flemmings | Entries tagged with translation

Somewhere I picked up a battered paperback Nicolas Freeling Van der Valk mystery, and because I was in the mood for a portable mystery ie not on a screen, started reading it at restaurants. Meant to use it as bicycle reading but in the end finished it in one fell swoop of sofa-doku. When I say battered, I mean at some point someone had spilled sugary coffee on the back cover that got transferred to the front. Normally I'd put it in the recycle now, but it would seem that Van Der Valk mysteries are a rarity. Neither Kindle nor the library has buyable/ circulating copies, except for one. But you can get (some of) his other series. I'll give them a try, just to see. Kindle, because March is forecast to roar like a lion for at least the next two weeks, and libraries may not be get-at-able.

As for this precious single copy, I could try a damp cloth on the covers and stick it back in a wee free library if it works.

Continue on with Walpole's letters in the slightly sniffy Everyman edition. I have another collection in a more readable, because larger, paperback but of course it's not where it's supposed to be. I've had both for 50 years, so high time I read the boring bits. Just, Horry is much more fun talking scandal than about the American Revolution, let alone the Seven Years War.

Have reached vol. 1 in my backwards reading of PMT. This is where the vicabulary gets not merely obscure but vague to the point of meaningless. Vice Fearless Leader tells me the Chinese translations often don't make sense either, so obviously the translator had the same problems as I do. Shall still be sad when I'm finished it..

Dank, grey, chill not cold. At least I got my Asia-going cards mailed. Since four weeks isn't nearly long enough in these latter days, they must be New Year's cards, and will with luck arrive around the Epiphany. And why does the arrival of the Three Wise Guys get called by the term for a sudden enlightenment, one wonders.

Last finished?

Wanted cozy mysteries so, having been reminded of the existence of Imogen Quy, I read the first two Imogen Quys. I had completely forgotten the plots in the nine plus years since I read them last, which is a nice way to read mysteries, but still disconcerting. I mean, *nothing* rang a bell in either book.

The Diary and Poetic Memoirs of Murasaki Shikibu
-- Bowring's translation makes her sound marginally less wet than whatever other translation I read her in, but Bowring's notes inform me that half the time any passage can mean its exact opposite, depending how you take it: largely, depending on who you think the unnamed subject of the sentence is. Am reminded forcibly and again of Seidensticker's comparison of Heian prose to the transcripts of the Watergate tapes. Without tone of voice and inflection, sentences in both often make no sense at all. Also the usual Japanese 'you have to know what it means to know what it means': the courtiers and Nixon's cronies did, so they did.

Reading now?

Ovidia Yu, The Frangipani Tree Mystery

Flann O'Brien, The Dalkey Archive
-- biking reading. I suspect that, just as there's a generation of American writers- or two, or three, or mumblety many- who want to be Ernest Hemingway, so there's a generation of Irish writers who wanted to be James Joyce. Either that, or all Irish writers think alike. (Irish-Irish, not Anglo-Irish, who are another kettle of fish entirely.) Which is to say, you try me, Mr. O'Brien, you try me grately.

Ima Ichiko, Hyakki Yakoushou 28
-- which I shall be working at for a while yet.

Next up?

Mh, well there's the other Ovidia Yu.

I feel in the mood for a thumping great book, so maybe Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell? Or maybe Sei Shonagon with Morris' notes beside me.

Last night's frustration dream was having an erotic scenario sabotaged because the dream protagonist, of uncertain sex, was unable to find batteries for their vibrator.

Someone else wants the library copy of Umibe no Kafuka. Do not feel like wading through the remaining 200 pages to get it done by Tuesday. Goodreads tells me I won't get any answers anyway, and I don't really want to read the translation. Especially since it appears Rubin translates 'boku no katai penisu' as 'my rock-hard cock.' Which may be the nuance included in using the English word, for all I know to the contrary. The yaoi I've read doesn't use a specific noun for it at all- the usual sore (that) and mono (thing)- but feels weird. I seem to recall having problems with Rubin before. But that leaves me with a 'what do I read instead?' Piles of manga, but manga print is small and I find manga dialogue much more difficult than straight forward prose. Oh well, there must be something.

In technological weirdness, my phone has taken to flipping any selfies I take of myself, left to right, and I can't figure out why, even by the time tested and, as I understand it, SOP of clicking anything clickable on the screen. Doesn't flip photos, just selfies.

Dear God but Piranesi is oogey-making reading. Like a bad dream or the faintest recollection of something else I read somewhere else but can't trace. For no good reason I think that something else is certain scenes in Hamabe no Kafuka, which doesn't read at all the same in English as in Japanese. In Japanese it's all quite straightforward, almost commonplace, because the language is, even when everything else is surrealistic. In English it's both oogey and menacing, and I'm not sure if that's due to the removal of the language scrim- which normally makes things look more resonant, not less- or the translator's word choice. Am not good at noticing stylistic choices in English unless they're anvil-to-the-head stuff like Lovecraft.

Waddell reminds me so much of (what I have heard about) donnish conversation in Oxbridge colleges- in-jokes, allusions, 'who needs no introduction' etc.

The port goes round so much the faster,
Topics are raised with no less ease –
Which advowson looks the fairest,
What the wood from Snape will fetch,
Names for pudendum mulieris,
Why is Judas like Jack Ketch?

Waddell at least is talking about more genial subjects than Larkin's smutty dons- well, I mean, Larkin, what would you expect?

"...But the new things are the anonymous lyrics, the glorious rhythms of

"O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina' and
"O admirabile Veneris idolum",
and still more significant in promise, the alba of the Vatican MS. formerly at Fleury, and "Iam dulcis amica" of the MS. of St. Martial of Limoges. The alba is more precious for its Provencal burden than for other merit: it still holds to Prudentius, and the cry might be to waken faithful souls rather than sleeping lovers, the enemy in ambush the Enemy of souls rather than the jealous guardian. But in its own exquisite phrase,

"Dawn is near: she leans across the dark sea".
For Iam dulcis amica, the quatrain halts a little, the rhythm wavers; Ovid's upholstery is in the background, a little the worse for wear. But its strength is in the sudden impatience with which the catalogue of attractions is thrust aside, the sudden liquid break like the first bird notes in the stuffy pedant-music of the Meistersingers:
Ego fui sola in silva
Et delexi secreta loca."
Maybe what she reminds me most of is Seidensticker's Tokyo diary, kept while he was translating Genji. It's the perfect companion to reading Genji itself, as Seidensticker chatters along about what he thinks of To no Chujo or Ukifune in between snarling at Mifune's obscurity and trying to find surviving bits of the Yoshiwara. The difference being that Genji is one book only, even if a long one; Waddell is referring to the whole corpus of medieval Latin lyric poetry, which one is supposed to have at one's fingertips. Naraba ii naa....

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/856189.html

And I did, late last night, at which a load lifted from my spirit.

Book is The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar. The blurb calls it 'a great mystical poem', 'an allegorical rendering of sufism- the secretive and paradoxical form of Islamic mysticism.' Cool! Reader, I bought it.

Reader, always look at the text first.

Because Conference is written in a Persian metre that has one rhyme-word halfway through the line and a second at the end, and the translators decided to express this through heroic couplets. And I am so very sorry but the heroic couplet belongs to the eighteenth century, to Dryden and Pope. It's the epitome of rationality and civilization, and once you get to Pope, of wit and flippancy as well: and neither at all is of any use to Sufism. Or what little I understand of sufism from reading this work, whose one virtue to me was all these stories about caliphs and their favourite male slaves. Oh yes- also learned that Joseph in at least one strand of Islamic lit is the avatar of desirable male beauty.

But otherwise, I feel like someone tried to translate Julian of Norwich into rhyming couplets.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/778782.html

Tuesday night I dreamed about H and her family leaving, all of us in tears and H a good ten years younger than she is, and their golden retriever running away and having to be corralled (except in RL they have two youngish... beagles, I think) and then riding with them part of their way, but we were in train tunnels that passed through bookstores, the larger than life shelves right by the windows, and the titles of Japanese books were flashing by and I thought 'Oh I wanted to read that one- and that-'

Woke to a cool placid Autumn Preview morning and

daegaer talking about the Gaiden and suddenly it was a dozen or more years ago in the calm happy days of fandom. Realize now that one thing that makes fandom calm is having one's attention focussed on fictional people and situations, not RL ones. Also the using another language thing. Time was I needed to have my dictionaries all handy here by the computer. Not any more.

(The H dream followed one about

petronia and her elegant Chinese friends, probably inspired by the cover of Full Fathom Five.)

When translations go bad

And here is the original Catullus 3 for those who haven't got it memorized. (Full disclosure- I only know the 'qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum' bit, because of the Hamlet echoes.)

My down the street neighbours put out a bunch of children's toys outgrown by their single and cherished child, with whom I have a speaking acquaintance from the time *she* put out some of her own toys. One was a Thomas the Tank Engine riding toy. (I suspect some basement cleaning here-- riding toys look to be six or eight years in her past.) I was so tempted to take it, if only to see the internecine warfare its arrival would have sparked in the toddler section. But it was gone by the time I got back from buying light bulbs, and probably a good thing.
( Further gifts )

Bought the first volume of Wild Sheep Chase when I was in New York last fall, as I said then, 'just to see what Murakami reads like in Japanese. As suspected, he reads like tapwater, but less sociopathic tapwater than in English where the lack of affect reads very unsettling indeed.' I must have been thinking of another Murakami work, because for interest's sake this afternoon I had a look at the English version in Book City. I may have to buy it. Because *that*, my friends, is what a translation should be. It doesn't even read like tapwater.

(I probably didn't mean sociopath either. One must be as careful with psychiatric terms these days as one had to be with religious terminology in the Middle Ages. Homoousios, not Homoiousios, transsubstantial, not consubstantial. Whatever the tech term is for a blunted emotional range, distance from reality, and lack of empathy, then.)

I detest the song Walking in a Winter Wonderland. Also Have a Holly Jolly Christmas, and OMG most definitely Santa Baby, and I hear them everywhere. But let's not talk of unpleasantnesses. The reality of a winter wonderland is yappari not bad at all.

If it were merely an overcast Toronto day with greige sky and grey streets today would be dispiriting indeed (aka why I could never live in Vancouver.) But a light snow is falling, not enough to impede locomotion, just enough to make a nice contrast to the greige and grey. Takes me back all the way to high school, the greyer city Toronto was then, and how much better the solid Presbyterian buildings looked in snow flurries. Takes me back too to the rare Tokyo snowfall, which believe you me impeded locomotion, as well as the Yamanote line and anyone mad enough to go out in a car. "I'm cancelling your class," my boss told me one Saturday after a two inch/ 5 cm dusting. "The mothers won't let their children out in such dangerous conditions." What madness is this, I wondered; and then on the way to the station observed what happens when non-snow tires meet two inches of slushy snow. Feared for my own life once or twice, there being no sidewalks in that end of Nerima.
( Read more... )

Jo Walton has a lovely explanation of why time goes elastic in Patrick O'Brian. For the uninitiated, there's not enough Napoleonic War for all the Aubrey action, so that several voyages of many months if not years all happen between 1813 and 1815. Her reasoning-- Stephen's almost mute assistant Padeen, who can speak well enough if it's Gaelic and who does canonically manage well with children and animals, is fae, and time works differently where he is. Does not explain why Jack's family back in England doesn't grow older, though.

Otherwise a grey rainy December Sunday, and I reading a translation of Soseki's short pieces, which has put me in a nostalgic mood. Rainy grey is what it did a lot of the first December in Tokyo, and Soseki was the first novelist I read in my intensive Japan period, back in the fall and winter of 1985. That doubtless explains why I always think of Meiji as cold and grey and invigorating; it's amazing how much the weather of Toronto influences my notions of an era.

The translation as ever is one of those 'but *I* could do better than that' ones, even if I couldn't. Still I see no reason to translate the word for the small drum that accompanies Noh performances as 'tambourine' even if that's what it looks like. Especially not when the player first has to tighten the cords on it. (I'm assuming the Japanese is shime-daiko; a shoulder drum would surely be called a drum?)

Mountain Travel by Du Mu

遠上寒山石徑斜     Far away on the cold mountain, a stone path slants upwards,
白雲生處有人家     In the white clouds is a village, where people have their homes
停車坐愛楓林晚     I stop the carriage, loving the maple wood in the evening
霜葉紅於二月花     The frosted leaves are redder than the second month's flowers

And here is a sung version with visuals.

(Google was adamant that I wanted Du Fu, but grudgingly gave me a few links to the right poet.)

Shall also quote an anonymous commenter: "Someone likened translation to a French woman. If she is beautiful then she cannot be faithful. If she is faithful, then she cannot be beautiful." Discuss.

Friday I discovered two of the translated Madara at BMV and polished them off yesterday. I don't know if Madara's really as dismissable as it comes across in English-- or to turn it around, if the resonances I sense in the later manga avatar are due entirely to Japanese scrim. The latter is a chronic anxiety of mine: 'there's less here than meets the eye, and if it was in English you'd realize that.' But also: what English does is flatten the flavour of the Japanese. The language's own resonances don't-- can't-- resonate any more. The content of any Japanese sentence may well be simple to the point of simple-minded, but as always in Japanese, it's not what you say it's how you say it, and even more importantly, what you don't say. Which is all lost in translation.

Also-- truly, translator guys, there's a difference between will and shall. The difference may be arbitrary by region-- still recalling the hapless 18th century Scotsman who fell into a river and declared, according to his English listeners' ears, that no one should save him and he *would* drown dammit; so they left him to do it. To render all (implied) futures as shall is wrong, and the work of someone who never uses shall themselves, humpf sniff.

That said, am fairly sure original series Madara is run of the mill shounen. The shoujo redact of blue has nuances, yes, but again a lot of the nuances come from not knowing who everyone is. (After seeing the stock relationships in Madara 4&5, watching Kaos abandon Jamila and his kids *just like that* is a surprise, to say the least.) So much of the mysterious feel to Japanese whatevers does come from a lack of context, I agree. Even so, it's a pretty manga and I *would* like the rest of it.

ETA: Read the afterword. Madara blue in fact is a series of doujinshi dealing with Kaos' after story. Is why all the satisfying emotional interaction cough cough.
( Cut for hauntings )

Arghities.

Yanno. Yanno. There are mangaka who devote their time (or possibly their assistants' time, if they have assistants) to drawing flowers all through their backgrounds, or the detailed patterning of a kimono, or even, in the good old days, scenes filled with buildings and people. Hirano Kohta devotes his time (or his assistants', which in his case he hasn't got because the English manga includes his desperate advert for same) to drawing piles 'n' piles 'n' piles of BODIES. Mutilated, stabbed, shot, bayoneted, garrotted, casually dismembered and above all BLEEDING bodies.

And a few corpses as well.

You'd think it'd get to him, yanno? ( But at least he's not responsible for the translation )

Something that occurred to me Saturday anent Kenren's 咲いて咲いて咲いて!! ('bloom bloom bloom' if you must have it literally). A problem I've encountered myself. 咲く is a common phrase in Japanese. You use it all the time. Bloom isn't a common phrase in English. Even when we talk about flowers on trees- which we rarely do, compared to the Japanese- common NAmerican English reduces it to a flat 'the whatevers are out.'
( Flowery things that grow on trees )

(Now I'll have the Whiffenpoof Song stuck in my head all day)

What 5 series/books/movies can you rewatch/reread time and again?
( How very odd )

With the clarity of the insomniac I suddenly realize what this reminds me of: this of course being 'watching a foreign series in a language I don't know at all from a culture I don't know well with specific cultural references I've never heard of through the medium of curtailed and uninformative subtitles.' It reminds me of Lacan's dictum about women and language: "they don't know what they are saying." Sure, women can *talk*. but we don't comprehend the symbolic order of language so we don't know what our talk means; and yes, I can discuss and interpret what I see on the screen, but what I see is an unclear, distorted, and culturally deformed version of what's there.

One argues from ignorance, always. Argh.

( Nostalgia: Oncle Jacques makes the children's heads spin )

More Waley:

Green, green,
The grass by the river-bank.
Thick, thick,
The willow trees in the garden.
Sad, sad,
The lady in the tower.
White, white,
Sitting at the casement window.
Fair, fair,
Her red-powdered face
Small, small,
She puts out her pale hand.
Once she was a dancing-house girl,
Now she is a wandering man's wife.
The wandering man went, but did not return.
It is hard alone to keep an empty bed.

"...from a series known as the Nineteen Pieces of Old Poetry. Some have been attributed to Mei Sheng (first century BC) and one to Fu I (first century AD. They are manifestly not all by the same hand nor of the same date."
( And then Ezra Pound got his hands on them )

So Waley translates a poem of Ts'ao Sung's, however you write that in pinyin (and unless you can write it in pinyin you can't find anything googling, evidently: certainly not how it's written in Chinese):

A Protest in the Sixth Year of Ch'ien Fu (AD 879)

The hills and rivers of the lowland country
     You have made into your battle-ground.
How do you suppose the people who live there
     Will procure 'firewood and hay'?
Do not let me hear you talking together
     About titles and promotions;
For a single general's reputation
     Is made out of ten thousand corpses.

I know this one from an idiosyncratic, quirky but to me immensely useful book of translations called Old Friend from Far Away by C.H. Kwock and Vincent McHugh. (Someone called it a lost classic. Glad I have a copy.) Quirky because of how they lay out the poems- which necessitates me using the unwieldy rich text format for this entry, because otherwise all spaces must be hand-coded, and god knows there are spaces. Also words written above and below the lines, which I can't do in RTF but, annoyingly, could in hand-code html.

Lowland hills and rivers
                       dragged on to the war map
              O lowland lowlands O!
Those groaning people!
how can they live?
                                       A turnip or two
                                       grubbed up
Don't talk to me
                                       about titles
                                          promotions
                                          all that slop
One general
pulling out a victory

                    leaves
                                   ten
                                   thousand
                                   corpses
                                          to rot!

There's a dialogue at the end of the book between the two translators where they talk about this poem:

V.MCH: What about that 'War Year' poem we did?
C.H.K.: Oh? The Ts'ao Sung? ... remember, we thought the original was pretty flat. Just another Confucian diatribe against war.
V.MCH: Yes, but we-- or I, rather- got pretty far off it. Why did we want to do it anyhow? Because it had that strong ending about the corpses?
C.H.K.: Yes. Do you have it?

V.MCH: Your literal version? Yes, it's here.

Marshland;/ rivers(&)mountains/ (have been)included/ war map
Lowland     territories                                    (into)

People;/ (in) what/ way;/ (could)enjoy;/ sticks(&)weeds
Population;          plan;            relish;

(I) request;/ you/ never/ discuss/ (military) promotion/ matters
     ask
One/ general;/ (after)achievements/ made/ 10,0000/ bones;
                                                             numerous; corpses
                                                             (have)dried up;
                                                               rotten

C.H.K.: Yes. And you remember when we sent it out round-robin with the other poems to the consultants... -sent the first finished version, I mean, Dr. San-su Lin and her husband Dr Paul Lin wrote us that the second line simply meant: "What can the (suffering) people do for a living now?
....
I like it. It's really better than the Mandarin.
V.MCH: Oh, it's a *poem* all right, in English. But that quote from an English ballad! And the way I kept playing that open O all through the first four lines. ... The taste's all right. But it's the furthest off an original we ever got.
You know, I feel now that almost any getting away from the text- anything you're not forced into, I mean- is probably a mistake. I wonder at myself. Why didn't I try harder to do something with that 'sticks and grasses' in line two? It's better than the turnip thing. And closer. To the fact, I mean. Everything happens in Chinese famines. Clay-eating. Cannibalism.

And here is

feliciter's translation, complete with graceful rhymes:

Lowland territories marked on a war map:
Poor souls, to lose their joy of life.
Prithee speak not of spoils, old chap;
Ten thousand deaths rise from one man's strife.

Have been rereading Waley's One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems- or possibly reading it for the first time, because I don't think I made it to the Po Chu'i (Bai Juyi) section last time. Nor do I have any idea when last time was, but I note that this book cost me $2.60 new, so it was a long way back.
( Cut for poetry and considerations of So much better than it is today )

Then it must be solstice fever or some especially malign astrological conjunction. I discount Christmas depression. Babies know nothing of Christmas depression and the babies yesterday were all simultaneously wired and inconsolable. Of course, it could be molars, and in their case I rather fancy it was.

However my molars have been with me for over half a century. That's not what's causing the current bout of dark night of the soul. YesAsia tells me last night that my copy of Woxin has shipped, though the webpage said it wouldn't be released until January 9 and their email had said expect it around the 18th. And all I can think is 'It's the wrong version' though it *says* English subtitles American edition, and 'Watch Customs and the shipping firm screw me for another $40 on this.' Gloom doom life is a howling wilderness, people still haven't chipped the ice off their sidewalks a week later and I wrench my knees inching across it, I can't bike the winter streets and even if I could my bike is a balky hard-mouthed beast, my hot water heater doesn't heat enough hot water any more, and we're all going to die.
( When I find myself in times of trouble part 2: A E Housman )

Yesterday afternoon the mug of the last few days blows away in a deluge and a restrained thunderstorm; the wind ripples the leaves, the sun appears among baroque clouds, and in the returned coolness I can think sensibly again. So of course the first thing I do is very sensibly go over to Markham St and spend upwards of $40 on English translations of manga I already own in Japanese; and then take me out to dinner to read them. Cause, you know, I just want to see what they're like. Curiosity emptied the bank account, is what.
( Results: pass with honours; could try harder; utmost fail )

So here's a translation of

flo_nelja's 100 Demons fic, kindly once-overed by her so I didn't reveal more of my woeful ignorance of French than is necessary, and dedicated to

xsmoonshine for the many many hours she spent uploading the 100 Demons TV shows for our viewing pleasure.

A Dragon in the Family

And now of course I have a certain conflation in my mind between the peck on the cheek in this story and the slurp on the cheek in episode 7 there, and, well. Not canon. Not canon. Not not not canon oh hell what did canon ever do for *me*? (goes off to plan truly yaoirrific fic.)
( Speaking of which )

I've wailed often enough about the Japanese tendency to call people ketchi and what a pain it is for a NAmerican to translate, when all notion of miserliness as a character trait has passed out of the culture. I'm not sure when that happened- post-war is my guess- or why, though I'm coming to a vague notion that in societies where few people are very rich, like Edo Japan and 19th century Britain or America, the notion of hoarding and not sharing and being ungenerous in general is not only more widespread, it's more in the forefront of people's consciousness. It's one of those vices that weakens the social net people depend on. Reach a certain level of affluence and it becomes less of an implied social crime. Misers existed and were condemned in the 1860s and had all disappeared a hundred years later, when the meaning of 'mean' had gone from 'skinflint' to 'unkind.' Misers existed- I think Howard Hughes was probably one- but it wasn't a character trait by then, it was a pathology, and no one was much interested in it. Japan took longer to reach that affluence and was always more of a mutual-dependence society, is possibly why the miser sense of ketchi hung on longer.

The current use of ketchi in fact takes in both senses of mean- niggardly and unkind, one who withholds out of malice or ungenerosity: but it bugs me that most people reading it will only take it in one sense. I could rant here about the flattening effect of American English, but I won't.

( But I *will* rant about 'greedy'. )

Shall link this old but classic entry from

bravecows afrai because it still makes me laugh so hard it hurts, especially

Oogenesis -- somebody really enjoying reading the Bible. (See oocorinthians, ooexodus, aarghrevelations.)

Carpel -- to complainl.

Histones -- kick 'im in ~.

( Semiotic despair and the inevitability of misreading )

I've always had difficulty getting a grip on the UK word wet, its precise connotations and characteristics. In a moment of synapses finally firing as they ought comes the satori realization: wet = drip. Why won't my mind always do that?

Continue to swim through Perdido. Am bemused that

nojojojo could finish this and and not Jonathan Strange, though I'm sure it's a question of what you're used to. Perdido continues to be a more human funhouse mirror reflection of Gravity's Rainbow for which, trust me, I'm grateful. First night after reading it I dreamed I was in Shakespeare's London, tawdry garish smelly and energetic version of same. Thank you, China (which surely isn't his name? though given what other stuff my generation pulled on its kids, it might well be.)

So I'm translating a Seimei story in which a lady abandoned by her lover goes off and asks a pair of dragon rain gods to turn her into an oni so she can revenge herself. Why ask dragons for this kind of favour? Who knows. That's what's in the noh play the story's based on. (Next question: does Yumemakura ever make up original stories in all that 'think think think'ing he does, or does he always crib from Zeami? Answer: do not ask.)
( Cultural considerations, plus spoilers for the story Kanawa )

amazon.fr has sent me my cent demons. This is nice. They tell me in the notice:

Le service de livraison utilise ne propose malheureusement pas de suivi des expeditions.

After five minutes' blankness and useless recourse to a dictionary, by dint of employing the same kind of semi-psychic ability that I often use to wrest meaning from Japanese, I *think* that *may* mean We do not offer a tracking service.

Anyone know for sure? she asks pathetically.

ETA: joyfulness from the wank communities, where someone dismisses a twit thusly: "At this point our man prematurely closes off the discussion threads ~~like a brat~~ and Xerne and I can't get our stab on. Oh well. Nothing would have come of it anyway. Fighting with this guy is like warring with that humongous baby in Spirited Away."

Bifocal silicon lenses. ( Cut for presbyopic chatter )

Oh, and google. Let me praise google again. ( How did one do research before google? )

I shall just mention, to mention, that Bleach in Japanese is a faster read than Bleach in English. This says nothing at all about my Japanese skills and everything about the WTFery of Viz's translation.
( Cut for thoughts on shounen WTFery in general )

Also the artwork is so much better in the original. The loss of detail in translations is one of those things I never hear complaints about, and should.

Hmph. I have finished vol 9 of Bleach. That only took me since May. I think I can see what people see in it, and I might too--

--except for the fricking translation. ( Translation frothing )

Because I feel ijiwaru I shall post the translation to the spring Gaiden episode that hasn't yet appeared online. Well, not on many people's line, whatever.
( In which karma is acquired )

I suppose I am cheered by the discovery that when Minekura is writing high style she too likes to end her stories with a big bow-wow of highflown rhetoric and allusive poetic phrases. Doubtless one can do that more respectably in Japanese than English. 'A logic that made opposites into one, two sides of the same thing. Good and evil. Nothing and something. Hope and despair. Past and present.' Mh. "La Tour Eiffel- c'est tout parce que c'est rien."

But since I've been there and done that and occasionally in my diminished fashion still do, I'm left with a certain failure of interest in translating the last four paragraphs of this thing. Shall break for lunch and Napoleonic dragons.

Have been translating all weekend so far and have pinched a nerve in my right shoulder doing it. Proof that typing is every bit as debilitating as hefting babies, and the screen doesn't even love you back. Have also discovered, four pages from story's end, that once again the brilliant idea I had for a fic- now three pages long itself- came from the forgotten denouement of this Yumemakura story. Well, not the details, but only because I hadn't yet worked out the details of the fic. Still, it's a nicely chilling denouement and I look forward to finishing the translation.

But not now, because my shoulder hurts, and because once again I'm hung up on how-do-you-translate 呪, ju, which everyone here knows as a (magic) curse but which Seimei (and Yumemakura) use in a broader sense of more-or-less 'magic words with magical effect.' I mean, I'm translating it 'spell' (unless I translate it incantation) but maybe I should be translating it 'magic'. I dunno. Ju wo kakeru turns into cast a spell just fine, but magic has no such specific verb attached to it.

ETA: Have hit the crux that ends the night. Something cold/ shivery and like a sasakure, stands on end up (ripples up?) Hiromasa's spine on seeing Taizan Fukun. Five dictionaries, three of them J-J, assure me with maddening uniformity that sasakure is a) a hangnail b) a frayed end c) a frayed temper. In kendo, a splinter. *But* google "sasakure no you na" and there are people talking about their hidoi sasakure no you na feelings at, f'rinstance, bleeding heavily after cutting themselves accidentally on a razor's edge; or the top of the Nagasaki Memorial that just after the war looked like a crown of thorns or a sasakure no you na thing. I'm stumped. I can't even begin to think what's meant here.
( Message )

My translator's conscience pricks me. I have to wonder if Yumemakura's Seimei really sounds as much like Sherlock Holmes as he does in my translation. ( Read more... )

Meant to go to bed before 2 am last night but because I'm a geek I stayed up till 2 am tracking down the source of Tenpou's line in the last Gaiden episode. Because I'm avoiding translation I give you the result of my inquiries.

In Japanese it's 形ある物いつかは壊れる katachi aru mono (things that have shape) itsuka (eventually, some day) wa (emphasizing the inevitability of itsuka, I think) kowareru (break).

There's a lot of entries for that and even more if you do variants- itsuka alone or kanarazu (inevitably). Very few people cite sources. 'An old saying' 'a Buddhist saying' 'something they said in olden days- pretty smart, those olden days guys' and even 'some westerner in history.' It's a common saying, whatever, even if the exact source is obscure.

I'm pretty sure it's Buddhist and possibly riffing off the Noble Truth that all is impermanent. Alas, in Japanese the Noble Truth gets expressed by quite different kanji- 諸行無常 shogyou mujou- which a reader of modern Japanese might be tempted to take as All goings, nothing regular: the plight of

mvrdrk's chronically business-tripping World Traveller.

However in amongst the wps was a link to a jataka, tales of the Buddha's life, in which he consoled a grieving father with something close to katachi aru mono kowareru. Couldn't find an English translation, did find a paraphrase: "all conditioned realities are subject to dissolution." Er, yes. I guess that's what it's saying. The Japanese just didn't want to say that all things melt.

It's that kowareru. Rather as mujo's jo has two meanings (normal, regular as well as- by extension? or originally? continual, unending) so with kowareru. It usually has the meaning of break into pieces or break down, but religiously the meaning has to be the more diffuse dissolve, come apart- thaw and resolve itself into a dew, even. There just seems no way to say it in English without likening the whole physical world to alarm clocks. "All that has form inevitably will come apart."

The problem, if you consider it a problem, exists in Japanese too. A good 90% of the webpages quoted 'katachi aru mono itsuka wa kowareru' before advising their readers to back-up their hard drives. Because everything that has a body will break. Nod nod, common sense that.

(No, of course I didn't write this to explicate a troublesome line in the Gaiden. I did it so I could tell you about a Japanese witticism. Because I can't resist a pun. Like the car in The Phantom Tollbooth that you have to be silent if you want it to move, because it goes without saying.)

What a useful man Brust is, she says in pleased surprise. I find that I can occasionally mitigate the idiocies of Japanese in translation through a judicious application of Paarfi's style. "Before sipping, while sipping, and after sipping, his red lips floated their usual small smile" thus turns into "Before doing so, and after, and indeed in the course of the action itself, his red lips curved in their customary little smile."

Now if I could only do something about: 'His bent left knee had fallen to the side, the right knee stood up, and on that right knee he was resting his right elbow and on his right hand he was resting his right cheek." Yumemakura clearly always wanted to be a mangaka, but he didn't have the Latin.

I've been vaguely aware for the last six months or so of people saying WA4, oh where is the translation of WA4, does anyone have a translation of WA4? to which I respond FINGERS IN EARS LALALA I DON'T HEAR YOU. The trouble with WA4? It has this important untranslatable word I can't decide how to translate. The word might well be the 'kotodama' 言霊 that shows up on the third page of the story. The spirit/ soul of words and how saying a thing can make it real and a bunch of related animistic Japanese ideas. Except kotodama isn't the problem word. It's the 'tsumaranai' that also shows up on the third page and that I couldn't translate without a footnote so it's easier not to.

Equally I was desultorily translating a Yumemakura story but couldn't bring myself to go back to it. Partly a problem of how to phrase a longish quote from Konjaku Monogatari in middle English to parallel the medieval Japanese of the original and *not* sound idiotic when I translate Yumemakura's modern Japanese paraphrase right afterwards, and partly because translating = yuck boring and-besides-my-teeth-hurt. (They do. It does. Whichever. Ow ow ow.)
( And kickinpants gave me a manga for Xmas )

A long weekend (I *will* not work Monday, I *will* not- and other famous last words.) Third week of headcold now moving into lungs, provoking (again) spasmodic coughs and dynamite sneezes; heavy, logey, head hurts hurts hurts. What to do? What can anyone do?

Why, translate Yumemakura, of course!
( God, why me? )

Ballpark translation for the latest gaiden ep, as provided by

radiofreebanri. Take with a few grains of salt- had to guess a few kanji, didn't find explanations of what might be a Buddhist sutra reference, and I have *no* confidence in that last page, which contains at least two level 1 Japanese Proficiency Exam grammar points.
( Under the cut )

I love to sneer at other translators' idiocies because it makes me feel better about my own gaffes.
( Other stuff )

I'm sure someone has already done a scanlation of this, never mind a translation, but for what it's worth here's my version of the latest Gaiden episode.
( Long, behind the cut )

I actually like translating more than I think I do. When I'm doing it I hum along nicely and feel the way I used to feel etc etc. Very nostalgic, very 1999. But when I'm not doing it the idea of doing it is total yada, and so I postpone doing it. Like exercise: I refuse to accept the fact that I like what I think I shouldn't like in spite of all experience to the contrary. And that, foax, is why the good that I would do I continue not to do, and the evil that I would not do I continue to do. And there is no health within me: but that's another, if related, problem.

(I wish lj gave you a list of tags as they give you a list of user pics, because I can never remember what mine are.)

I wonder if there was the same outcry in FMA fandom over the translations as there was in Saiyuuki? I turn the subtitles on, from laziness and inability to understand the alchemical terms just hearing them, and I keep noticing that what I see doesn't match what I hear. Ed says 'The day we decided to leave we burned down our house.' The subtitle says 'The day we left home we burned down the family house and all the memories in it-- because some memories aren't meant to last.' Farewell Japanese understatement, hello hammer it home with a mallet overkill. Some officious translator or, more likely, editor has a very low opinion of western intelligence.

I shall quote ~~Pratchett~~ Gaiman again, just for the fun of it:

"It's not Brits who think American readers are a bunch of whinging morons with the geo-social understanding of a wire coathanger, it's American editors."

( Whinging )

Oh come on, you great sodding lump. Just finish the damned translation. Seventeen more pages of dialogue you could do in your sleep. Do it. Do it. Do it.
( And Max said No. )

Ah well. I suppose I'm happy that my mind remembers something I read four months ago in Japanese and trots it out at need when I want to write a story. I just wish it came with a citation so it doesn't look so much like plagiarism.
( Betrayal by subconscious )

I spent the evening reading Edogawa Rampo, another book unearthed from the Box in the Basement. In that I finished the book, and in one evening, this counts as accomplishment.
( On being dated or demented )

As Flow would have it, I was reading over that thread at

mikeneko's about the Horror! the Horror! the Horror! of Canada Post/ Escargot Canada's new regulations when there came a merry timble at the door- on a Sunday- surely the Greeenpeace people have better things to do on a freezing weekend before Christmas than come soliciting, must be kids selling chocolate bars poor bunnies, better limp down and get them in out of the cold for a minute. Did, could see nothing out the window in the upper door, must be very little kids what can their mothers be thinking of, open door... on nothing, and a white van taking off... and two packages on the porch. So

mikeneko and

incandescens, worry no more, your contraband has made it multas per gentes et multa per aequora, through many peoples and over many waves, to my doorstep. (And so did yours earlier,

mvrdrk, but of course you put 'no' on your label so I know you weren't worrying. ^_^)

( But Canada Post needs to learn about spoiler warnings )

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