Igenlode Wordsmith

I randomly listened to one of the chunks of the four-part "27 Years After" Soviet Musketeers documentary ( and I can definitely understand a lot more of it than I could what I first encountered it )

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† I was extremely excited to discover a couple of weeks ago that "When I Was Athos" was actually about to be republished in print form via a crowdfunding scheme, having, according to the funding blurb, only been available in 'samizdat' form -- I stumbled across it while chasing his Kino-horoscope back in June, via an unlinked reference on an old Livejournal blog entry about the making of the film, and by a massive coincidence had pretty much just finished reading my way with incredible slowness through the online version a couple of days before I heard the news.( Read more... )

I have another Boyarsky song stuck in my head now (and weirdly, I can't find the crude online translation I'm *sure* I saw for it when I first encountered the song and was desperate to know what was going on -- maybe it was just the YouTube auto-translate? At any rate I can follow most of it now from the lyrics and my memory, however obtained, of what it is *supposed* to mean...)


( Read more... )
( Tomatoes )

This new batch of Russian lessons are definitely different in style and emphasis (and, alas, in sound quality) from the preceding ones. A much higher focus on formal grammar (or at least verbs) rather than the conversational/lifestyle vocabulary of the previous batch, I think, and in consequence much simpler sentence structure. It gives me the feeling of having skipped back to the starting lessons... until I get asked to repeat back the dialogue, at which point I realise that while I have a perfect passive understanding of it, I don't know the different tenses and constructions accurately enough to be able to reproduce them on request, and flounder :-(
https://youtu.be/BWmZP1SJLZU
"This is Petya. He is writing a letter. He was writing yesterday and he is writing today. Now finally he has finished writing his letter" -- that sounds like my sort of letter... or email, for that matter :-D

(Wow -- Russian students had to bed down with *three* people sleeping in one small room, and get up at seven a.m.? I thought Americans and their mandatory 'room-mates' had it bad!
On the other hand they get a sizeable selection of savoury breakfasts. Except for Lida, who apparently just wants cake :-p And yes, she is *gorgeous*...)

( Captioning )

After spending so much time referring to YouTube's auto-generated transcripts to try to decipher Russian (they are basically a timestamped listing of all the auto-generated subtitle text, I think, so they enable you to look back at the context of an entire phrase as opposed to just the handful of words visible on the screen at any one time), it dawned on me a couple of days ago that it is of course possible to read the transcripts of *English* text as well. Which is particularly useful in the case of videos which are basically a voiceover with marginally-related images screened for visual appeal, because it is possible simply to read the transcript and not bother to actually listen to the speaker at all, especially if the title appears to be clickbait :-p

It's the equivalent of playing the sound back at 6x speed, without the high-pitched gabbling effect :-) Of course the text isn't formatted into neat sentences and proper names are often weirdly mangled, but it makes it possible to skim through to the actual relevant content, if any, and/or go even faster in order to ascertain that there isn't any...

In Russian, ironically, reading the transcript is actually considerably *slower* than simply listening to the entire video. ( Read more... )

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... )

"Mesdames, Messieurs, bonsoir— good evening ladiss and dzhentlemens" :-D

(It's an interesting error to make, because it suggests that he does actually know the word 'gentlemen' rather than just reciting it phonetically, and realises that it is *supposed* to be plural, but not quite how!)

I also appreciate the appropriately stiff and restrained body language, as versus the flamboyant hand-kiss for the French ;-)

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...

εὕρηκα! I have it!
After being completely stuck on my last verse last night (I should have liked to rhyme 'angel' with 'salvation', but unfortunately I think Derbenov is actually referring to God when he talks about the Earth also having its own guardian) I got rhymes for all the translations on my way to market this morning: 'guardian'->'protector', 'stretch out'->'extend', 'invisible'->'undetected', and 'end'... simply 'end' ;-D

And from that I was able to work backwards quite quickly to fit in the whole thing...

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 :-)

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...