hidden_passages | Member Posts

After the brief biannual period of wearing my short-sleeved jumpers I am now considering doing the full changeover to winter clothing; I am wearing dressing-gowns (albeit summer ones) in the morning and snuggling down under an eiderdown and two blankets at night, which thinking about retrieving the third one from upstairs! And I really need more vests, even if not quite full thermals as yet.

( Swan River daisy and marigold seed, and pink Linaria )
( Chives and spring onions )

( Poppies )

( Wildflower trough and tomatoes )

( Chillies )

( Basil )

thisbluespirit

I will try and make a post again soon, but am now recovering from parental visit (due to me and the ME/CFS, not any fault of said parents). Yesterday, though, I got lucky at the BNA while searching for a newly-discovered address for an ancestor's siblings and found him accidentally involved in a plot to steal a painting by Petrus van Schendel. (London ancestors are v hard to find, especially when they have common names, but the joy of London is that every so often your relatives are briefly entangled with someone or something famous).

Anyway, the fraud was discovered, I was rewarded by a description of two rooms in a relative's house (29 St Mary-at-hill) and I thought some of you might enjoy the resulting magistrate's hearings:

( A Cunning Plot )

igenlode

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:

Watch on YouTube

( Read more... )

igenlode

Some stuff I stumbled across when looking for information on what letters in the 1640s actually *looked* like: https://honorandintrigue.blogspot.com/2017/11/early-modern-price-list.html
Note that this is for 1620s France rather than 1640s, but the relative prices at least should give some kind of idea...

Information on letters: https://honorandintrigue.blogspot.com/2016/12/envelopes-and-letters-in-17th-century.html

igenlode

I have (finally!) just started upon my crackfic "Little Gentlemen" story (as with my usual crackfic, I envisage a total lack of humour :-p) And while checking on the description of the chateau at Bragelonne, I have just noticed that Athos appears to be in possession of some very unusual trees ;-)

In Chapter 15, we are told that as d'Artagnan approaches the house, he perceives it sur le fond d’un massif d’arbres épais que le printemps poudrait d’une neige de fleurs. Very picturesque, except that, constrained by history, Dumas proceeds to inform us some fifty-five chapters later that, after the passage of a relatively short period of time, the date at that point is January :-p

(But as we already know, consistency in dates is not the author's strong point...)

Edit: I have just noticed that there was likewise a magnificent display of flowers visible from the windows of Athos' dining-room, so at the time of writing Dumas evidently envisaged the scene as taking place later in the year! I don't *think* it can have been the previous autumn, as all the events of the novel (from Athos' arrival in Paris immediately following d'Artagnan's visit and Raoul's departure for Flanders and encounter with Mordaunt along the way, followed by Mordaunt's interview with Mazarin and departure from Boulogne ten days later, followed by King Charles' capture within a week of Athos and Aramis' arrival) seem to have taken place within a remarkable brief timespan...

igenlode

I spent an incredibly frustrating hour at lunchtime trying to teach a woman how to knit -- I have never known anyone so utterly fail to *understand* the process before. ( She just could not *see* the basic principle of how it was supposed to work )

igenlode

Watch on YouTube

"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 ;-)

igenlode

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 )

igenlode

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...

igenlode

( 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 )

igenlode

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...

igenlode

I just stumbled across Lois McMaster Bujold's account of a visit to "The Congress of Russian Science Fiction Writers" in September 2000. https://hell.pl/szymon/Baen/Cryoburn/Travel%20Memoirs/Russian%20Impressions.doc
And after finding an online site to convert it out of Microsoft Word format, I was astonished and amused in the first page to stumble upon a description of the in-flight movie as a Russian-made American Western starring "[and rather delightfully, I might add] M.Boyarski and O.Tabakov" (d'Artagnan and Louis XIII)! I'm pretty sure this must be the movie that I've seen multiple stills from, cited as having originated Boyarsky's now-iconic public image with broad-brimmed black hat and black clothing in his screen role as the character "Chërniy Jack" :-D

( Read more... )

evandar

Title: Retreat, Move Forward
Author: Evandar
Fandom: SVSSS
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Gen, Angst
Pairing: Pre-Shang Qinghua/Shen Yuan
Warnings: Self-esteem issues, AU - No Transmigration, References to Depression
Disclaimer: I do not own SVSSS and I am making no profit from this story.
Summary: It’s on a whim that he checks his email inbox afterwards; he usually throws himself into writing straight away, desperate to get his words out and his deadlines met, but he was unexpectedly prolific yesterday and he can afford the pause.

He deletes most of them without thinking. He reads a couple of newsletters to remind himself that he used to be part of a community once, then deletes those too. His mouse is hovering over the mass delete function when a subject line catches his eye: Paradise Hills Writers Retreat: Your Reservation.

AN: Written for the 2025 round of

iddyiddybangbang!

Part 1, Part 2

( Read more... )

Current Mood: creative
Current Location: Hanoi - Vietnam
Current Music: Planet Zero - Shinedown

evandar

iddyiddybangbang!

Part 1, Part 3

( Read more... )

Current Mood: creative
Current Location: Hanoi - Vietnam
Current Music: Planet Zero - Shinedown

evandar

iddyiddybangbang! I asked for amnesty and then Ao3 went down two hours earlier than anticipated.

Part 2, Part 3

( Read more... )

Current Mood: creative
Current Location: Hanoi - Vietnam
Current Music: Smoke - PVRIS

igenlode

Christopher Lee himself on sword-fighting in film (with demonstrations!), and the advantages of working with stuntmen as opposed to actors :-)

Watch on YouTube

igenlode

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 :-)

thisbluespirit

I'm sorry, I still haven't really tried catching up properly, and next my parents will be here for a week, although that may actually not stop me posting some things.

Anyway, it's nearly

yuletide again! I'm not at all sure whether I shall be able to do it or not, but it's looking more likely than I thought, so I have had to consider the important issue of nominations.

Other people have nominated Welcome to Our Village Please Invade Carefully and The Winslow Boy, so my 5 (five!!) are looking like this:

* Enigma (Movie 2001)
1. Hester Wallace
2. Tom Jericho
3. Mr Wigram

* Indigo Saga - Louise Cooper
1. Indigo
2. Grimya
3. Nemesis
4. Fenran

* Mimic (1997)
1. Susan Tyler
2. Peter Mann
3. Chuy Gavoila

* Time Police Series - Jodi Taylor
1. Jane Lockland
2. Luke Parrish
3. Celia North
4. Matthew Ellis

* Wish Me Luck (TV)
1. Matty Firman
2. Colin Beale
3. Liz Grainger
4. Faith Ashley

I was VERY tempted to put down The Schoolmistress (BBC Radio 1991) but I decided that I shouldn't make my Jeremy Northam problem quite as bad as all that. Maybe next time! (Also because I'm not sure what I would request beyond "more shenanigans," really). I might swap out Mimic, though, idk. (I think it would be a great one for the Hurt/Comfort exchange or maybe Chocolate Box because I want a v specific thing (not an unreasonable specific thing), but OTOH I do not seem to be managing more than Yuletide, if even that, at the moment. Hmmm.

I don't know what I'll actually request if I do sign up, as there look like being a fair few other shiny things in the tagset already, just from the nomination coordination post. \o/

igenlode

Still struggling to contact a human being via a morass of menus. I've already had to wait an hour for an automated check to confirm that there is nothing technically wrong with my Internet connection before being able to pass this stage.
"You are caller number... forrdy-seven in the queue."

igenlode

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 )

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Hidden Passages: Gothic Horror/Romance

Member Posts

The turning of the year

A Cunning Art Fraud, Complete With A Goose

They translated me into Russian

Possibly useful period information

The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la

No knitting

Boyarsky speaks English

Another version

I don't have it yet after all

All Shall Be Well

I have it!

More unexpected connections

Fic - Retreat, Move Forward - 3/3

Fic - Retreat, Move Forward - 2/3

Fic - Retreat, Move Forward - 1/3

From the horse's mouth

Half a second verse

Yuletide Nominations

Aarrgghh

English embellishments

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