Igenlode Wordsmith

We never celebrated 'the new year' as anything special at home (that would be the Scots and their Hogmanay...) but the Soviet Union did, complete with decorated trees, coloured lights, snow, and all the otherwise-Christmas trappings... presumably a nice non-religious state-sponsored alternative :-p

And so here is a charming "New Year's Song" performed in the TV studio by Veniamin Smekhov and Evgenia Simonova, from a 1980s broadcast...


(I gather it was her husband and father-in-law who were responsible for the lyrics and melody respectively :-)

( Translation )

I have just noticed another passage added(?) by the English translator into his version of "Twenty Years After", apparently in order to clarify d'Artagnan's line of thought (unless it comes from a different source edition...)

( In England we were beaten )

---

Edit: yes, it is clearly a case of different editions!( Read more... )

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

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)

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 )

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...

Whie hanging around on hold for an hour I took the opportunity to read some more of the French version of "Twenty Years After", going back afterwards to run a skim-comparison with the online English version I'd read. The differences really are quite considerable, but what gets me are the occasional sections where the translator has not just abridged the text when rendering it into English, but instead added in something that simply doesn't occur in the original.

— Ohé ! qu’est-ce que cela ?	"Oho! what’s that?"
— L’Éclair, dit le patron.	"The Lightning," answered the captain, "our felucca."
— Nous sommes donc arrivés ? demanda Athos en anglais. — Nous arrivons, dit le capitaine.	"So far, so good," laughed Athos.

I can see, after a fashion, the point of adding in the extra clarification as to what, exactly, the "Lightning" is, especially as for some reason the preceding allusion to the ship's name had been cut out, so it hasn't been mentioned for a while.
But changing Athos' quiet query into a jolly and out-of-character aphorism that isn't reflected anywhere in the original text (where a large chunk of the content immediately following that exchange is then omitted) just seems *odd*.

( Multiple French editions )

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.


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