Igenlode Wordsmith

It eventually dawned on me that the mysterious phrase on the bottom of my handwriting worksheets was the Russian equivalent of the infamous quick brown fox that jumps over the lazy dog -- a short sentence that includes all the letters of the [Cyrillic] alphabet :-D

съешь ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю

(Eat more of these soft French rolls, and drink tea!)

---

I *think* I have finished the BBC Musketeers one-shot that I started halfway through December... after struggling with my final line over the dread of how other people's fetishes might choose to sexualise something that very much wasn't intended to be 'shipping' :-(
( The BBC characters )

I am currently wearing a ridiculous number of layers (thermal vest, heavy brushed-cotton shirt, thin jumper, sleeveless hand-knitted tank top, heavy roll-neck Aran pure wool jumper given to me after it had shrunk in the wash from XL to S, silk scarf under the roll-neck to keep the neck of the jumper clean, fluffy novelty scarf wound many times over it -- and a similar arrangement on my lower half, ( Read more... )

Since the temperature outside my bed was 49F I didn't feel like getting up until finally forced to do so by the demands of my bodily functions, so spent a further three happy if somewhat mindless hours watching uploads on YouTube from Russian channels celebrating the New Year with archive footage, Project Zomboid playthoughs (a game I have never played and shall never be able to play, but for some reason find entertaining to watch), and, by an inevitable process of intersection, Project Zomboid videos *in Russian*... the game being popular enough to have generated its own circle of players there, and even its own Project Russia setting, which remaps everything in the game to a 1990s Russia instead of 1990s USA (the game developers are not, in any case, American, so the original setting reflects zombie movie culture rather than anything else ;-)

After which YouTube proceeded to suggest to me an hour-long interview with Mikhail Boyarsky from 2007, which turned out to be, as so often with the lively Boyarsky, highly entertaining... and also turned out to be completely without subtitles of any kind, either English, Russian, or auto-translated, as I discovered about 15 minutes in when I actually wanted to check what had just been said ;-) ( Read more... )The great thing about Boyarsky as a performer is that he has absolutely no embarrassment and no inhibitions :-D)

† "Mama"....



At any rate I am feeling unusually pleased with myself for once -- and almost ready to gird my loins and tackle the broken-spined paperback 1960s/70s Penguin "АБВ of Russian" (ABV -- the first three letters of the Cyrillic alphabet) that I have just acquired, with an eye to formal grammatical study!
(Never mind grammar, there are words that I don't know in the very first lesson: 'school-desk', 'blackboard'. This is what happens when your vocabulary acquisition consists of words like "honour", "sword" and "hand-to-hand combat"... :-P)

Edit: heating is on. Temperature in here now 54F -- am sweating a little!

I watched another 'graduated comprehension test' in four levels, which confirmed to me that I am indeed somewhere between 'B1' and 'B2' in terms of listening comprehension; I can understand everything up to the B1 level, and can follow the meaning of the B2 conversation without being able to understand every word of it, provided that I look at the subtitles. Which is an interesting brain-quirk, given that objectively speaking I have spent far more hours *listening* to Russian than reading Cyrillic over the last few months... but apparently words are still easier to recognise in their written form, even in a foreign script!

I subsequently did the exercises from Chapter 2 of Colloquial Russian and made a ridiculously large number of mistakes (at least where the answers were provided in the back of the book for comparison), to the degree that I felt I ought to go back and do the whole thing again an hour or so later. Which I successfully did without mistakes this time, but probably as much simply from memory of the corrections as from actually having mastered the material...
( Mistakes )

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 ;-)

Two verses of the pirate ballad ("Ballad of the tipsy gunner"? It seems to have a weirdly irrelevant title) now more or less complete, although neither rendition is as good as I would have liked. But I'm definitely stuck into translating it now.

*sigh* Oh, Boyarsky, what are you getting me into?

(Or, as the football fans of St Petersburg Zenith -- of which he is a passionate celebrity supporter -- put it in this home-brewed d'Artagnan-chant: "Hey! Boyarsky! We have returned! A thousand devils!" ;-D)

This performance made me laugh out loud (though I didn't realise until afterwards that it was supposed to be Baron Munchausen, which means that silliness can be expected).

The Baron is trying to get a priest to marry him to Marta, but unfortunately there seems to be some question as to whether he is already married or not. ( Read more... )

I'm still working my way through the 1970s broadcasts for learners, and got a jolt with Episode/Lesson 23 (out of 30). We have another change of host, another very young teacher-like woman in place of the affable young man in the sports jacket, and a distinct change in style; this film feels almost surreal in comparison to the straightforward story-telling of previous episodes, with its deliberate jump-cuts as things appear in the frame that weren't there before, and its flashback structure, signalled (but initially unexplained) by stylised slow-motion and massively over-the-top swelling music.
( Read more... )

I've just come across the Romanian version of the film "Ma-ma", or the tale of the wolf and the five little goats (made as a tri-lingual production, from which I've seen clips in Russian of Boyarsky as the Wolf, and about half the film in its BBC English version); it is noticeably different not only in the soundtrack but in the lighting, timing and composition of each shot. So it's true that they really did re-shoot the film three different times on the same set, exactly as in the days of early sound films when stars like Anna May Wong or Buster Keaton were required to repeat their performances in multiple languages -- and apparently with different directorial choices to suit the target audience...! ( Read more... )

I have been watching the excellent (and moving; it starts off as romantic comedy and acquires considerable thought and depth) 2020 film "Elsa's Land", probably Veniamin Smekhov's final screen role -- unless someone else comes up with a project sufficiently compelling to entice him away from his own preferred pursuits -- and so far as I can see very probably, at the age of 79, his debut as romantic lead ;-)
I think I originally learned of the film's existence when YouTube started showing me its (subtitled) trailer:

( 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 )