Boyarsky speaks English

Oct. 1st, 2025 11:31 am
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] igenlode


"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 ;-)

Another version

Sep. 30th, 2025 12:42 am
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] igenlode
All right, I think we have a new version of that final quatrain of the first verseRead 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 )

I don't have it yet after all

Sep. 29th, 2025 09:10 pm
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] 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...

All Shall Be Well

Sep. 27th, 2025 11:37 pm
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] 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 ;-)

Original lyrics: https://lyricsonline.ru/36293-igor-nadzhiev-moy-angel.html


Literal translation )
Verse translation )

I have it!

Sep. 27th, 2025 10:01 am
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] 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...

More unexpected connections

Sep. 26th, 2025 05:16 pm
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] 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... )

Fic - Retreat, Move Forward - 3/3

Sep. 26th, 2025 01:46 pm
evandar: (Default)
[personal profile] 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 [community profile] iddyiddybangbang!

Part 1, Part 2

Read more... )

Fic - Retreat, Move Forward - 2/3

Sep. 26th, 2025 01:46 pm
evandar: (Default)
[personal profile] 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 [community profile] iddyiddybangbang!

Part 1, Part 3

Read more... )

Fic - Retreat, Move Forward - 1/3

Sep. 26th, 2025 01:48 pm
evandar: (Default)
[personal profile] 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 [community profile] iddyiddybangbang! I asked for amnesty and then Ao3 went down two hours earlier than anticipated.

Part 2, Part 3

Read more... )

From the horse's mouth

Sep. 26th, 2025 04:52 am
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] igenlode
Christopher Lee himself on sword-fighting in film (with demonstrations!), and the advantages of working with stuntmen as opposed to actors :-)

Half a second verse

Sep. 25th, 2025 08:44 pm
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] 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 :-)

Yuletide Nominations

Sep. 25th, 2025 06:23 pm
thisbluespirit: (dept s 2)
[personal profile] 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 [community profile] 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/

Aarrgghh

Sep. 24th, 2025 11:12 am
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] 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."

English embellishments

Sep. 23rd, 2025 11:07 pm
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] 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 )

Starfall Stories 49

Sep. 23rd, 2025 09:32 pm
thisbluespirit: (viyony)
[personal profile] thisbluespirit
A [community profile] rainbowfic piece I finally posted a couple of weeks ago:

Name: On the Interpretation of Dreams
Story: Starfall
Colors: Warm Heart #17 (Honesty)
Supplies and Styles: Nubs
Word Count: 1891
Rating: G
Warnings: None.
Notes: Portcallan, 1313; Viyony Eseray, Osmer Nivyrn.
Summary: Proof that Viyony also takes Leion's advice from time to time.

On the Interpretation of Dreams

Fic: A Family Affair (Winslow Boy)

Sep. 21st, 2025 08:34 pm
thisbluespirit: (winslow boy)
[personal profile] thisbluespirit
As I mentioned about a month or so ago, I did some AU_gust prompts, starting with flash fic for the prompt Romance, using the UC generator to get a summary for The Winslow Boy. It was a bit of a complicated summary for flash fic, and it's just taken me about, um, seven weeks to straighten this out into being a reasonably more comprehensible bit of AU nonsense than it was at the start. idk why. Anyway, also for [community profile] genprompt_bingo & two [community profile] allbingo squares (for two different bingo fests of theirs, that is, I'm not cheating).

A Family Affair (1472 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Winslow Boy (1999)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Robert Morton/Catherine Winslow
Characters: Catherine Winslow, Robert Morton (Winslow Boy)
Additional Tags: AU-gust | August Writing Challenge 2025, Alternate Universe - Regency, Regency, Unconventional Courtship Generator, Accidental Baby Acquisition, Stranded
Summary: Catherine Winslow's day is getting worse by the minute.

False panic

Sep. 20th, 2025 01:11 pm
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] igenlode
Had a panic when I thought that first my computer and then my monitor and then my remote-controlled power socket had failed -- but in fact everything seems to be working now, so I don't know what had happened while I was out. (The power socket was definitely lighting up and the display definitely wasn't showing anything...)

Possibly a brief power cut to which the monitor objected by shutting itself down.

The kale is still being stripped by caterpillars; I have caught three or four so far, but they are almost impossible to find until they are already big and juicy with leaf.

On a more cheerful note, I have however succeeded in translating the first four lines of the first verse of the 'guardian angel' song (breaking with tradition by starting at the beginning this time) -- only another twelve lines to go!

The story of a history book

Sep. 19th, 2025 12:28 am
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] igenlode
These are my kind of people -- every second person on the bus is busy reading ;-)

This second dozen of TV broadcasts for learners has a different host, a friendly young man rather than a bright young woman with the air of a primary-school teacher, and is undoubtedly but indefinably more difficult than the first set. Read more... )
It does come up with a couple of memorable observations, though: the lady at the lost-property office comments that the books in their possession represent the most popular books among readers, since they are the ones most often lost on public transport and hence the ones people most like to take with them :-) And the owner of the second-hand bookstall uses the sales slogan "Buy an old book, learn new things"!

A chorus

Sep. 18th, 2025 10:40 pm
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
[personal profile] igenlode
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 :-pAnd 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...

Trick or Treat Exchange Letter

Sep. 17th, 2025 11:55 pm
evandar: (Default)
[personal profile] evandar
Dear Author,

Hello! Thank you so much in advance for writing for me. I can't wait to see what you create.

This letter contains a list of Likes and DNWs as well as a couple of prompts. If none of the prompts catch your eye, then write whatever you like. As long as it doesn't hit any of my DNWs, we're good.

Read more... )

Thank you for reading! I'm really looking forward to reading what you create for me <3
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