I don't have much to add to the many fine reviews I see here of this excellent novel. I agree with the warm words about Virginie Despentes's extraordiI don't have much to add to the many fine reviews I see here of this excellent novel. I agree with the warm words about Virginie Despentes's extraordinary ability to get inside the heads of all these people society would rather pretend didn't exist: the trans girl, the National Front supporter, the guy who hits his wife, the retired porn star, the teenager who has revolted against her father to find peace in Islam, the predatory lesbian, the middle-aged guy whose job has disappeared and finds himself out on the street begging for his next meal. Like all the people who've read her in the original, I'm amazed by her razor-sharp, foul-mouthed, up-to-the-minute Parisian street French.
Just one thing: if you haven't already seen the 2019 TV series, check it out. They've taken a few liberties with the story, but the characters are exactly the same as they are in the book. Romain Duris, always a fine actor, outdoes himself in the title role, and the supporting cast isn't far behind....more
People who should know better keep insisting that the novel is dead, but they are making a fundamental mistake. It is the publishing industry, with itPeople who should know better keep insisting that the novel is dead, but they are making a fundamental mistake. It is the publishing industry, with its soulless insistence on chasing profit to the exclusion of everything else, which is dying. The novel is very much alive: you just need to look for it in the right places.
Melancholia is a stunning example. When Not and I first heard about this book, we couldn't help smiling: here's a six hundred page stream-of-consciousness account based on two days in the life of an obscure nineteenth century painter, moreover written, not just in Norwegian, but in the less commonly spoken version of that small language. It sounds like an SBS Woman parody come to life. But I found, to my considerable surprise, that the book works. It isn't just readable, it's compulsively readable, and it says some things about art and the human mind that...
So what's it saying, you want to know? I was wondering how I could try to explain, but on reaching the book's final pages I found that the author had anticipated me. The painter's sister, now a very old woman, is sitting on the toilet looking at the picture her brother had given her many years ago:
Og ein dag kom han Lars springende etter henne og gav henne dette biletet, og ho sa vel ikkje takk eingong, tenkjer ho Oline, og ikkje syntest ho vel at biletet var noko særleg, heller, helst var det vel berre noko rableri, syntest ho nok, men ho tok då imot og så hengde det der på veslehuset og der har det nu hange i alle dei år, tenkjer ho Oline, og ho synest vel og etter kvart at biletet er vakkert, og ho skjøner vel og kva Lars kan ha meint med det biletet, gjer ho vel, men å seie det! få sagt kva han kan ha meint! nei det går vel ikkje, eg ho kan vel omogeleg seie det, heller, for då var det vel ikkje noko vits for han Lars å male biletet, då, kan ein vel tenkje, tenkjer ho Oline, men biletet er fint, det, sjølv om det vel helst er noko rableri, fordi han Lars ha malt det, er biletet fint, det meiner ho nok, ja, om einkvan andre enn han Lars hadde malt det, hade ho ikkje synst at det var noko vakkert, tenkjer ho Oline, men no synest ho at biletet er så vakkert at det nesten er som om ho skal ta til tårene når ho ser på det.
My translation:
And one day Lars came running after her and gave her this picture, and she didn't even say thank you, thinks Oline, and she didn't think the picture was anything special either, really just a scribble, she thought, but she let him give it to her and she hung it in the outhouse and it's been hanging there all these years, thinks Oline, and in the end she thought the picture was beautiful, and she understands what Lars meant with the picture, she does, but how would she say it! say what he meant! no you can't do that, she could never say it, because then why would Lars have painted the picture would he, thinks Oline, but the picture is lovely, even if it's just a scribble, because Lars painted it the picture is lovely, that's what she thinks, yes, even though if someone else had painted it she wouldn't have thought it was anything special, thinks Oline, but now she thinks the picture is so beautiful that tears almost come to her eyes when she looks at it.
Please forgive the infelicities in my translation: this is almost the first thing I've read in nynorsk. But it won't be the last. ________________
If you want some idea of what the passage sounds like in Norwegian, here is a C-LARA version. Word glosses by GPT-4, audio by Google TTS (NO-Wavenet-B voice; unfortunately I can't find a nynorsk TTS voice) and image by DALL-E-3....more
A few years ago, Not and I were having a discussion about whether rape jokes could ever be genuinely funny: there is, needless to say, an influential A few years ago, Not and I were having a discussion about whether rape jokes could ever be genuinely funny: there is, needless to say, an influential school of thought which holds that a funny rape joke is a contradiction in terms. But it only took us an hour of searching to convince ourselves that rape jokes could be hilarious, the winner being Amy Schumer's "Football Town Nights", a sketch about an unsuspecting football coach who tries to implement a no-rape policy for his team. The jocks simply don't understand why rape might be wrong: they keep trying to find loopholes ("Like, suppose we just filmed it on our phones?"), convinced that no one could really be making such absurd demands of them.
And, similarly, Kunsten at græde i kor is a genuinely funny book about child abuse, surely one of the grimmest subjects around. Well-meaning, naïve eleven year old Allan worships his father and simply doesn't understand what's wrong with him regularly sleeping with Allan's big sister. Dad always looks so much happier after one of their little sessions! Surely he can't be doing anything bad, even if Sanne is a bit weird about it? And when that's your moral starting point, things develop with their own logic.
Obviously it's a high-wire act, but Jepsen waves away the safety net and confidently strolls along fifty metres above the sawdust, cracking one hilarious incest joke after another in South Jutland dialect. He reaches the other end without even looking worried, then strolls back again cracking more jokes about murder, mental illness and suicide. The audience, tears running down their cheeks, clap until their hands hurt.
Why have I never even heard of this guy before? Danish authors are ridiculously underrated....more
I started leafing through this at the bookshop round the corner, and by the time I'd got to the third page of the introduction I was intrigued. Clive I started leafing through this at the bookshop round the corner, and by the time I'd got to the third page of the introduction I was intrigued. Clive James gave an insightful analysis of the Divine Comedy's poetic structure and explained, better than anyone I'd seen try this before, just how ridiculously difficult it is to produce an English-language translation that has some meaningful relationship to the original text. Everything is difficult, needless to say, but the very worst thing is the rhyme scheme.
A prose translation is flat, and large parts of the second and third books turn into boring theology; in the original, they are sublimely beautiful, and the poem gets more and more beautiful as Dante draws closer to God. Also, Dante's poetry is propulsive, carrying the action forward at a rapid pace. But it turns out, unfortunately, that you can't do terza rima in English, the language just doesn't support that verse form. James thought about it for decades, and in the end had an idea: maybe quatrains would do the job? He experimented and decided the answer was yes. I flipped forward to Canto I and found these gorgeous lines:
At the mid-point of my path through life, I found Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound I still make shows how hard it is to say How harsh and bitter that place felt to me - Merely to think of it renews the fear - So bad that death by only a degree Could possibly be worse. As you shall hear It led to good things too, eventually, But then and there I saw no sign of those, And can't say even now how I had come To be there, stunned and following my nose Away from the straight path.
I was sold: James definitely had something. I paid my $20, took it home, and carried on reading.
I had previously only read the tepid Dorothy Sayers translation, some of the Longfellow, and some passages in the original, but my Italian, alas, is still nowhere near good enough to get through the whole thing that way. This was an acceptable substitute, and James was not overselling himself. The language, indeed, was often beautiful. And it really was propulsive: I often read several canti at a stretch, unable to put it down. By the time I reached the third book, where Dante ascends the spheres of heaven in the company of Beatrice, a third aspect became noticeable: it was wonderfully romantic. The adoration Dante feels for his angelic Lady leaps off the page in a way that I totally didn't recall from Sayers. For example (one passage of very many):
And so I am invited and made bold To ask you of another truth less than Clear to me, lady. Let me now be told If ever it can happen that a man May make it up to you by doing good For vows he has not kept." She looked at me With eyes so full of love my powers could Do nothing to withstand the clarity That sparkled there within. My vision shook. I almost fainted, stunned by that one look.
As I progressed, I become more and more certain that the translator was being inspired by his own muse, and I was also sure I could identify her: in the foreword, James was very gracious about the debt he owed to his wife, Prue Shaw, who introduced him to Dante when he was still a student and eventually become an internationally acclaimed Dante scholar. When James described how Dante is dazzled by the radiance of Beatrice's smile, I thought how he was being led on his own journey by his own celestial guide. It was really quite inspiring.
I mentioned some of my theories to Not, who scornfully told me that, as any Australian knew, Prue Shaw had unceremoniously dumped her husband in 2012 when she found he'd been deceiving her for years with a much younger woman. Maybe James had had a heavenly muse, but it was less than clear who she was. It was quite conceivable that he in fact had had two muses.
Damn. Why can't life ever be as beautiful and simple as you'd like it to be? But however it was produced, I still give an unhesitating thumbs up to James's translation. If you can't read five hundred pages of medieval Italian, this is the next best thing. _________________ [And the next day...]
Over lunch, it occurred to me to wonder whether Leanne Edelsten was in fact Clive James's anti-muse, helping him express that sense of pervasive guilt so central to Dante. Not's explanation was simpler: she thought that James, like most male writers, was a total shit.
I said that my interpretation in no way disagreed with hers, it was just more nuanced. But I am unsure whether Not found this convincing....more
Given the intense mystique that surrounds Proust, I decided I would try to approach the final volumes with an open mind. It's possible that I went a lGiven the intense mystique that surrounds Proust, I decided I would try to approach the final volumes with an open mind. It's possible that I went a little too far and that my review of Albertine disparue was insufficiently respectful. Sorry Kalliope! But having now reached the end, I am relieved to say that my fears were unfounded. The final chapter, which I discover Proust wrote immediately after completing the first chapter, pulls everything together; nothing was wasted, nothing was gratuitous. Although it was not easy to climb this mountain (a metaphor the author uses himself), when you reach the top the view is absolutely worth it. It is of course very sad that Proust died when he did. The three posthumous books are uneven, with strange plot holes and passages that are stylistically in need of revision, but it doesn't really matter; he seems to have known this would happen, and the text contains several references to his "unfinished cathedral". In a strange way, it is almost appropriate.
Some thoughts that have been going through my head the last couple of days:
- Given the construction of the book, I was very lucky to have ended up reading Combray and Le temps retrouvé in parallel: I'm sure it heightened my appreciation of the last volume. If you're also nearing the end of the series, I strongly recommend doing the same. You won't regret the time you spend on this little detour.
- In general, the problem with reading Proust is that you want to keep the whole thing in your head at once, so that you can appreciate all the interconnections, but in practice it's hard to read it quickly enough. I was however encouraged by my recent experiment with creating a multimedia version of the first volume. I will soon get back to this idea.
- A la recherche du temps perdu is formally a novel and always described as such, but it is at least as much a work of philosophy. It is both theoretical (it says deep and provocative things about the nature of the self) and practical (it embodies a highly idiosyncratic set of precepts for how one should live one's life). I wondered what people there might be who have tried to follow this philosophy and extend it; my top suspects are Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I must look around to see if anyone else has had the same thought, and what they have written about it....more
I've just posted a LARA version of Un amour de Swann, built using the same methods as with Combray out of a public domain audiobook taken from LitteratureAudio and parallel French and English text taken from Gutenberg. This gives a total of about 19 hours of Proust in LARA form. The scripts still need more work, but they're starting to get there: Combray took three weeks and a substantial revision of the code, Un amour de Swann a few days and some minor bug fixing. Coming next, Noms de pays : le nom and then A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. By the time we get to Le temps retrouvé, I hope everything will be quite stable.
There is a good deal of editing and quality control involved. If you're interested in contributing to this project, please leave a comment or PM me! ________________________________
I finished rereading it in the new multimedia format, and, as with Combray, I was astonished to see how much more I appreciated it this way. It becomes clear that, even for people who fancy themselves as connoisseurs of Proust, we tend to underestimate just how complex and subtle a writer he is. It helps a great deal to be able to read the French text while simultaneously getting the viewpoints of a French person who's spent a lot of time thinking about how she should read it aloud, and an English person who's spent a lot of time thinking about how he would say it in his language. Both of them quite frequently made obvious mistakes: as noted, Proust is very challenging. But much more frequently, they showed me things I'd missed on previous readings.
Starting with what the book is about. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but (view spoiler)[I'd somehow acquired the idea that it's about jealousy. It isn't. It's about the nature of the mind. (hide spoiler)]...more
I've been spending a lot of time this year trying to develop ways to build multimodal LARA documents automatically out o[Original review, Sep 13 2022]
I've been spending a lot of time this year trying to develop ways to build multimodal LARA documents automatically out of public domain internet resources. In principle, as Not told me a while ago, it should be easy. For many classic works of literature, everything you need is already there: the original text, a good English translation, and a high-quality audiobook. You just need to pull them apart and then put the pieces back together again so that the text, audio and translations line up. Surely there can't be much to it?
Not's intuition was spot on, though the details have taken a while to work out and still need considerable tidying up. Basically, my recipe goes like this. You start with the audio and cut it into pieces at silences using the ffmpeg tool. You then take the pieces of audio and send them for processing by Google Cloud Speech to Text. This is far from 100% accurate, but it's good enough that you can write a script which aligns the speech recognition results against the text of the book and matches them quite reliably. Next, you take the source text and the translation, and send them for processing at the YouAlign site; this cuts the two texts into roughly sentence-length chunks in a way which matches corresponding passages.
The problem is that the two alignments, source/audio and source/target, are not consistent with each other, since silences and sentence-breaks are not at all the same thing. In general, a sentence contains many silences comparable in length to the ones you get at periods. However, the aligments agree well enough that you can in practice take the places where they do agree and use those to create a consistent alignment. Most often, this means that a sentence found by YouAlign corresponds to several silence-delimited audio segments, though sometimes you need more than one YouAlign segment for it to work. For each combined segment, you stick togther all the relevant audio chunks and all the relevant translation chunks, and you're there. There is slightly more to it than the above, but basically it is indeed quite simple: it works because the core resources, Google Cloud Speech to Text and YouAlign, are very good, and you just have to find a way to exploit that power.
Proust's Combray is my first full-scale test of the idea. The original French text and the Scott Moncrieff translation were both downloaded from Gutenberg; the audio, about 8 hours and beautifully recorded by Monique Vincens, comes from LitteratureAudio. The resulting LARA version is posted here, view in Chrome or Firefox. You can use the audio controls to play audio a page at a time or a sentence at a time. Clicking on a pencil icon shows a translation of the previous sentence on the right; clicking on a word shows a concordance of places where that word occurs in the text.
We are writing a paper about this work, due at the end of the month. If you have any feedback, in particular including suggestions for what texts to do next or ideas about how one might use resources like LARA Combray in practice, it will be much appreciated! _______________________________ [Update, Sep 17 2022]
Picking up on Théodore's recommendation in message #9, I have used the same technique to create a LARA version of Rimbaud's Les poètes de sept ans. It's posted here. What a great poem! I had not seen it before, thank you Théodore. The audio is again from LitteratureAudio, this time by recorded by Alain Degandt. _______________________________ [Update, Oct 11 2022]
We have now submitted our paper. In the course of writing it, I went through four texts I'd created using the alignment method, listening to each piece of audio, checking it against the text and translation that the aligner had matched to it, and correcting where it was wrong. This kind of annotation work is common in language technology projects, and in nearly all cases it's painfully dull. But not here! I was amazed to find how much I enjoyed reading Combray in this new way, and how much more I got out of it as I listened to the French audio while flicking my eyes back and forward between the pieces of French text and English translation, which were neatly lined up for me.
There were two things in particular that stood out. First, it's possible to read a good deal more quickly. Proust is a notoriously demanding author; when reading in normal text form I usually feel I've reached my limit after at most 20-25 pages, and can no longer maintain the concentration needed to disentangle the longer sentences. Here, I was supported by the audio and the English translation, and I could read the whole book in two or three days. This exposed all sorts of connections I hadn't noticed before. Second, listening to Monique Vincens reading aloud made me properly aware of how funny Proust is; his irony is often so subtle that I hadn't noticed it, but she does a wonderful job of conveying the humour.
All in all, I felt I was appreciating the book at a different level. I will soon start putting together a LARA version of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs....more
Over the last two and a half years, it has been my great pleasure to help my talented Icelandic colleagues use the LARA platform to put togethe[image]
Over the last two and a half years, it has been my great pleasure to help my talented Icelandic colleagues use the LARA platform to put together a multimedia edition of the Poetic Edda. Three poems - Völuspá, Hávamál and Lokasenna - have already been posted separately, and some people will remember the Goodreads reading groups we had for them.
As of today, the project has passed another milestone, and we have just posted a combined edition which contains ten poems (Völuspá, Hávamál, Vafþrúðnismál, Grímnismál, Skírnismál, Hárbarðsljóð, Hymiskviða, Lokasenna, Þrymskviða and Alvíssmál) organised as a single document which you can find here. As with the individual poems, you can view it in Chrome or Firefox and listen to the original Old Norse a verse at a time. Hovering over a ᚠ rune shows a verse translation from the public domain Bellows edition. Hovering over a word shows an English gloss; clicking on it plays audio, and also brings up a concordance on the right hand side where you can see different places the word occurs, both in the current poem and also in the other ones.
The project has been a true labour of love, and hopefully this is still just the beginning. ___________________ [Update, Aug 26 2022]
After further diligent work, there's now a second version posted here where the glosses are in modern Icelandic. Even if you don't know any Icelandic or Old Norse, it's quite interesting to go through a few verses, hovering over the Old Norse words to discover how much the language has changed since 1280. ...more
With regard to the frequently posed questions about ursine house-training and papal religious affiliation, I cannot imagine how I can only just now haWith regard to the frequently posed questions about ursine house-training and papal religious affiliation, I cannot imagine how I can only just now have discovered that the original title of the Book of Genesis is Bereshit. Surely God is telling us something very important here. A quick search reveals no end of learned commentary....more
To me, the point of Flaubert's famous novella is the contrast between the unyielding grimness and ugliness of the subject-matter and the extraordinaryTo me, the point of Flaubert's famous novella is the contrast between the unyielding grimness and ugliness of the subject-matter and the extraordinary serenity and beauty of the style. This doesn't quite work in translation; I see a number of puzzled reviews. But if you want to find out what you've been missing, I've just used the new methods we've been developing to construct a LARA version out of high-class audio from the litteratureaudio.com site, the English translation available on Gutenberg, and a state-of-the-art text to speech engine. In Chrome or Firefox, you can listen to it a page at a time, a sentence at a time, or a word at a time. Hovering over a pencil icon shows you a translation of the previous sentence, and clicking on a word shows you all the places it occurs in the text, plus in most cases a link to a French lexicon page.
I'm curious to know if this changes anyone's mind about the story. If it does, please let me know!...more
"I'm not a cat. And I'm not a man. And I'm not a philosopher. And I'm not an asshole. I'm sort of a bit of all four at the same time."
The amazing true"I'm not a cat. And I'm not a man. And I'm not a philosopher. And I'm not an asshole. I'm sort of a bit of all four at the same time."
The amazing true story of how Philippe Geluck transformed Le Chat, one of the francophone world's most beloved cartoon caracters, into a series of twenty monumental sculptures in bronze that have gone on a Europe-wide tour.
Some of my favourite images:
[image]
"Careful with that chisel!"
[image]
"Just this once, a car got run over by a cat"
[image]
"Track star"
[image]
"The martyrdom of Saint Cat"
[image]
"Rodin chose the easy option with his 'Thinker'. Geluck has raised the bar with his 'Talker'"...more
I am continuing to experiment with the scripts I've developed for cutting up audiobooks and turning them into multimedia LARA texts (more details hereI am continuing to experiment with the scripts I've developed for cutting up audiobooks and turning them into multimedia LARA texts (more details here if you're curious). I've tried French and English, so I thought I'd move to a different language and do something in German. What better place to start than Aschenputtel, the original Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella? You can see the result here. As usual with LARA texts, view in Chrome or Firefox and hover over a pencil icon to get a translation of the preceding sentence; clicking on a word shows you all the places it occurs in the text, and also gives you a link to a German lexicon/grammar page. The audio comes from someone on Librivox called Hans Hafen, who sounds like the kind German grandfather every child ought to have to read Grimms Märchen to them. Vielen dank Herr Hafen!
I did the translation myself, partly because the one I found on Gutenberg was far removed from the German, and partly because it was fun. What a weird story Aschenputtel is compared to the bland Disney film! I started off thinking it was very politically incorrect, which I suppose it must be, but after a while I decided that the proto-feminist component was even stronger. Herr Charming, if you haven't figured it out yet, I must warn you that this is a seriously dangerous princess. You look like you're way out of your depth. _________________ [Update, Oct 1 2022]
This afternoon, we watched the Adelaide Gilbert and Sullivan Society's charming production of Into the Woods, which I'd never seen before. I was amazed to discover how closely the Cinderella segment followed Aschenputtel! If you're a fan, I definitely recommend checking out the original text....more
I cannot forgive Piet for breaking Tove's heart. But his poems are clever, and they say one should never confuse the artist with his art.I cannot forgive Piet for breaking Tove's heart. But his poems are clever, and they say one should never confuse the artist with his art....more
I spent most of yesterday exchanging emails with our Ukrainian friend Marta and helping her prepare this book. All of the text and audio is Marta's, uI spent most of yesterday exchanging emails with our Ukrainian friend Marta and helping her prepare this book. All of the text and audio is Marta's, unchanged. I have just assisted with the formatting. View in Chrome or Firefox and start here. Hovering over a word shows an English translation, clicking plays Marta's audio recording.
Warning: might make you cry. ________________________
David has now created standard e-pub and Mobi editions as well. You can download them here. ________________________
Another little experiment: an annotated tweet in Ukrainian. Again, access in Chrome or Firefox. Hover over a word to see a translation, click to hear it. Pencil and speaker icons give translations and audio for sentence....more
We have been doing some work recently to make LARA support picture-based texts, and this is our first real example: a multimodal French alphabe[image]
We have been doing some work recently to make LARA support picture-based texts, and this is our first real example: a multimodal French alphabet book based on Le petit prince. If you're a fan of the book and beginner level in French, you might find it fun! Start Chrome or Firefox and go here.
There's a set of 26 pages, one for each letter, and each page comes in three versions. In the Semantic version, you can click on the picture and hear the word spoken in French; hovering gives you a translation. In the Phonetic version, you can hover over the word and spell through it one letter group at a time. Clicking on a letter group will play the sound and show you other words where that sound occurs. In the Examples version, you'll see a French sentence from Le petit prince which uses the word, annotated with audio and translations both for the individual words and for the sentence as a whole.
The screenshot above illustrates. The D word is dessins ("drawings"). This is the Phonetic version: I've just clicked on the letter group in, and it's played the sound /ɛ̃/, the nasalised vowel that this letter group usually represents in French, and shown me that the same sound also occurs in invisible ("invisible") and jardin ("garden"). If you go to the Examples version, you see the sentence Mon dessin ne représentait pas un chapeau. ("My drawing wasn't supposed to be a hat") from the first chapter of the book.
Comments will be very welcome! We're thinking of doing more of these and want to know where we can improve things. ...more
"Good gracious," said Alice, "I think I have fallen entirely through the Earth and ended up in the Antipodes! I suppose that must be why I'm da[image]
"Good gracious," said Alice, "I think I have fallen entirely through the Earth and ended up in the Antipodes! I suppose that must be why I'm dark brown and completely naked." She looked down on herself, and, indeed, she was not wearing a stitch of clothing. "At home," she continued, "I am sure they would have thought it most improper; but here it seems to be the thing to do. All the same, I wish I didn't have to say everything in Pitjantjatjara! Why, it's all I can do to pronounce the name of the language, let alone speak it."
"You needn't worry," said the Witchetty Grub shortly, "No doubt someone will backtranslate you into English by and by. They'll lose all the subtle wordplay but that will serve them right. And maybe the editor will add a few footnotes to tell people what they're missing."
Alice had not the least idea what backtranslation was, and for a moment she wondered if she should be alarmed; but so many strange things had already happened that day that one more would hardly make a difference....more
I have been helping my Icelandic colleagues put together LARA versions of Old Norse poems from the Edda, which gave me the opportunity to appreciate aI have been helping my Icelandic colleagues put together LARA versions of Old Norse poems from the Edda, which gave me the opportunity to appreciate a few of them in the original; Völuspá and Hávamál were indeed quite magnificent. When I remembered we had this book lying on the shelf, I thought I should read it. I'm fluent in Swedish, it's a direct descendant of Old Norse, translation between closely related languages often works, and Collinder came across as very serious about the project.
Well, having finished, I'm afraid to say I'm disappointed. Collinder was indeed extremely serious, maybe even too serious. He gives the impression of having known everything there was to know about the Edda and Old Norse literature in general, and seems to have spent a good part of his life reworking his translation; I have the third revised edition. He says the meter is always the same as in the original. The long introduction is interesting, and told me a great deal I didn't know about Old Norse poetry. Some verses are very good. But mostly, it's flat. I compare with the lines I'd read in the original, and the music is gone. Well, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. These are some of the greatest poems in world literature, why should they work in translation? Reading through the book was not at all a waste of time though. It has given me an overview of the Edda and made me want to go back and read more of it in Old Norse. Maybe that's all Collinder was trying to achieve.
One noteworthy exception: the translation of the final poem, Egil Skalla-Grímssons Sonatorrek, Egil Skalla-Grímsson's elegy for his dead son, is extraordinary, beautiful and heartbreaking. The pages I have found about Collinder's life are uninformative and don't mention any children, but it's hard not to feel there is some personal connection here. ____________________
I reread it, and second time round I appreciated it much more. Collinder's uncompromising language takes some getting used to, and also you have to know the whole story already for it to make sense.
I am now very interested to try reading more of the poems in the original Old Norse. Also the versions of the Völsungasaga by Tolkien and William Morris, both of which I've only just discovered....more
Damn! I loved the 2020 Finnish movie Tove, which was beautiful, romantic, and extremely respectful of its subject. But now I find that it interferes wDamn! I loved the 2020 Finnish movie Tove, which was beautiful, romantic, and extremely respectful of its subject. But now I find that it interferes with my appreciation of the Mumin books. Every time I hear Tofslan and Vifslan using their secret language, my thoughts are drawn to Tove Jansson and Vivica Bandler, who at least according to the film had the same private joke going, and my mind's eye shows me Alma Pöysti and Krista Kosonen in bed together (view spoiler)[
[image]
(hide spoiler)]. This simply doesn't work.
I suppose though that it is a good example of why knowing something about the author's life isn't necessarily an advantage... ...more
Oh, how I wish I had written this poem, which I found reproduced in Henry Beard's Poetry for Cats!
Grendel's Dog, from BEOCAT
by the Old English Epic's Oh, how I wish I had written this poem, which I found reproduced in Henry Beard's Poetry for Cats!
Grendel's Dog, from BEOCAT
by the Old English Epic's Unknown Author's Cat*
Brave Beocat, | brood-kit of Ecgthmeow, Hearth-pet of Hrothgar | in whose high halls He mauled without mercy | many fat mice, Night did not find napping | nor snack-feasting. The wary war-cat, | whiskered paw-wielder, Bearer of the burnished neck-belt | gold-braided collar band, Feller of fleas | fatal, too to ticks, The work of wonder-smiths, | woven with witches’ charms, Sat upon the throne-seat | his ears like sword-points Upraised, sharp-tipped, | listening for peril-sounds, When he heard from the moor-hill | howls of the hell-hound, Gruesome hunger-grunts | of Grendel’s Great Dane, Deadly doom-mutt, | dread demon-dog. Then boasted Beocat, | noble battle-kitten, Bane of barrow-bunnies, | bold seeker of nest-booty: “If hand of man unhasped | the heavy hall-door And freed me to frolic forth | to fight the fang-bearing fiend, I would lay the whelpling low | with lethal claw-blows; Fur would fly | and the foe would taste death-food. But resounding snooze-noise, | stern slumber-thunder, Nose-music of men snoring | mead-hammered in the wine-hall, Fills me with sorrow-feeling | for Fate does not see fit To send some fingered folk | to lift the firm-fastened latch That I might go grapple | with the grim ghoul-pooch.” Thus spoke the mouse-shredder, | hunter of hall-pests, Short-haired Hrodent-slayer, | greatest of the pussy-Geats.
* Modern English verse translation by the Editor's Cat. ...more
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