Writers who use imitative harmony + the movement of their language to evoke meaning are so great to re-read once you’ve learnt this language, if you’ve read them in translation before, it feels like the best reward. I’m reading Annie Proulx in the original for the first time, and so much of her writing style was just not salvageable by French translators (< my condolences), because she intertwines sound with meaning so often, at least in Close Range, and French just doesn’t sound the same! so by translating the meaning you’ll sacrifice a lot of the style… It reminds me of a haunted house book in French that also made me think “haha RIP translators” because it made great use of sound—a lot of “u / eu / ou” to create a sort of sinister howling effect in some sentences, and one sentence about a closed door used “i” and “rr” sounds to give an ominous “creaking open” sensation without actually opening the door in the text…
This kind of thing always makes me reflect despairingly on how many authors I’ll never get to appreciate fully as I can’t read them in the original, but I’m glad to re-discover Annie Proulx at any rate! I mean compare the sound of a phrase like “a hundred dirt road shortcuts” to the French “des centaines de raccourcis, des routes de terre”… First of all the English phrase sounds clippety-cloppy, it sounds like hooves on a dirt road in a way that’s very hard to preserve in a language without syllable stress, but also the French language demands that you turn it into ‘a hundred of shortcurts of roads of dirt’, so it’s best to dilute it into two phrases, and you just lose the clippedness. It sounds less tight, more leisurely.
Same for the phrase “the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts” vs. “la plaine fauve encore marquée des ornières laissées par les chariots des pèlerins.” That’s a 54% expansion ratio and once again you turn the tight clippedness of ‘grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts’ into ‘grooved with the ruts left by the wagons of the pilgrims.’ You just can’t avoid it, French words have to hold hands in a long procession rather than being stacked like pancakes on top of one another. And sometimes it makes for lovely stylistic effects too (*), but it doesn’t fit the style of a text like this one, which uses rhythm and sound in a very un-French way—rhythmicality in French tends to rely on long flowy phrasings rather than the potholed ruggedness this story demands. (I saw a NY Times article describe it as Annie Proulx “mining the ore of language out of a gritty Wyoming rockscape”)
The rhythm of this whole bit is so neat, you can snap your fingers along with it: “hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog…”
The French version is not finger-snapping material but you can tell the translator did her very best to preserve the author’s intention by creating interesting rhythms in French as well. For “hard orange dawn” she could have kept close to the original with, say, “la dureté orange de l’aube” but instead she chose to turn ‘hard’ into a four-syllable adjective (éblouissante / blinding) to end up with a noticeable rhythm—“les aubes orange, éblouissantes,” one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four (and she made ‘dawn’ plural for the same reason.) She wasn’t able to preserve the g/r alliteration of “GRooved with pilGRim waGon Ruts” (although her translated phrase also has a lot of R’s) but she did preserve the ‘sss’ alliteration of “Smoking Snaking duSt” (“pouSSière Serpentant Sur le Sol”). Even with languages as close as French and English, for every stylistic effect you can save you have to sacrifice a few, or replace them with opposite effects which align better with your language’s notions of literary style (like with the orange dawn bit, doubling the length of a tight phrase so it can sound rhythmical).
You can tell all throughout the book that a lot of thought and care went into respecting Annie Proulx’s writing choices and you still end up with sentences that sound and move so differently. You get to see the limit of translation when authors fully lean on their language’s syntax and melody to help convey meaning, like poets do!
(*) Re: English stacking words and French linking them—this reminds me of an essay I read by an English translator of Proust who despaired of this difference in the opposite direction—saying some long, descriptive phrases in Proust with articles & prepositions linking words, and commas linking phrases with regularity, read like telling the beads of a rosary. And the sensation (or a lot of it) had to be sacrificed because English just does not use as many linking words as French, information is conveyed in a more economical way, so a lot of these sentences with a hypnotic rhythm like “the A, of the B, of the C, whereby the D, of the E, on an F” were often not achievable with English syntax or created redundancy (e.g. having to use ‘that’ or ‘which’ 5 times when French used different tool words). But he said he did try to form sentences that had this continuity, and meditative quality.
I don’t have a conclusion to this post other than to say something precious will be lost if human translation is replaced by AI translation, because literary translation involves creativity and ambiguity and aesthetic considerations and a dimension of instinctual feeling for your own language and the original style, and I don’t think any amount of data and processing power and artificial neural networks will yield the flavour of literary quality that emerges from human sensibility and care, from someone reading a sentence and thinking “this feels like hooves clippety-clopping down a dirt road” or “this feels like rolling the beads of a rosary” and starting from there…
Chapters:
3/?
Fandom:
Final Fantasy XV
Rating:
Mature
Warnings:
Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters:
Original Leonis Character(s) (Final Fantasy XV), Prompto Argentum, Nyx Ulric, Original Kingsglaive Character(s) (Final Fantasy XV)
Additional Tags:
Bad Things Happen Bingo, Over The Shoulder Carry, Gun Violence, Bombing, Implied/Referenced Terrorism, Blood and Gore, Pre-Canon, Hurt/Comfort, BAMF Prompto Argentum, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Series:
Part 1 of BTHB
Summary:
“Fucking—Goddamnit, Prompto! Come on!”
“But—”
Rosea didn’t wait for him to finish his protest, ramming her shoulder into his stomach with all the strength she could manage. She was lucky that he was distracted. He was deceptively heavy for an overgrown stick-bug, all tight muscle under his baggy clothes. She hooked her arm behind his knees, pressing down hard to prevent him from kicking her in the face as she continued with the little forward momentum she still had. No time to listen to his protests or fight him on it. Get out. Get out. Get out.
The one-word text from her dad was the only thing on her mind.
BUG
Bad Things Happen Bingo: Over the Shoulder Carry
[id: Bad Things Happen Bingo, with only “Over the Shoulder Carry” filled, marked by a gold Star of Lucis.]
"10,000 Ways for Sidious to Die" should be a fandom-wide event. (Even the people who enjoy his over-the-top villainy, would also enjoy over-the-top villain deaths.) Here's one: he trips and falls into one of his million pointless ornamental pits. Here's another: he dies of an infected skin rash caused by his nasty-ass robes which he never washes.
I äm just going to leave you with this epic stuff.
@pomrania you should totally write and publish this. Maybe 10,000 is a bit too ambitious, but you could write 365 stories: one for each day of the year… :’D
Grievous accidentally killed him during the Battle of Coruscant the better to please Master Sidious.
Xenomorphs get him
He falls and break his neck during the fight with Yoda.
Slipped on the edge of his Drama Bathrobe
Set fire to his hair
Poked a stick at a grizzly bear
Taught himself how to fly
Ate a two week old unrefrigerated pie
(I know, that’s the Dumb Ways to Die song, but I felt it was appropriate haha)
Death by Noghri
Thrawn plays on Palpatine underestimating him and wipes the Imperial palace off the map
Death by improperly cooked moonglow (someone actually did that in a fic I read last year and it was the most hilariously ignominious way for him to go it was so fitting)
Hmmm…. So many choices, so many ways this could go. Would you like de-aging, with one of Nyx, Cor, or Drautos de-aged and the others having to deal? ♥️ Good luck!!
Though the original Personnel Files were for the other glaives, we thought we’d do one with Nyx to try to gather his information in one place. We hope it helps!
Two weeks until Nyx Week! Where has the time gone? /o\
Interesting results again. While we had out usual 1/3 agreement on tumblr, this week to Galahd holding most important one specific astral, the story on Twitter was much different! There, over 50% chose that Eos or Etro was the most important figure in Galahd’s religious views. Very interesting!
We come with a simpler question this week as we pull into the home stretch. Background reading is the facebook blurb that says Regis rescued Nyx as a child, and Nyx feels he must pay him back for that, the movie script where Nyx says, “I owe [King Regis] for taking me in. I was lucky. There are people in Galahd who weren’t,” and the newspaper article on Nyx’s cork board that says Regis promised regular patrols of Galahd in exchange for Galahdans joining the Kingsglaive. Given that information, and the regular reminder that there are no wrong answers…
Last week had another interesting array of answers, with a good third of the responses choosing the same topic, but the others spread out over most of the other answers. Thanks so much for everyone who elaborated on why they chose what they chose! It was interesting to hear your thoughts and characterization.
(Nyx gets hugs of his choice for everyone who decided understandably said he was too depressed/stressed/anxious/busy to have a hobby.)
Back to a more worldbuilding question this week. There are only two more weeks of us posing inane questions and getting to hear everyone’s thoughts, and then it will be time for the big event! Good luck to everyone participating in Nyx Week, even for just a single day. Any Nyx content is appreciated. ^_^
We’ll have a deep dive up today or tomorrow, but until then…
What is/are the most important religious figure in Galahd?
We have four weeks until Nyx Week! This is not a drill! Where has the time gone?
Last week had a rather bell-like distribution, with a little over a third of the votes agreeing that greater that 70% of the Glaives are Galahdan, and a little under a third saying that at least 50% are. So majority Galahdans seems very popular! Though most people seem to believe there are at least a mix.
Our quiz this week is pretty much completely subjective. We would love to hear your thoughts or your additional ideas, but unfortunately we can only include nine options. So…
We missed a lot of options because of the limits of the polls, so please feel free to add ones we missed! We just want to stir conversation.
You could also add whether you think Nyx enjoys doing the hobby or watching it (especially for performance art like music) or which particular aspects of the category you think (maybe you think Nyx is great at drums but cannot hold a tune or act, for instance)
Whatever your choice and your thoughts, good luck with all your dreaming and creating, and thank you for enriching fandom.
“spicy pillow” jokes aside, I think @flowerkrone’s tags deserve a serious reply:
#my old phone looks like this on my shelf lmao #im too scared to touch it to throw it away #idk what trash this even goes into when its at this point
The pillow-shaped object here used to be the phone’s battery. It’s not a battery anymore. Now it’s a balloon full of corrosive, pyrophoric chemicals and hydrogen gas and it’s one puncture away from burning your house down. I am 100% serious. You should be scared to touch it.
But you gotta touch it, because you gotta get it out of your house before the pressure builds up to the point where the balloon pops. This isn’t going to happen soon – there is no need to panic – but it will happen eventually.
And, indeed, it doesn’t go in the ordinary trash. You put this in the ordinary trash and you’re gonna set the garbage truck on fire. Don’t do that to the garbage collectors, their job is hard enough already.
The first thing you need to do is get a fireproof container. The most common household item that qualifies as a fireproof container is a cast-iron cookpot with a cast-iron lid – often sold as a “Dutch oven.” Any other cooking container that’s unreactive, has a very high melting point, and has a lid made of the same materials will also work: enameled or stainless steel, Pyrex with glass lid, etc.
However: Do not use a pot with a PTFE-based non-stick coating. If the battery does explode, the fire will probably be hot enough to degrade a PTFE coating, producing toxic smoke. (Not that you should breathe the smoke from the battery fire either, but PTFE breakdown products are worse.) Do not use a pot made of aluminium or copper. The fire might even get hot enough to melt those.
Whatever container you use, you might have to throw away along with the phone, so don’t use your good Dutch oven for this. Go to a thrift store and buy a cheap one.
Once you have the fireproof container:
Gently pick up the phone and put it in the fireproof container. If possible, gently tape the phone to the bottom of the container to prevent it from bouncing around. Don’t put any padding in there, that’ll just make a fire worse if it does happen. Put the lid on and tape it shut.
Put a label on the container, something like “DEFECTIVE LI-ION BATTERY – FIRE HAZARD”.
It is now reasonably safe to move the container around. However, if the battery does explode, the container is very likely to leak smoke and get hot, so keep it in a well-ventilated area and away from things that will be damaged by heat. Don’t leave it exposed to the weather, either.
You need to find either a hazardous waste disposal site, or an e-waste recycler that
will accept defective Li-ion batteries. I can’t help with that because I
have no idea where you live.
However, your local fire department, if you have one, will probably be happy to help. Call their non-emergency number. Nothing is on fire yet, so this isn’t an emergency, but things that can easily start a fire are still within the fire department’s responsibilities. Tell them you have a phone with a bulging lithium-ion battery, you put it in a fireproof container, and you want to know how to dispose of it safely.
If the fire department tries to tell you this isn’t dangerous or it’s okay to throw it out in the regular trash (with or without fireproof container), hang up on them and write a cranky letter to your local government representatives, then keep looking for a proper disposal site.
When you do find a a hazardous waste disposal site or an e-waste recycler, call them and make sure they will take defective Li-ion batteries, before showing up. That’s also a good time to ask if they will let you have the fireproof container back.
Reblog to save lives.
[id: photo captioned “pillow :33” and showing a cell phone with the interior exposed, where the battery has swelled as if it is an inflated rectangular balloon. Barely visible on the battery is a symbol of a trash can that has been crossed out.]/end id.
