![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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."
no subject
(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.)
no subject
Good!
P.S. I thought of you.