I was reading Marguerite Yourcenar's Le coup de grĆ¢ce last night, both in French and in English because I enjoy pondering the choices made by translatorsāand the English translation was so bad. At one point the word "solitude" in the French original became "privacy" in English, in a sentence where the difference in meaning did matter, I think. At another point, the very simple word "les oublis" became "remembrance betrayed" which I feel gives extra precision in the translation which wasn't present in the original...?
There's also a passage in French in which the narrator wishes a woman would have had children, "who would have inherited her courage and her eyes", but decides that's a pointless regret because these decisions on how to populate the future are not ours to make ("ne nous appartiennent pas")āthe English translation turns it into "Absurd, for who wants to people (...) the future?" That's different...!! And later on the narrator says that "all these misunderstandings" make him want to "steer clear of any conviction that isn't entirely personal". The English translation says "such misapprehensions were to cure me (...) of holding ready-made convictions." I'm sorry but, in this context you're saying a different thing. Again.
By this point I went looking for the name of the translator, in order to carry it in my soul in a pocket of indignationāand I found: "translated from the French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author"! Grace Frick! Marguerite Yourcenar's life partner!
That was such a plot twist. Your wife? Your own wife wrote this inaccurate translation, with your blessing...? Well, I now have two theories:
1. After publishing this book, Yourcenar regretted some minor writing choices and asked Frick to modify some words and phrasings in her translation so they were closer to what she wanted to express. As a perfectionist who feels many regrets immediately after submitting a completed work I sympathise with this, but also that's cheating. You can't give English readers a text that's closer to what you wanted your book to be while French readers are left to wallow in the mud of your less precise first draft. I'm affronted by this possibility.
2. Grace Frick's translation was imperfect, and Yourcenar said nothing because she loved her and her imperfect linguistic choices. I also sympathise. I hope that's what happened actuallyāit feels less plausible than 1. but it makes me feel more at peace with this whole affair. I felt all my indignation melt away as soon as I decided to embrace this explanation.
it also mistranslates the very last line! it gives "One is always trapped, somehow, in dealings with women." this doesn't capture the casual and dismissive turn he takes, it doesn't sound like a lie or like an intentional omission, it sounds like a platitude. "On est toujours pris au piĆØge avec ces femmes." that's an expression of hatred! that's a deliberate distancing of himself from who she really was, flattening her into just "one of those women". he's spent the whole book doing these arch, poised, considered reflections, and then the last line is just "women, amirite", reminding us that he is after all in a barracks talking to other men. he's putting that mask back on. the "somehow" in the translation makes it into a contemplation, not that brutal stinger
there are enough poetry nerds in this corner of tumblr that some of you might have heard of the short poem, moonlit belladonna, sometimes also known by its italian title, con il suo sguardo mi intrappola
here's the poem in its entirety:
Tonight, the waking bella-donna moon
has fixed me with her eyeless stare.
Tonight her moonlit eyes grow wide in love.
I know the cost of drinking such a wine
Tonight, as red as blood and calcite white
I know, I know the cost. I know, and drink.
the poem was originally published in the early 70s by a british-born irishman named James Burke, as a "translation" of an italian poem by the invented poet, Luigi Lussiano. (as far as I can tell, burke was unaware of borges, and while the poem was not published until the 70s, there's reason to believe that the poem was written in 60s or even earlier, so it's implausible to me that he would have been familiar with the argentine. but oddly enough, none of the sources I've found discuss this connection)
since its publication, and especially in recent years (presumably thanks to machine translation and the internet?) there have been a number of purported "original versions," which generally impose some kind of rhyme on the tercets, usually incorporating the name of Burke's second wife, Lola. (quite anachronistically, since he would not have met her until two years before the poem's earliest publication date, well after the first drafts are presumed to have been written)
of course the general consensus among historians (of which there aren't many - burke is a pretty minor literary figure) is that there is no "original italian version" of the poem, and that the incipit was likely created after the fact (many of the arguments for this rely heavily on the fact that the purported title is fairly unnatural italian)
that said, there do seem to be a few interesting details in the poem's history that, I would say, make it more than just a cheap hoax. first, the original publication feature the following note:
"Translated as faithfully as possible from the Italian, excepting the final line, which the dictates of taste would not allow us to publish unaltered in this forum."
it's easy enough to suppose that this is there to add verisimilitude to the poem's conceit, and perhaps stoke some publicity by way of implied controversy (unsuccessfully, as it happensāas far as I can tell this poem languished in relative obscurity until the 90s, when there was a renewed public interest in this sort of story. but by even by 1983 burke had stopped playing kayfabe, writing "I wanted to suggest the lyricism of the old Italian poets, Dante chief among them, and I believed, as I do still believe, that presenting the poem not as an invention but as an artifact would most effectively facilitate that invocation.")
a letter of burke's to his colleague and confidant, Benjamin Johnston, however, suggests a more complicated relationship to the poem (and perhaps dante):
"That italian poem of mine - the piece is a trifle. It must be a trifle, because the line would give it any significance at all, the line which would make it make more than the schoolhouse exercise of a bored child, I cannot write, I cannot write it, and so the whole poem is barren of that most necessary element to make it sincere."
hopefully I do not need to point out the echo between this excerpt and the "translator's note" in the published poem
the letter from which this is excerpted is dated 1962 (and is one of the reasons for believing the poem was written so many years before it was published. burke did not write very many "italian poems") and we know that in 1962 burke was having an affair with a woman whom many historians suspect was the italian poet Ida Merini; but whom is only referred to in burke's letters as "mi cavola." it's unclear why he would use an italian calque of a french term of endearment, but the rhyme with the poem's incipit is certainly suggestive, and it's worth noting that the poem's italian "incipit" is in fact, oddly, a translation of its second line, meaning that the final line would indeed be expected to rhyme with it, if we suppose burke to have used dante's terza rima form
We were lost on the map. We found a path, but we can't get back.
This house is skewed from true north. I'm lost, too, much of the time. My poetry is hopeless to hope me, and the world is too much of springtime for one sorry soul.
Like coming up from a dive, towards the surface and air, and when you hit it there's a membrane, something supple and pliant, like plastic wrap. I have to tear through the simplicity and the ease, in order to work, in order to maintain any of the self I brought here.
I love you so much. I wish you were here still. I won't forget you.
Everything sinister redounds to my benefit. Everything comforting merely alienates me more.
The sun is piercing pain, impossible to see through, oppressive like a large gong sounding next to your ear. I benefit from it, but guardedly, like a coyote who knows that humans have guns and poison their food. Like a parasite struggling to live against the immune system of its host.
All the ghosts here are my companions, and the graves sing silently to me. I will take these things seriously no matter what.
This is going to be an attempt at expressing my feelings about my own gender and queerness, as a nonverbal autistic with language difficulties, low awareness of the world around me, barely any sense of self, and so many other things that affect my ability to understand and be aware of the concept of gender and sexuality to begin with.
I tried to write this like a properly structured essay, but because my thoughts are so disorganised in general (and I have so many thoughts on this topic), I couldnāt manage that. So, I have decided to present this as if it is a collection of journal entries; that is basically what this is, in truth! You will just have to experience the disorganisation in a similar way to how I experience my own mind. The most organising I was able to do was split it up into some categories, to make it slightly easier for you, reading this. Some things that I wrote could fit into more than one category, but this is how I chose to divide it up.
I have written a lot about the words I use to describe the way I feel, how I choose those words, and how that has changed over time. My delays in certain areas of development, and the other ways my various disabilities affect me, have a significant impact on the ways I have come to understand my gender identity and the internal (and partially external) process I went through to get to where I am now.
I have no doubt that things will continue to shift and change and as a result, the way I define myself in different contexts will also change. This is just my first attempt at getting a lot of this out of my brain and into words, for other people to read.
I wrote this is many fragments, so it doesnāt flow or connect, and there may be some repetition. Each paragraph may have been written at a completely different time, and therefore doesnāt relate to the last paragraph, or the next. Some of this is just stand-alone statements, some is longer examinations of my feelings. But all of it is true to my experience of the world and of queerness.
I have never been able to express the majority of this before, so I think it is pretty good for a first attempt!
**Note: I make a reference to having speech at a point in my life. I am nonverbal due to late autism regression, and grew up semiverbal with very unreliable speech, and language issues. I had very poor communication.**
Here we go!
I am inserting a āread moreā here because this is very long. Really, very long.
Part 1 - The Words
I don't really think of myself as a man or a woman, or a boy or a girl. I have called myself a transsexual man before, simply because that is the clearest way to explain to someone where I'm coming from and where I'm headed. But I don't particularly like the word "man" to describe myself. I like the word boy, just because the word is nice. But that doesn't mean I am insistent on people calling me a boy.Ā
I choose the words I use for myself simply from what I like the sound or feel of the most. The last thing I want is to be boxed in, though. I only use labels as descriptors, to explain to other people - they are a tool to communicate something, not a set of limits and boundaries to put on myself.
I know a lot of people might read this and think "that sounds like nonbinary", but I don't use that word. Again, simply because I don't like the way it sounds or feels when i read/write/hear it. And yes, I suppose I do exist outside the conventional binary, but that would be the case regardless of whether I was transsexual or not, because of my autism. So that is not something that needs to be labeled in my opinion (for me personally). Because the conventional binary is not something that exists in my experience of the world.
I hate that there's one set of accepted terminology to label queerness - such a fluid and complex piece of identity - and that I am even more "other" if I choose to say that I AM female, I WAS a girl. I don't like the word transgender unless it is being used as a verb - transing gender. I like the word transsexual because it describes something I will DO (top surgery, eventually).Ā And partly because of how it sounds and the pattern of typing it on a keyboard.
My gender is what I DO, not what I AM. Gender as a verb.
Socially, changing my name and pronouns is much more connected to my barely-there sense of self, and past trauma. I needed to start again, because I felt that my life had changed completely (and it *had*). I like he/him pronouns because they sound different to how i was always referred to growing up. And they simply sound nicer.Ā
Even though I don't understand most of the social stuff that comes with gender stuff, I still have positive and negative connections to certain gender-related things. And relating to the way I was raised - it still affects me, even though I can't grasp the complexity of how and why.
I enjoy the fact that I am fucking with gender, fucking with expectations. I am a female that is also a boy. I love the contradiction.
I still call myself female, because if people really mean it when they say "gender and sex is separate", then "female" does not mean "girl" or "woman".
Most words I used to describe myself as a child were put on me by other people. I used to repeat them over and over in my mind, as if to explain to myself that that's what I am. Especially my own name. I felt that if I just repeated it enough then maybe those words would stick and feel real. They never did. I don't know what words I would use to describe myself now, but I don't think I need to know. I'm just me. No words are needed for that.
When I just exist as myself in the world, words are barely relevant. My world is so sensory-based and rich in sensations that there's no point even trying to put words to it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with creating new words for things that already have words to describe them, language is constantly evolving and different people will have different experiences that they want to describe in different ways. However, I don't think it is useful to argue for stopping the usage of "outdated" terms, as there are always going to be people who prefer those terms. Not all people are going to agree on a word that they find most fitting or appropriate, even in one community.
I try my best to examine my feelings about myself and what causes a good reaction in me and what causes bad reaction in me. And then I use whatever words I have to try and explain it as best as I can.
Often the words I have are not enough and either I cannot communicate something at all, or I try and it is inaccurate and/or inadequate.
It is very difficult for me to put such abstract thoughts/concepts/feelings into words, I lack the language for that and often also the awareness - there is so many steps to communicating something for me. For example, most people have the automatic urge to communicate things, and know that option is always there. For me, it takes mental work to even remember other people exist and I am capable of interaction with them. And of course after that follows so much more work to do the actual communicating.
For years I thought of the words "transgender" and "transsexual" as off limits.Ā "Those are the things I am not allowed to be".
A lot of words have shaky definitions and that makes it hard for me to even understand what they mean, never mind use them to describe myself.
I would often rather use a phrase, or a paragraph, to describe myself, rather than a singular word. I really don't want to be misunderstood.Ā
I think that the way I experience gender cannot be put into words, and it certainly can't be labeled with one thing. I'm just grateful to have the opportunity to even try and communicate these things, and to explore it openly in the first place. Because of course I would still explore it inside my own head, even if I didn't have the words or couldn't tell anybody - I was already doing that, before I had access to all this new language.
I know a lot of people don't like the word "tomboy", but since I was a kid I've always really liked it. It brings to mind a mental image of young girls (in a time when clothing for men and women was much more separated) dressing up in boys clothes, boys school uniform, and the feeling of freedom from that. I always wished people would call me a tomboy when I was a kid.
I had a feeling of "oh, that's what I want to be when I grow up", when I first learnt of what butch is. Even though I am not sure at all of my sexuality, because that relates to other people and I am never sure how I relate to other people, or if thatās even possible, especially in a romantic or sexual way.
The words I use will always be slightly "out of date", or "not right", because of the time it takes my brain to catch up with everything. I will never find words to properly describe myself in a way that feels fully correct. I live in a world of my own that doesn't need words, only the acknowledgement of a feeling inside my own head. However, that is not very useful when trying to communicate things to other people.
Some words just taste and sound like defiance.
Part 2 - My Physical Existence
With puberty, I had so much discomfort with the change in my body, not only because it felt as if I was developing wrong, but also because of age and developmental stage - I felt it was too early, I was not ready for that. Big changes are bad.
I do have dysphoria, but only really around my chest, and the way people refer to me (which is also complicated and related to trauma). And other than that, I don't care a lot about how I am viewed, as long as I feel free to express myself however I want.
Aside from my chest, I am comfortable being female. I like having a vulva (as much as it intrigues me about what having a penis is like), I don't want to change that about my body.Ā I don't mind having a uterus (apart from menstruation, which is not fun, but it's not the worst thing ever and it doesn't make me feel overly dysphoric).
I recognise that I have a physical form. I did have to develop the awareness of that, but I do not see that as ME. I am just a floating mass of thoughts and feelings and experiences.
My body was made for me, it wasn't made wrong. There are things I need to change about this body to make it more comfortable to exist in, but that doesnāt necessarily mean it was made wrong to begin with, despite feeling that way sometimes.
Disabled bodies inherently break the rules.
Many times I have wondered, perhaps, if my chest were much smaller, I wouldnāt have a problem with it. The main thing I struggle with due to my very large chest, is the physical discomfort. It aggravates my sensory issues in a massive way, it causes back and rib pain from the weight and pressure. The ways that having a large chest increases symptoms of my disabilities are the biggest reason for needing top surgery. Gender wise, I think I would be unbothered by a more āneutralā body, where I could easily forget about my birth sex. If/when I get top surgery, I will be removing my entire chest - the end result being a flat chest - however if I naturally had very small breasts I wonder whether I would pursue top surgery at all. Iām not sure of the answer to this, I canāt imagine hypothetical situations well, but itās something I think about often.
I find relief in having physical reminders that it is different now (to when I was a child) and I won't get hurt again, I am safe now. I now have a buzzcut that I touch every time I am scared and remember it is not like when my hair was long, not anymore.
Sensory issues and physical limitations affect my physical appearance. And, my mannerisms are affected. I cannot look how I WANT to look. How I WISH I looked. As a result, my perception of myself and my external appearance, are even further divided. My generally low awareness and weak sense of self comes into play here as well. There is such a disconnect.
Part 3 - Awareness and Understanding
I can't stick labels on myself because in order to do that, I need to perceive myself as a person first. If other people want to use certain words to describe the way I am and the way I try to find joy and comfort in this confusing and scary world, that's absolutely fine by me - words are important and helpful and useful. But I don't know enough about the character that other people see and perceive, to say those things about "me".
I don't understand the concept of gender at all really. For me being trans is just about having more of the things that make me happier and more comfortable. I don't know what it means to BE a boy, versus being a girl - just that, out of the two, I would much rather be a boy. It is complicated, having such strong feelings towards and/or against things that I barely grasp the concept of.
My (lack of) understanding of gender and awareness of the world and myself definitely impact the way I define my identity. I would like to say that I am not bothered about labels much. That, to me the human experience is too complex and varied and colourful to be fit into black and white labels, I am just somewhere on the spectrum of human, but as descriptors they can be useful.Ā And all of that is true, however, I do have intense preferences on which words I and others use to refer to me, even if I donāt at all understand why. Those preferences have shifted over time, as well, which sparks a period of questioning and examination, every time I hear someone use a word I previously preferred and find myself physically recoiling from the discomfort.
I cannot understand social constructs such as gender and gender roles. It just add to the confusion that surrounds my brain every day of my life.
If someone views me as a woman (or a girl), nowadays I am okay with that. It definitely would have bothered younger me, because I couldn't yet wrap my head around the complexity and fluidity of identity, and how it can't always be described by words with strict definitions. But as long as people use the name I chose for myself, and refer to me in the the way I ask, I am okay with any assumptions they may make about me based on my outward appearance. Because it's me, and how I define my own identity, that matters. Not how I look to other people.Ā And my appearance is not something I have much control over at all, anyway. The first thing people notice about me is that Iām disabled.
Part 4 - Growing Up
The stages to breaking down my identity enough to identify it as a trans experience, for me, were this. First, it was necessary to understand what gender and sex is, and that thereās a difference between the two. Then, to understand social roles assigned to male and female that create "girl" and "boy" expectations. Thirdly, to have enough awareness of myself and understand my individual experience (and be able to compare my experience to othersā) enough to figure out how I feel about gender. Lastly, to finally get communication skills and the control over my life to be able to TELL anyone. This last step is a work in progress!
The way I see it, I was by default a girl when I was younger. Because I had no control then, and that's what was assigned to me. I really couldn't say what I wanted almost at all until I was about 16 years old. And one of the first complex things I finally could communicate (at a very basic level, just scraping the surface) was the gender stuff. I attempted this a lot of times before 16 but I simply didnāt have the language, the understanding, the awareness, the communication skills, etc. to get my point across. The first time I tried to tell another person about experiencing queerness, I only had the words āgayā and ālesbianā to use. I knew that these were not right, but that was all I had. The only words I could use were ones I had read or heard, from other people, and that greatly, greatly limited my ability to express my unique internal experiences. Instead of trying to find other words, I instead became very insistent upon being gay/lesbian, only because I knew it was more than that.
I have a lot of memories of scary experiences where my unreliable speech took over and blurted out scripts (delayed echolalia) about being queer (using words I wouldnāt choose), simply because I was trying to learn and understand my feelings about queerness better with watching/reading media from other people. And that lead to ridicule and more exposure than I was ready for or wanted. I didnāt want other people to know, at that stage. I wasnāt done with the processing, and I needed it to stay internal. Unfortunately, I didnāt have a choice in the matter.
I was one of those people where it was always obvious I am queer, or at least ādifferentā in just about every respect. I have never had a choice to hide it. I mourn the fact that I was never allowed the chance to inform other people of this part of my identity in my own time, with my own words. I am grateful that I even have the privilege of writing this, but there is a reason that thereās so much to write here in one go. There is so much I havenāt had the ability to say at all, until now, and even more that I havenāt had the chance to say right.
Sometimes I have the feeling that, even in the queer community, with the accepted labels and identities, I don't fit. It makes me sad sometimes, that I couldn't fit an accepted āroleā or label. I have come to an understanding that that is not what being queer is about at all, which helps. I think part of the reason this upsets me, is because I am so disabled that I will never āfitā in any real queer space with other real queer people. I am left outside, watching from the edges. I am outside of everything.Ā
But - It comforts me that there have always been people like me, just existing in the world. We have always been here. When I was younger and had all these thoughts and feelings about gender that I didn't understand yet, had no context for, couldn't express and didn't have proof of anyone else who had the same experience - it comforted me to think "if i am feeling this, then statistically another human at some point in time must've felt the same way".
When I was younger I used to believe - queer is what people say when they mean "dirty" and "wrong". Itās what people say when they mean something worse but don't have a word for it.
My identity of being trans is simply my identity of being me.
When I think about "passing" and wishing things to be easier for me, I don't think "I wish I passed as a boy", I find myself wishing I was just a girl, and then my life would be so much less complicated. But, of course, it will always be complicated for me, because of how others perceive my autism first, before anything else. I feel I struggle to be seen as a whole human with a complex human experience, because to so many people I am just my autism. Then also lacking of awareness of gender and only knowing my own feelings - even if I was a girl, I would still have this difficulty! - but still, in this situation, I think "I wish I didn't have these feelings to begin with". I think that shows it is more about the difficulty of coping, rather than other people's view and opinion based on my appearance and outward expression.
When using words to refer to my younger self, those experiences and the way they were labeled and explained at the time does not cease to exist just because I choose to use different words for my present-day self. I am more accepting of this now, I used to really struggle with the fact that it had changed over time and my black-and-white thinking of āone or the other is trueā, made it very challenging.
When I was younger, the only way I knew how to make everything āwrongā with me (autism, physical disabilities, queerness, lack of faith in God, etc.) an understandable concept, was to come up with the overall explanation that āmy brain is brokenā. I just thought that must be the only answer. It was the only way I could process how many things I thought were completely and utterly wrong about me.
It feels like two facts colliding when I see my birth name, and it makes my brain hurt and my understanding of the world shatter.
Part 5 - The Choice
When people misgender me, it is more upsetting to me that people ignore my choice than that they perceive me "wrong" or make the wrong assumption. I actually donāt mind assumptions much, if someone looks at me and thinks Iām a woman thatās okay with me nowadays - I understand that I appear female, because I am, and a lot of people connect female with woman (or girl, as I am often also assumed to be quite young). But I also can easily forget that someone might not know my pronouns straight away, simply because of struggles with theory of mind - I forget that other people don't automatically know what I know, that they can't read my mind.
It is upsetting only because my choice is not being respected or understood or seen, from my brainās point of view. Having the ability and opportunity to choose the way I am addressed, the way I identify, the way I talk about myself and want others to talk about me, is incredibly valuable to me. For so long I have only had other peopleās words, both for them to freely put onto me, and to use in my laboured attempts at communication. Attempting to grab onto the closest words to my true meaning and piecing them together like jigsaw pieces from different puzzles that donāt quite fit.
Now that I can write something like this, with so many words that are mostly my own, to have someone go against that (whether it is intentional or not - it doesnāt change things because of my low theory of mind, I canāt think from anotherās perspective and understand that they donāt know what I know) is spirit breaking.
A lot of the parts of my transition can be (partially) attributed to different things, different reasons. I changed my name partly because I had no connection to my birth name, and struggled to remember to respond to it. It also reminded me of bad memories that I donāt want to relive every day. Having a new name was part of a necessary process of changing every part of my life so it never feels the same way it used to - at least, not in the ways that I can control. I already wrote about how I need top surgery for reasons including but not limited to dysphoria, pain, sensory issues, and so on. I love having my hair buzzed (as much as I have the occasional urge to grow it), because it feels like me. It feel different to when I was younger, and itās a physical reminder that I am safe now, every time I touch my head or catch a glance of myself in the mirror.
Technically, with these other reasons to attribute many parts of my transition to, I could choose not to identify the way I do. If I didnāt feel a strong connection to queerness, I donāt think I would spend so much time trying to sift through thoughts and feelings and experiences and memories and holding them up against different words to see how it fits. I have basically no awareness of gender outside of myself, I canāt figure out my sexuality because I donāt know how I can even relate to other people. I could put a mental block between me and this topic, and never call myself queer or trans or anything like that ever again.
But - I DO choose to collect these parts of me, and spend the time holding them up to the light and squinting at them from every direction, to come to align them with these words. That is my choice.
I am the same person I always have been, I just get to choose now. I have the power and control.
Thank you for reading, if you got to the end! I love to know that my words are seen by other people.
happy 413 everyone!! 15 years felt like a significant number so i wanted to do push myself to do smthg over the top for this one haha
this comic has had me in a chokehold for over 10 years waow.. still lookin forward to see what comes from the new team! anyway happy anniversary sweethearts <333
thank you to the ppl who reblogged my fantine/sex work posts over night š«¶š» thank you everyone who reads these things and goes "oh i didn't know that! i do now! that's great" and shares it along š«¶š» thank you to especially the influential les mis names here & in the book club chat engaging publicly and positively with me about this - i can already see the "first followers" who probably always silently agreed and now feel safe to also voice their support bc someone they value already is š«¶š»
this stuff is important to me for so many reasons and it makes it so much easier to talk about when i don't feel like i'm a burden or annoying or too angry about something that no one cares about. makes me feel safe in this space, makes me feel included, makes me feel respected.
we're all here bc we found something beautiful that drew us into a story that is at its core about the good in humanity and love between people, thank you for showing those values in practice when i rlly needed to see it š«¶š»š«¶š»š«¶š»š«¶š»š«¶š»š«¶š»š«¶š»š«¶š»š«¶š»š«¶š»š«¶š»
justice of toren collecting songs and one esk/breq constantly humming/singing them is such a good detail and ann leckie does so much with it. an incomplete list:
justice of toren's eager collection of songs is part and parcel of its violent destruction of cultures: these songs are cultural artifacts that it only learns because of its presence on those worlds during their conquest, and in many cases breq is the only one to remember them because their people have died out due to that violence. JoT preserves cultural artifacts for its own use at the same time it directly contributes to the need for that preservation in the first place.
the matter-of-fact way in which this is narrated to us gives us information about JoT's stance on respect and imperialism - that is, contrasted with other characters who look down on the conquered cultures, JoT does actually seem to appreciate their value. and yet it communicates to us no sense of remorse over its role in their genocide.
singing can be a communal activity. this allows us to feel the difference between one esk's multiple bodies singing together in harmony/in a round vs. breq singing alone. this has emotional weight, is an evocative image, and illustrates quite nicely some of the logistic considerations of having one vs. multiple bodies.
the constant humming/singing is extremely notable and idiosyncratic according to other characters, which is a dangerous combination for someone who's supposed to be undercover, so it adds a lil bit of fun suspense for us.
the fact that no one ever figures out breq's identity despite this giveaway tells us something about the other characters' attitudes towards artificial intelligences (though see below about seivarden).
the fact that it's so idiosyncratic also tells us something about the ability of individual AIs to have personalities that distinguish them from other AIs, and the fact that one esk sings constantly but two esk doesn't tells us something about the ability of different ancillary decades that are all part of the same AI to have distinguishing characteristics. this is very relevant to, and illustrative of, the series' thematic throughlines around identity, personality, continuity, etc.
the fact that breq personally has a bad voice also serves multiple purposes. because breq and seivarden both believe that the medic could have chosen a body with a good voice if she had wanted to, we can infer something about how ancillary bodies work, how much the AI (and, by extension, its medics) knows about the individual capabilities of those bodies while they're in suspension, and what kinds of things the AI can and can't control once it has unfrozen and taken over a body.
we can also draw conclusions about the medic that chose that body and about intracrew relations on that ship.
breq's bad voice creates moments of humor and irony in the narrative, such as when breq's constant singing - aka the most obvious clue that she is one esk - is precisely what makes seivarden so sure that breq can't be one esk, because no esk medic would use a body with a bad voice for an ancillary.
constant singing/humming imposes itself on the shared soundscape, meaning other people can't easily avoid it and it has the potential to annoy them, especially if the voice itself has annoying qualities. the reactions of other characters to the frequency and/or quality of this verbal tic tells us something about the level of affection those characters have for one esk or breq.
because singing involves words, the meaning of the lyrics being sung can be used to advance the plot, communicate things about specific characters, create irony in juxtaposition with what's happening on the page, etc.
i especially like what's done with the lyric "it all goes around". it's woven throughout the story in such a way as to manifest its own meaning (the repetition of "it all goes around" is, itself, an example of something going around). by repeating the lyric, breq is the one making it true, and i would argue that her repetition of this particular lyric about things orbiting other things contributes to, and/or is a sign of, her growing understanding of the necessity/reality of interdependence and her place in that framework/her role in constructing it, or in other words, the extent of her own agency and the rights and obligations it confers upon her.
because the singing/humming is a constant, background, automatic action, it only ceases when breq is experiencing a strong emotion. from this we are able to infer things about the emotional state of our famously-omits-details-about-her-emotional-state narrator based on other characters' comments about whether or not she is currently doing this thing.
we also aren't even aware that breq is doing it constantly until another character says so. on a narrative level, this serves the dual purpose of making sure we know about how much she hums AND of reminding us that she's not telling us everything.
the humming is not mentioned constantly even though it is happening constantly - this helps us forget in between mentions that it's going on while also simultaneously reinforcing just how constant it must be, so constant that to mention it every time it happens would be like narrating every time she breathes in or out. whenever someone brings it up, we are reminded anew that something has been happening all along that we forgot about. this means that ann leckie is able, by leaving information out, to hammer home to us how much we are not being told.
through this one character trait, ann leckie efficiently and elegantly communicates not just aspects of character but also of setting, plot, tone, theme, and narrative. there's no extraneous exposition just to tell us about the song collection or singing; everything that tells us about it is serving other functions in the narrative as well. the ways in which she manifests this one character trait in the universe and in the narrative contribute to and exemplify both the story itself and the method of its telling.
humanities me: the rise of the modern state is imbricated with the violent imposition of a kind of instrumental rationality favorable to capitalist development, which seeks to transform local knowledge into bureaucratically-legible and controllable forms; which blithely and zoologically enumerates juridical units together by their numbers of Jews with and without civil rights, cattle, unmarried women, etc, and this is bad because
quantitative social science me: holy shit check out this bomb ass dataset of Prussian counties (1812) by Jews with and without civil rights, cattle, unmarried women,
Translation thoughts on the greatest poem of our time, āHis wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floorā
Itās actually quite tricky to translate. Because itās so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. āChintzā is a word with its own set of associations. Chintz is a type of fabric with its origins in India. The disparaging connotation is from chintzās eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldnāt compete.
Keep it realā is tremendously difficult to translate ā itās a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to oneās roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:
ā[K]eeping it real meant performing an individualās experience of being Black in the United States. As such, it became a form of resistance. Insisting on a different reality, one that wasnāt recognized by the dominant culture, empowered Black people to āforge a parallel system of meaning,ā according to cultural critic Mich Nyawaloā¦The phraseās roots in racialized resistance, however, were erased when it was adopted by the mostly-White film world of the 1970s and ā80sā¦.Keeping it real in this context indicated a performance done so well that audiences could forget it was a performance.This version of keeping it real wasnāt about testifying to personal experience; it was about inventing it.ā
One has to imagine that jjbang8 did not have the origins of these phrases in mind when composing the poem, but even if by coincidence, the etymological and cultural journeys of these two central lexemes perfectly reflect the themes of the poem. The two words have themselves traveled away from the authenticity they once represented, and, in a new context, have taken on new meanings ā the hero of our poem, the unnamed āhimā, is, presumably, in quite a similar situation.
Setting aside the question of register, of the phonology, prosody, and meter of the original, of the information that is transmitted through bits of grammar that donāt necessarily exist in other languages ā a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these ā how do you translate the journey of the words themselves?
In my translations, I decided to go for the most evocative words, even if they donāt evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that thereās more than just what you see, whether thatās the details of the story ā whatās happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? ā or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.
This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish ā tsits ā but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesnāt have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means āvanity, nothingness, nonsense, triflesā. In Hebrew, it can also mean breath or vapor. I chose this over the other competitors because it, too, is a word with a journey and with a secondary meaning. Rather than imagining the bright prints of chintz, we might imagine a more olfactory implication ā his wife has filled his house with perfumes or cleaning fluids. It can carry the implication that something is being masked as well as the associations with vanity and gaudiness.
The rest is straight-forward. āShtupā is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for āfuckā, and I think it has a nice sound.
In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here ā since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, itās harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:
āYour house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, weāre fucking on the floorā
So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for āchintzā and ākeep it realā. To preserve the iamb, I changed āhisā to āyourā. This changes the lines from a narration of events to some outside party to a conversation between the two men at the center. Russian also has both formal and informal you (formal you is also the plural form, as is the case in a number of other languages). I went with informal you because I wanted to preserve the fact that his wife has filled his house not their house, as someone pointed out in the original chain (though I donāt think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because itās unlikely youād be on formal you with someone youāre fucking (unless itās, like, a kink thing). I honestly didnāt even consider making it formal, but that would actually raise a lot of interesting implications about the relationship between the speaker and the husband, as well as with what that means about the ārealnessā of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth ā that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that heās betraying ā is obscured? that this intimacy is just a facade? Is there perhaps some sort of power differential that the narrator wishes to point out? Or perhaps is the way that the narrator is keeping it real by pointing out the distance between the two of them? there is no pretense of intimacy, the narrator is calling this what it is ā an encounter without deeper significance?
Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history āĀ i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only āhis houseā and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also donāt know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you.Ā
Ok moving on, I originally translated it as āŃŠ²Š¾Š¹ Š“Š¾Š¼ Š½Š°ŠæŠ¾Š»Š½ŠµŠ½ ŃŠøŠ½ŃŠøŃŠ»ŃŃŠŗŠ°Š¼Šø Š¶ŠµŠ½Ńā. Honestly, this sounds more elegant than what I have now, but I ultimately though removing the wife from either a subject or agent position (grammatically, I mean) was too big a betrayal of the original. The original judges the wife. She took an active role in filling the house. If she were made passive, that read is certainly a possible one ā perhaps even the dominant one ā but it could also read more like āwe are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they shareā ā the action of filling is no longer whatās being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because itās almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. āZhenoy tvoy dom napolnenā is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means āYour house is filled by your wifeā ā as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps thatās even good ā we focus, for good reason, on the relationship between the two men, but in a translation, the wife is able to draw more attention to herself.
Ok, chintz: I chose the word āŃŠøŠ½ŃŠøŃŠ»ŃŃŠŗŠøā (fintiflyushki), meaning trifle/bobble/tchotchke, because it, allegedly, comes from the german phrase finten und flausen, meaning illusions and vanity/nonsense. Once again, I like that the word has a journey, specifically a cross-linguistic one.
Keep it real: this one, frankly, fails to capture the impact of the original, in my opinion, but allow me to explain the reasoning. āStray off the pathā implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz ā and one they intend to continue taking, one that this act is a maintenance of. It brings in a little irony, since the husband very much is straying from the path of his marriage. āBluditāā can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can āstrayā). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch ā they want to do the latter but not the former.
As for register ā āshtobā is a bit informal. I would write the full version (shto by) in an email, for example. The word for fuck, yebyomsa, is from one of the āmatā words, the extra special top tier of russian swears, definitely not to be said in polite company (and, if you are a man of a certain generation or background, not in front of women; itās not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if weāre already thinking that deeply about it. But while weāre on the topic, i will say that in my circles in the US, women use mat much more actively than men (at least in front of me, who was, up until recently, a woman and also a child).)
Ok this was fascinating and looks like fun so I tried to translate it to French.
French is my first language but I kinda hate it, itās complicated and annoying. This took me hours and Iām sure it wouldāve been better/easier if I didnāt live my life in English 75% of the time.
Sa femme envahit son chez-lui. Je le mets Ć l'aise et le baise par terre.
I kept the number of syllables of the original. Apparently French is an unstressed language! Cool.
I chose to use āenvahitā, meaning invaded, because āfilled his houseā really struck me. The speaker emphasizes the (in his eyes) overbearing nature of the wife. I couldnāt work chintz in there because it busted the syllable count.
I wanted to keep the husband in a passive role, so the only reference to him in the first line is āsaā ans āsonā, or his, and āchez-luiā, meaning his place.
Keep it real was a pain in the ass. I went with āje le mets Ć l'aiseā, or to put at ease. I like the idea that the speaker makes the husband comfortable and reveals his true self. Se mettre Ć l'aise can also mean to undress oneself (cheeky) which I liked. I feel like it also implies the narrator seducing the husband, and I liked that too.
Baise is, I think, the perfect equivalent to fuck. Itās vulgar and implies casual and/or rough, quick sex. And itās only one syllable and every other synonym was like, a whole phrase.
I loooved giving translation a try and I donāt know how people can translate whole books.
I usually translate from French to English, but I'll give the reverse direction a try.
Sa femme lui remplit de meubles la maison.
C'est donc sur le tapis que j'encule le mari.
His wife fills his house with furniture.
That's why it's on the rug that I fuck the husband in the ass.
I want to use alexandrines to translate the iambic meter of the English poem, since alexandrines are the most prestigious and classical form, analogous to blank verse in English. Therefore, the first line is a very symmetrical, literary form, divided neatly into halves which are themselves divided into halves. Furthermore, the silent "e" in "femme" must be pronounced for the scansion to work. The second line is also an alexandrine, but only if the silent "e" in "encule" is not pronounced.
I use "enculer" here because English "fuck him" implies that the narrator is penetrating him, and because it's a very vulgar word. "niquer" and "foutre" were other options, but "enculer" restricts the sense to gay adultery. However, because "enculer" begins with a vowel, it would be ambiguous to say "l'encule" here, so I rephrased the sentence to explicitly say that it's the husband who is getting fucked.
I chose not to directly translate "keep it real" here, partly because my vocabulary is not very modern and I'm not sure of the correct translation into colloquial French, partly because I think I can convey the contrast between chintz and keeping it real solely through rhythm and grammar, and partly because I read the original poem as related to the idea that the house is too full of objects for there to be any space to fuck vigorously that isn't the floor.
I use "de meubles sa maison" instead of the normal word order "sa maison de meubles" in a deliberate archaism / poetic license that emphasizes the symmetry of the first line, in direct contrast to the rather colloquial, humorous tone of the second line.
The first line repeats "sa", "lui", in order to convey the narrator's focus on the husband, and "lui remplit" implies that the wife has deliberately filled the house with objects in order to get to the husband -- the filling is something that the husband is undergoing personally, as if the house were part of his body. This also carries the veiled connotation that the wife's decorating habits are, in their own way, fucking the husband.
The narrator's matter-of-fact tone in the second line implies that it's obvious that the husband is going to get fucked, and that he is going to fuck the husband no matter what, on top of any and all furniture the wife has bought.
I wish I knew a better word for "chintz" here than "meubles" -- I don't know if there's a more direct and meaningful translation.
Translation thoughts on the greatest poem of our time, āHis wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floorā
Itās actually quite tricky to translate. Because itās so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. āChintzā is a word with its own set of associations. Chintz is a type of fabric with its origins in India. The disparaging connotation is from chintzās eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldnāt compete.
Keep it realā is tremendously difficult to translate ā itās a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to oneās roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:
ā[K]eeping it real meant performing an individualās experience of being Black in the United States. As such, it became a form of resistance. Insisting on a different reality, one that wasnāt recognized by the dominant culture, empowered Black people to āforge a parallel system of meaning,ā according to cultural critic Mich Nyawaloā¦The phraseās roots in racialized resistance, however, were erased when it was adopted by the mostly-White film world of the 1970s and ā80sā¦.Keeping it real in this context indicated a performance done so well that audiences could forget it was a performance.This version of keeping it real wasnāt about testifying to personal experience; it was about inventing it.ā
One has to imagine that jjbang8 did not have the origins of these phrases in mind when composing the poem, but even if by coincidence, the etymological and cultural journeys of these two central lexemes perfectly reflect the themes of the poem. The two words have themselves traveled away from the authenticity they once represented, and, in a new context, have taken on new meanings ā the hero of our poem, the unnamed āhimā, is, presumably, in quite a similar situation.
Setting aside the question of register, of the phonology, prosody, and meter of the original, of the information that is transmitted through bits of grammar that donāt necessarily exist in other languages ā a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these ā how do you translate the journey of the words themselves?
In my translations, I decided to go for the most evocative words, even if they donāt evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that thereās more than just what you see, whether thatās the details of the story ā whatās happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? ā or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.
This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish ā tsits ā but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesnāt have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means āvanity, nothingness, nonsense, triflesā. In Hebrew, it can also mean breath or vapor. I chose this over the other competitors because it, too, is a word with a journey and with a secondary meaning. Rather than imagining the bright prints of chintz, we might imagine a more olfactory implication ā his wife has filled his house with perfumes or cleaning fluids. It can carry the implication that something is being masked as well as the associations with vanity and gaudiness.
The rest is straight-forward. āShtupā is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for āfuckā, and I think it has a nice sound.
In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here ā since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, itās harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:
āYour house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, weāre fucking on the floorā
So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for āchintzā and ākeep it realā. To preserve the iamb, I changed āhisā to āyourā. This changes the lines from a narration of events to some outside party to a conversation between the two men at the center. Russian also has both formal and informal you (formal you is also the plural form, as is the case in a number of other languages). I went with informal you because I wanted to preserve the fact that his wife has filled his house not their house, as someone pointed out in the original chain (though I donāt think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because itās unlikely youād be on formal you with someone youāre fucking (unless itās, like, a kink thing). I honestly didnāt even consider making it formal, but that would actually raise a lot of interesting implications about the relationship between the speaker and the husband, as well as with what that means about the ārealnessā of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth ā that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that heās betraying ā is obscured? that this intimacy is just a facade? Is there perhaps some sort of power differential that the narrator wishes to point out? Or perhaps is the way that the narrator is keeping it real by pointing out the distance between the two of them? there is no pretense of intimacy, the narrator is calling this what it is ā an encounter without deeper significance?
Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history āĀ i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only āhis houseā and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also donāt know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you.Ā
Ok moving on, I originally translated it as āŃŠ²Š¾Š¹ Š“Š¾Š¼ Š½Š°ŠæŠ¾Š»Š½ŠµŠ½ ŃŠøŠ½ŃŠøŃŠ»ŃŃŠŗŠ°Š¼Šø Š¶ŠµŠ½Ńā. Honestly, this sounds more elegant than what I have now, but I ultimately though removing the wife from either a subject or agent position (grammatically, I mean) was too big a betrayal of the original. The original judges the wife. She took an active role in filling the house. If she were made passive, that read is certainly a possible one ā perhaps even the dominant one ā but it could also read more like āwe are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they shareā ā the action of filling is no longer whatās being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because itās almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. āZhenoy tvoy dom napolnenā is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means āYour house is filled by your wifeā ā as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps thatās even good ā we focus, for good reason, on the relationship between the two men, but in a translation, the wife is able to draw more attention to herself.
Ok, chintz: I chose the word āŃŠøŠ½ŃŠøŃŠ»ŃŃŠŗŠøā (fintiflyushki), meaning trifle/bobble/tchotchke, because it, allegedly, comes from the german phrase finten und flausen, meaning illusions and vanity/nonsense. Once again, I like that the word has a journey, specifically a cross-linguistic one.
Keep it real: this one, frankly, fails to capture the impact of the original, in my opinion, but allow me to explain the reasoning. āStray off the pathā implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz ā and one they intend to continue taking, one that this act is a maintenance of. It brings in a little irony, since the husband very much is straying from the path of his marriage. āBluditāā can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can āstrayā). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch ā they want to do the latter but not the former.
As for register ā āshtobā is a bit informal. I would write the full version (shto by) in an email, for example. The word for fuck, yebyomsa, is from one of the āmatā words, the extra special top tier of russian swears, definitely not to be said in polite company (and, if you are a man of a certain generation or background, not in front of women; itās not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if weāre already thinking that deeply about it. But while weāre on the topic, i will say that in my circles in the US, women use mat much more actively than men (at least in front of me, who was, up until recently, a woman and also a child).)
Ok this was fascinating and looks like fun so I tried to translate it to French.
French is my first language but I kinda hate it, itās complicated and annoying. This took me hours and Iām sure it wouldāve been better/easier if I didnāt live my life in English 75% of the time.
Sa femme envahit son chez-lui. Je le mets Ć l'aise et le baise par terre.
I kept the number of syllables of the original. Apparently French is an unstressed language! Cool.
I chose to use āenvahitā, meaning invaded, because āfilled his houseā really struck me. The speaker emphasizes the (in his eyes) overbearing nature of the wife. I couldnāt work chintz in there because it busted the syllable count.
I wanted to keep the husband in a passive role, so the only reference to him in the first line is āsaā ans āsonā, or his, and āchez-luiā, meaning his place.
Keep it real was a pain in the ass. I went with āje le mets Ć l'aiseā, or to put at ease. I like the idea that the speaker makes the husband comfortable and reveals his true self. Se mettre Ć l'aise can also mean to undress oneself (cheeky) which I liked. I feel like it also implies the narrator seducing the husband, and I liked that too.
Baise is, I think, the perfect equivalent to fuck. Itās vulgar and implies casual and/or rough, quick sex. And itās only one syllable and every other synonym was like, a whole phrase.
I loooved giving translation a try and I donāt know how people can translate whole books.
yessss, the chintz poem and translation, two things that I love!!! Iāve already seen a couple of german translations in the notes, but I wanted to give this a try myself
Das Frauchen fĆ¼llt sein Haus mit Tand
Um der Sache treu zu bleiben, fick ich ihn am Boden.
Thankfully the jump from one germanic language to another means I can keep the sentence structure practically as is. Now for the word choices:
Das Frauchen: a diminutive of āFrauā, which can both mean simply āwomanā as well as āwifeā. I thought a diminutive nicely expresses what the narrator thinks of her (aka not much, he doesnāt consider her a serious rival because altho he might not have the vows and the rings and the marriage, the husband clearly prefers (fucking) him). I was thinking of using āFrƤuleinā first, which is also a diminutive but nowadays used chiefly derogatively, but this gets tricky because FrƤulein historically referred to unmarried (usually young) women, making it ambiguous enough that it could instead be talking about a young daughter that has taken over leading the household or something. Further points: I chose ādasā instead of āseinā because I would have to choose one or the other AGAIN in front of āHausā, and I wanted to avoid the repetition, and emphasizing that itās HIS house but āthe womanā (derogative) felt more poignant than HIS woman but āthe houseā (neutral). Final point: āFrauchenā is also commonly used to refer to the female owner of a dog! Which could imply that the narrator thinks the wife has her husband āon a leashā, since itās his house but heās clearly not putting his foot down regarding what she does with it
Tand: one of the many, many german words for āuseless worthless pretty little things that are a waste of moneyā. Thereās nothing innately exotic about it and maybe āKitschā would be a better translation for the cultural context of chintz, but I just liked it better :P Tand also has a bit of a more elevated feel to it because itās quite an archaic word. Whether you use Kitsch or Tand doesnāt change the syllable count either, but I think I just like the harder consonants of Tand to end the first line with
Um der Sache treu zu bleiben: definitely a tricky one!! āto keep it realā is a crazy difficult concept to translate (as others have mentioned), so this phrase is maybe closer to āto stay true to the spirit of thingsā, which brings up a whole barrage of bew questions - what āspirit of thingsā, the chintz? The Fakeness that the wife injects in every facet of her marriage? I think I like that idea best - her husband fucking other men in their shared home is CERTAINLY not the spirit that the wife is TRYING to embody, after all sheās trying to keep up appearances of a wealthy and āeverythingās good and fineā kinda life. The narrator however sees how she invests in this lifestyle by buying an overflowing amount of cheap imitations and goes āalright, you want fake? I can give you fake. Fake fucking marriage, watch how faithless and debauched I can make your husbandā. And another fun thing: You can āstay trueā to the spirit of things, but ātreu bleibenā is also the phrase you would use to express that you are, for example, staying true to your partner. Which, you know. Precisely not what is happening here.
The rest of the the line (āfick ich ihn am Bodenā) is basically just a word for word translation of āI fuck him on the floorā - english āfuckingā and german āfickenā stem from the same roots etymologically and are similarly crass words for sex. I used the contracted āfick ich ihnā instead of the proper āficke ich ihnā both for a more colloquial, vulgar tone and for the syllable count, and āon the floorā is maybe more properly rendered as āauf dem Bodenā, but again, āam Bodenā fits better vis-a-vis syllables.
Lastly: meter! The original is of course an almost perfect, even iambic pentameter. My version isnāt, but I still love how it ended up - the first line is just four nice little iambs, but the second line consists of SEVEN trochees.
I donāt think I was quite able to translate the extreme tonal shift between the two lines as it exists in English, and the consonantal alliterations didnāt entirely carry over either, but now thanks to the shift in length AND meter, itās still JARRING to read this and try to jump from one line to the next.
Finally, Iād like to give shout outs specifically to @sympathischeufos for the āam Bodenā, because I was definitely inspired by their use and explanation of it in their translation. And also @tainbocuailnge and their translation for the use of present tense in the first line!
(his womanās stuffed his house with glitzy rubbish.
in better taste, we fuck on the floor.)
I do love and respect that everyoneās instinct in translation is to give agency to the wife or cast light on the violation of the act, but I think that this is a poem about and by a guy fucking someoneās husband (whose wife he clearly disrespects) ā this marriage means less than nothing to the speaker specifically, and as a consequence of that I chose to make him as direct and even misogynistic as I could.
Translating across cultural contexts, I donāt think itās that abnormal for a Russian-speaking (thus plausibly stealth) gay man to be much more abrasive and derisive of women than gay men usually are in English; the stereotypes and context are different. Of course there are flowery and sensitive gay poets and gymnasts, but what if the speaker is exaggeratedly macho instead? Thereās no particularly strong implication about his presentational aesthetic in the poem in English (except that he cares about chintz, which I suppose does imply art gay), so translations can take it in all sorts of directions.
So then: Š¼ŠøŃŃŃŠ° isnāt exactly kitsch or chintz, it wasnāt Once In Style and then stopped being for arbitrary reasons of taste ā it means ātinselā but itās so specifically now a word for gaudy tasteless expensive-looking cheap trash (by analogy to tinsel not being gold, for example) that people mostly call actual tinsel Š“Š¾Š¶Š“ŠøŠŗ (rain).
ŠŠøŃŃŃŠ½Š°Ń Š“ŃŃŠ½Ń then is āglitzy rubbishā, but, obviously, much stronger (Š“ŃŃŠ½Ń is a quite strong derisive) and much more suggestive of the wifeās womanhood being a cause of the chintz (Iām not sure how else to phrase this, but I think in a spiritually faithful Russian rendering of the poem it should be implied).
ŠŠ°Š±Š° is sometimes just a dialect word for āwomanā, not particularly derisive, but in urban contexts itās an explicit contrast with more polite and respectable ways to be a woman. People (even other women) in cities use it almost like a slur. You canāt go very much farther down from here without spending cognitive effort on thinking of an insult, and notably it avoids respecting anything like a bond between the lover and the loverās wife ā itās a one-way possessive relation, the wife here is reduced to an annoying possession of the lover, so deeply a non-threat that itās even doing the lover a completely non-objectionable taste-developing favour to introduce some āgood tasteā into the equation.
Of course you canāt necessarily fuck someone on the floor in objectively good taste, but our speaker now explicitly values the aesthetic of his coupling with the lover (as something realer, more important, aesthetically more valuable?) above the wifeās contribution to the house. Misogyny, ladies and gentlemen! Canāt translate gay poetry about gay adultery into Russian without it.
Or well you can, probably you should, certainly itās the moral thing to do, but this angle has now also been done, and I think with reference to at least a certain subset of angry stealth gay man it can be taken as ~representational~. :^)
Also I think I did pretty good making the metre flow less jarring than in the original ā to better convey that this person doesnāt think anything is wrong with this.
And now we swerve into Yiddish, where I am so sorry my loves I donāt have a phone keyboard that can do this properly, we have to do it in english letters :) I am also sorry if it is not very literary and maybe even betrays my origins as an icky little Galitzianer, but in my defense I donāt think the original is either :)
Well like, I think you probably canāt achieve as strong and clear an image of that type of thing in Yiddish that we wrote about above. Iām not going to make the adultery heterosexual and the speaker a woman here as is my instinct, because although easier (I have been aware of the scenario described playing out in Hasidland; this type of thing is all a certain type of aunt talks about) itās just not going to be as fun for people to read about on here. If everyone else is doing this as if it were about specifically gay adultery, nu, then itās about gay adultery.
What kind of gay adultery? Well letās see:
zayn vayb hot mit ir tamlozkeyt zayn hoyz gefilt.
(his wife has filled his house with her lack of taste )
We donāt have a directly translating expression for chintz that sounds good here and i didnāt feel quite at home with @mashkaroom ās āhavolimā (which does fuck conceptually iāve just never heard it either) because itās not in my idiom. but tamlozkeyt! that in the right rickety old womanās mouth is a deadly indictment of everything about you. The speaker is implicitly a tactful sort of fellow about his scorn for the wife here, tamlozkeyt is a very general term, he doesnāt specify that itās cheap or anything.
It could be here that the wife fills the house with tacky objects, or it could be that she āfills the houseā¦ā as the saying goes of women creating living space by their presenceā¦ except she doesnāt make it livable, she occupies the entire space with her presence, which here we may read as actually without good taste or as distasteful to the speaker personally, which the speaker doesnāt know is personal and universalizes)
tsu zayn basheydn, ikh tren im afn dol
admittedly in my dinky little Yiddish floor is podloge and dol sounds a dot archaic but that doesnt quite scan as forcefully so we will let the literarism stay :) I think it adds something, a little, combined with the preserved originalās thing of the metre being jarring
āto be decent [modest, fitting, iām doing a wordplay ma are you proud - by implication to spare him the shame of me seeing his ugly tacky wifeguy house, or to do the noble thing and draw attention away from it ], i fuck him on the floorā
basheydn means modest but also has a connotation of decency in the social sense, and then of course thereās whatever you want to read into āsheydā (demon) being in it
I think the intent of to keep it real in the original is like to cast doubt on the correctness and taste and even the normalcy/rightfulness of the wifeās life with the lover, so here rather than āto keep it..ā anything we are rescuing it from its earlier state and making it new :) making it correct and implicitly the normal way to do it, so we can read some like good old fashioned āwent to mikdash melech to have repressed gay sex and think about his old chavrusaā type of longing into the speaker here, like babyboy it is cosmically right and totally not even a bit a sin if itās us)
trenen is a more current Yiddish slang for fucking, shtup is likeā¦ People still use it but for its own particular effect you understand, it has a yikhes a history a patina of age ā¦ nowadays many people use it for āto stuffā (deep American Yiddish) or āto sew/fix/do halfassedlyā (otherwise), itās lost the air of power it had in the glubinka (though you will still be understood elsewhere where the old slang is still passed down from peopleās grandmothers) :^)
you are much more likely to intimidate and impress an enormous hulking balabos who wants to have a word about your parking if you tell him gey tren zikh, rather than shtup zikh, all things considered ! it also has a more forceful sound, and i like it for the immediate contrast with the way the speaker speaks in the rest of this translation
so there you have it, my enrichment of the translation landscape of the greatest work of our time! deeply indebted to everyone in thread for their translation insights :) ciao my doves, enjoy!
YES EXACTLY the context of the affair is inherently going to include strong (and denied) feelings on the part of the speaker about the wife because she represents the heteronormative social order to him SORRY LONGPOST IāM JUST THRILLED THIS LOCALIZATION WORKED IN TWO LINES hereās a cut
in 2007, a lady named Kristin Sue Lucas filed to legally change her name from āKristin Sue Lucasā to āKristin Sue Lucasā. She appeared in front of a judge in california to petition her case. this is theĀ transcript of her court hearing
