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Cut your teeth on gritty portraits for the local 'zines
So the detailed grammatical explication of the Sumerian dog joke reminded me of something which I was not able to place at the time beyond the fun of translation, but fortunately I figured it out while making myself lunch after a hellaciously early appointment and yet another abortive attempt to acquire new glasses.
Vivian looked miserably at her few lines of crossed-out and rewritten green writing. "One large blacksmith threw four coffins about," she read.
Jonathan hurriedly stuffed a doubled-up lump of pigtail into his mouth. "Oh, did he?" Dr. Wilander said placidly. "To show off his strength, I suppose. Carry on."
"So that they turned into four very old women," Vivian read. "One got rusty for smoothing clothes. Two became white in moderately cheap jewelry. Three of them turned yellow and got expensive, and another four were dense and low in the tables—"
"So now there were ten coffins," Dr. Wilander said. "Or maybe ten strange elderly ladies. Some of these were doing the laundry while the rest pranced about in cheap necklaces. I suppose the yellow ones caught jaundice at the sight, while the stupid ones crawled under the furniture in order not to look. Is there any more of this lively narrative?"
"A bit," said Vivian. "Four more were full of electricity, but they were insulated with policemen, so that the town could learn philosophy for at least a year."
"Four more old women and an unspecified number of police," Dr. Wilander remarked. "The blacksmith makes at least fifteen. I hope he paid the police for wrapping themselves round the electrical old ladies. It sounds painful. Or are you implying that the police were electrocuted, thus supplying the townsfolk with a valuable moral lesson?"
"I don't know," Vivian said hopelessly.
"But just what," asked Dr. Wilander, "do you think your multitudes of old women were really doing?"
"I've no idea," Vivian confessed.
"People don't usually write nonsense," Dr. Wilander remarked, still placidly puffing at his pipe. "Pass the paper to Jonathan. Perhaps he can tell us what all these people were up to."
Jonathan took the paper out of Vivian's hand. He looked at it and stuffed another lump of pigtail into his mouth. Tears trickled from under the flicker of his eye function.
"Jonathan considers it to be a tragedy," Dr. Wilander growled sadly. "The police were killed by high-voltage crones. Here. I'll read it." He plucked the paper out of Jonathan's shaking fist and read, "The great Faber John made four containers or caskets and hid each of them in one of the Four Ages of the World." He turned to Vivian. "Faber does indeed mean 'smith,' and the symbol is the same; but your old ladies came about because you took no notice of the double age symbol, which always means 'time,' or 'an Age of the World' if it's female. To continue." He read, "The casket made of iron, he concealed in the Age of Iron. The second, which was of silver, he hid in the Silver Age, and the third, which was pure gold, in the Age of Gold. The fourth container was of lead and hidden in the same manner. He filled these four caskets with the greater part of his power and appointed to each one a special guardian. In this way he ensured that Time City would endure throughout a whole Platonic Year . . . There," he said to Vivian. "That makes perfect sense to me and supplies Jonathan with another of the legends he likes so much."
Jonathan unstuffed his mouth and asked seriously, "Do you think what it says is true?"
"The writer thought so," Dr. Wilander grunted.
I can't read Sumerian—I never studied it—but Akkadian cuneiform does have logograms and phonetic complements as well as phonetic values which can get a bit handwavy in their signage, making me intensely sympathetic and in hindsight perhaps slightly prepared for Vivian's experience that "Universal symbols did not exactly stand for letters, nor for whole words either. You had to fit the things the symbols might stand for together, and then try to make sense of them. Vivian's brain began to complain that it had never worked so hard in its life. Every so often it went on strike and she had to wait for it to start working again." I would not have said for years that A Tale of Time City (1987) was my most formative Diana Wynne Jones, except that things keep turning up in it that are so important to me, like the imprinting of time, the discovery of the unpredictable world, and the funniest and most agonizingly recognizable depiction of translation I have still run into, not to mention Sempitern Walker. Time-ghosts, walking in my footsteps before I did. I didn't remember, though, the line about "I've just come from a flood of reports from the Eighties threatening World War Three two centuries early."
Vivian looked miserably at her few lines of crossed-out and rewritten green writing. "One large blacksmith threw four coffins about," she read.
Jonathan hurriedly stuffed a doubled-up lump of pigtail into his mouth. "Oh, did he?" Dr. Wilander said placidly. "To show off his strength, I suppose. Carry on."
"So that they turned into four very old women," Vivian read. "One got rusty for smoothing clothes. Two became white in moderately cheap jewelry. Three of them turned yellow and got expensive, and another four were dense and low in the tables—"
"So now there were ten coffins," Dr. Wilander said. "Or maybe ten strange elderly ladies. Some of these were doing the laundry while the rest pranced about in cheap necklaces. I suppose the yellow ones caught jaundice at the sight, while the stupid ones crawled under the furniture in order not to look. Is there any more of this lively narrative?"
"A bit," said Vivian. "Four more were full of electricity, but they were insulated with policemen, so that the town could learn philosophy for at least a year."
"Four more old women and an unspecified number of police," Dr. Wilander remarked. "The blacksmith makes at least fifteen. I hope he paid the police for wrapping themselves round the electrical old ladies. It sounds painful. Or are you implying that the police were electrocuted, thus supplying the townsfolk with a valuable moral lesson?"
"I don't know," Vivian said hopelessly.
"But just what," asked Dr. Wilander, "do you think your multitudes of old women were really doing?"
"I've no idea," Vivian confessed.
"People don't usually write nonsense," Dr. Wilander remarked, still placidly puffing at his pipe. "Pass the paper to Jonathan. Perhaps he can tell us what all these people were up to."
Jonathan took the paper out of Vivian's hand. He looked at it and stuffed another lump of pigtail into his mouth. Tears trickled from under the flicker of his eye function.
"Jonathan considers it to be a tragedy," Dr. Wilander growled sadly. "The police were killed by high-voltage crones. Here. I'll read it." He plucked the paper out of Jonathan's shaking fist and read, "The great Faber John made four containers or caskets and hid each of them in one of the Four Ages of the World." He turned to Vivian. "Faber does indeed mean 'smith,' and the symbol is the same; but your old ladies came about because you took no notice of the double age symbol, which always means 'time,' or 'an Age of the World' if it's female. To continue." He read, "The casket made of iron, he concealed in the Age of Iron. The second, which was of silver, he hid in the Silver Age, and the third, which was pure gold, in the Age of Gold. The fourth container was of lead and hidden in the same manner. He filled these four caskets with the greater part of his power and appointed to each one a special guardian. In this way he ensured that Time City would endure throughout a whole Platonic Year . . . There," he said to Vivian. "That makes perfect sense to me and supplies Jonathan with another of the legends he likes so much."
Jonathan unstuffed his mouth and asked seriously, "Do you think what it says is true?"
"The writer thought so," Dr. Wilander grunted.
I can't read Sumerian—I never studied it—but Akkadian cuneiform does have logograms and phonetic complements as well as phonetic values which can get a bit handwavy in their signage, making me intensely sympathetic and in hindsight perhaps slightly prepared for Vivian's experience that "Universal symbols did not exactly stand for letters, nor for whole words either. You had to fit the things the symbols might stand for together, and then try to make sense of them. Vivian's brain began to complain that it had never worked so hard in its life. Every so often it went on strike and she had to wait for it to start working again." I would not have said for years that A Tale of Time City (1987) was my most formative Diana Wynne Jones, except that things keep turning up in it that are so important to me, like the imprinting of time, the discovery of the unpredictable world, and the funniest and most agonizingly recognizable depiction of translation I have still run into, not to mention Sempitern Walker. Time-ghosts, walking in my footsteps before I did. I didn't remember, though, the line about "I've just come from a flood of reports from the Eighties threatening World War Three two centuries early."
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I hope you may acquire new glasses soon, and may they settle in swiftly and without pain, too.
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I actually don't mind my glasses, I just mind how difficult it currently is to do anything about them!
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And it was funny almost before I knew any other languages, which is brilliant.
I hope you may acquire new glasses soon, and may they settle in swiftly and without pain, too.
Thank you. It is looking as though I will first need to find a new place to acquire them from.
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[It is the MOST true piece of writing about translation, possibly ever. I remember chipping away for a week at some handwritten Yiddish on the back of a photograph -- it was a letter, not an inscription -- and I turned it over to its owner having done the work gratis on my lunchbreaks with a fair number of "Dunno" and "Don't know a place-name with that spelling" and "Could be one of three shtetls." She critiqued the translator quite sharply until I told her the only person I knew of at [Temple] who could translate Yiddish was me. It's like the joke about hieroglyphs being a breeze if only you know the vowels. Which I did not, thank you, work into my book.]
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*hugs*
I may or may not be capable of digesting a butter-pie at this point in my life, but I still want to get the chance to find out.
It's like the joke about hieroglyphs being a breeze if only you know the vowels. Which I did not, thank you, work into my book.
Always punch Champollion!
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Surely by forty-two century, your butter-pie nanoconfigures to your physical needs.
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Headcanon accepted.
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The New Testament was supposed to be so much easier than Attic Greek, they kept telling me; but if you start with Attic Greek, the New Testament is just all blodgy and attenuated and telegraphic and weird. As I expect you know, though possibly you'd express it more elegantly.
P.
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I'm so glad. That may be one of the things that passage is for.
all blodgy and attenuated and telegraphic and weird. As I expect you know, though possibly you'd express it more elegantly.
I like your description!
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Also the way Jonathan changes over the whole book, and the hint of Jenny's complicated grief for her brother at the end, and Elio's "I forgot that two percent is just as wet as any other rain"--a passage I have quoted often in various contexts--and the clothes with little hearts floating on them.
And God knows we are living in an Unstable Era if there ever was one...
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I pretty much always consider this a good life decision.
Especially, as a translator who works with "symbols that [do] not exactly stand for letters, nor for whole words either," reading your take on that particular passage!
Nice!
And God knows we are living in an Unstable Era if there ever was one...
I don't know what a Fixed Era would even look like.
(I also quote the line about two percent of rain, especially when outside in it.)
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As I remember, doesn't one of the Fixed Eras have lots of police who turn up to check permits and stop people from doing anything even slightly weird?
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Good luck with the glasses!
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It, Howl's Moving Castle (1986), and The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988) were my formative DWJ and I recommend all three, if you have not already encountered the others.
Good luck with the glasses!
Thank you!
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I don't see how this could be a bad idea.
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If you recall its title, I'd love to know!
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For additional entertainment value, I recognize that Tumblr handle because the user reblogged one of my poems a couple of weeks ago as part of that spate I was surprised by.
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I spent part of last year re-reading all of DWJ (except for her first, adult novel which I've yet to find). She is glorious.
Nine
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Is that Changeover? I've never even seen a copy. I found one of Susan Cooper's Mandrake in a library once.
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Nine
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Less professionally, my sister and I made a deliberately disastrous translation of Catullus 3 that springboarded off passer meaning "flounder" as well as "sparrow" -- at least according to the dictionaries we had in our classroom, though the one here in my office doesn't agree.
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Awesome.
Less professionally, my sister and I made a deliberately disastrous translation of Catullus 3 that springboarded off passer meaning "flounder" as well as "sparrow" -- at least according to the dictionaries we had in our classroom, though the one here in my office doesn't agree.
It's in Lewis & Short. I have to say that if I had to name something a "sparrowfish," a flounder, except perhaps for coloration, would have been very low on the list. Does your disaster translation survive?
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Heee. Yeah, I can't explain it . . . but it amused us.
Does your disaster translation survive?
My sister and I both kept copies. (Our teacher kept the original.)
(Tragically, it is not a verse translation.
<clears throat>
Wear mourning clothes, o highest toss of the dice and greedy ones, and how many there are of men who are endowed like Venus: my girl has killed her flounder, that fish, the crime of my girl, which loved her more than her flower buds -- for there was honey for her and the other knew herself so well that she was a girl, neither that one moving himself from the center, but running around how this how that, to the sun of the house and chirping: which now plows again through Tenebricus, where waves decline as they return there. And you are a bad apple, evil pigs of low birth, where everyone love war, so war to me seems like a fish. O apple fact! O evil fish! Now you sing an opera so that my girl is crying and swollen because there is rhubarb in her eyes.
I believe our general principles were "if you can mistake this for a similar word, do," "grab the word above or below it in the dictionary," "screw up the grammatical relationship of the elements," and "if all else fails, take the most obscure gloss available."
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I hope you sent a copy to DWJ.
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(I did, however, through an intermediary, get to send her a birthday message in which I explained how Fire and Hemlock made me a writer.)
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Good!
P.S. I thought of you.