious, although at least I was precocious in my timing. To judge by the effusions of fanfiction.net, most people go through this stage in their teens...

---

The rails are humming:
A train is coming.
The rails are singing:
Another train's bringing
Thousands of people
All out for some fun
And back they'll come again
When the day's done.

(I do actually vaguely remember that one!)

Walking in the country lanes
In between the hedgerows
Strolling through the flowery woods
'Mong lots of lovely flowers.

Hear the skylark singing
High up in the heavens
See the sheep all running
With the tails swinging behind.

(That dates it -- they all have their tails docked nowadays! Also... 'mong. Ouch.)
( Read more... )