Swept off to sea in our sleep

[sovay]

I dreamed that I lived alone (except for some murderous neighbors) on a hot, sandy sea-cliff where there was very little between me and the sky but small windbent stands of pine; I blame cucumberseed for the detail that I painted my skin with silver nitrate whenever I went out into the sun. There was also a pangolin. I'm not sure who to blame for that. I still have a fever.

Meanwhile, I have been informed that when International Talk Like a Pirate Day falls on Rosh Hashanah, the holiday must be celebrated as International Talk Like a Jewish Pirate Day. I have not yet seen any consensus on what that's supposed to sound like—other than not like Robert Newton, and bonus points if you speak Ladino—but it provides a perfect excuse for me to post the following songs:

La Nef, "Dame la mano (La Sirena)"

En la mar hay una torre
En la torre hay una ventana
En la ventana hay una hija
Que a los marineros llama

Lotte Lenya, "Seeräuberjenny" (1930)

Und das Schiff
Mit acht Segeln
Und mit fünfzig Kanonen
Wird entschwinden mit mir

And the rest of this post has been superseded by the fact that the mail just came and I have been translated into Czech. My story "The Depth Oracle," originally published in Sirenia Digest #8, is now available in Martin Šust's Trochu divné kusy 3, along with stories from Jay Lake, Christopher Rowe, Theodora Goss, Catherynne M. Valente, Sarah Monette, M. Rickert, Tim Pratt, and many other purveyors of awesome. It's a nice hardcover. You will need to be fluent in Czech for this information to be of any use to you, but it makes me incredibly happy. "Orákulum hlubin," trans. Jana Rečková. I can't help wondering now whether I could use it to teach myself Czech.

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Damn you! Now I have Jewish pirates talking in my head.;)

[sovay]

Damn you! Now I have Jewish pirates talking in my head.

Hey, you're the historical go-to . . .

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Dream sounds interesting.

I'd love to hear Ladino pirate talk, even though I probably couldn't understand it.

Thanks for the tracks! Congratulations on the translation!

[sovay]

I'd love to hear Ladino pirate talk, even though I probably couldn't understand it.

You never know. I can crash-read quite a lot of Ladino based on my knowledge of Spanish. (And I know I butchered the orthography of "Dame la mano" in this post; I should do the research and fix it. It looks too much like Spanish right now.)

Thanks for the tracks! Congratulations on the translation!

You're welcome and thank you!

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

You never know. I can crash-read quite a lot of Ladino based on my knowledge of Spanish.

True. Problem is, I have almost no Spanish. Can read a certain amount based on knowledge of French, but that's about it.

(I wish I had Spanish--I'd get a lot more use out of it than I do of French.* Then again, I also wish I'd took Modern Greek at college instead of Ancient Greek--I could actually use Modern Greek a fair bit, around here, at least in diners. And I probably would have been better able to learn it.)

You're welcome and thank you!

Most welcome! I hope to see many more translations of your writing, and ideally some of them into languages I can read.

*This is probably a fair portion of why my YAVNC is set in a partially Francophone alternate USA.

[eredien]

Congratulations! Is this your first translation?

[sovay]

Congratulations! Is this your first translation?

Thank you! It is; my flash "Skins on Sule Skerry" appeared in a Chinese anthology, but the story was itself untranslated.

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

What a beautiful dream! And congratulations on the Czech translation. I wonder how it sounds.

[sovay]

And congratulations on the Czech translation. I wonder how it sounds.

I will find someone who speaks Czech and find out!