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 🫶🏻 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 🫶🏻 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 🫶🏻
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 🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻
I MISTOOK THE SENSATION FOR LOVE AND DIED.
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:
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.
Translation thoughts on the greatest poem of our time, “His wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floor”
It’s actually quite tricky to translate. Because it’s so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. “Chintz” 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 chintz’s eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldn’t compete.
Keep it real” is tremendously difficult to translate – it’s a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to one’s roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:
“[K]eeping it real meant performing an individual’s experience of being Black in the United States. As such, it became a form of resistance. Insisting on a different reality, one that wasn’t recognized by the dominant culture, empowered Black people to ‘forge a parallel system of meaning,’ according to cultural critic Mich Nyawalo…The phrase’s roots in racialized resistance, however, were erased when it was adopted by the mostly-White film world of the 1970s and ’80s….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 wasn’t about testifying to personal experience; it was about inventing it.”
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 – the hero of our poem, the unnamed “him”, 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 don’t necessarily exist in other languages – a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these – 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 don’t evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that there’s more than just what you see, whether that’s the details of the story – what’s happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? – or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.
Yiddish first:
זייַן ווייַב האָט אָנגעפֿילט זייַן הויז מיט הבלים
צו בלייַבן וויטיש, איך שטוף אים אופֿן דיל. zayn vayb hot ongefilt zayn hoyz mit havolim.
tsu blaybn vitish, ikh shtup im afn dil
This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish – tsits – but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means “vanity, nothingness, nonsense, trifles”. 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 – 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.
Vitish – Okay, this is a good one. Keep in mind, of course, that I’ve never heard or seen it used before today, so my understanding of its nuances is very limited, but I’ll explain to you exactly how I am sourcing its meaning. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CYED) gives this as “gone astray (esp. woman); slang correct, honest”. I used the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition software, which allows you to search for strings in their corpus, to confirm that both usages are, in fact, attested. It’s a pretty rare word in text, though, as the CYED implies, it might have been more common in spoken speech. It appears in a glossary in “Bay unds yuden” (Among Us Jews) as a thieves cant word, where it’s definted as נאַריש, שרעקעוודיק, אונבעהאלפ. אויך נישט גנביש. אין דער דייַטשער גאַונער-שפראַך – witsch – נאַריש, or “foolish, terrible, clumsy/pathetic. not of the thieves world. in the German thieves cant witsch means foolish”. A vitishe nekeyve (vitishe woman) is either a slacker or a prostitute. I can’t prove this for sure, but my sense is that it might come from the same root as vitz, joke (it’s used a couple of times in the corpus to mention laughing at a vitish remark – which makes it seem kind of similar to witty). I assume the German thieve’s cant that’s being referred to is Rotwelsch, which has its own fascinating history and, in fact, incorporates a lot of Yiddish. In fact, for this reason, some of the first Yiddish linguists were actually criminologists! What an excellent set of associations, no? It has the slangy sense of straightforward of honest; it has a sense of sexual non-normativity (we might use it to read into the relationship between the narrator and the husband) – and a feminized one at that; it was used by an underground subculture, and, again, the meaning there was quite different – like the “real” in “keeping it real” it was used to indicate whether or not someone was “in” on the life (tho “real” is used to mean that the person is in, while “vitish” is used to mean they’re not). It’s variety of meanings are more ambiguous than “keep it real”, which can pretty much only be read positively, and it also brings in a tinge of criminality. Though it doesn’t have the same exact connotations as “keep it real”, I think it’s about as ideal of a fit as we’ll get because it’s equally evocative of more below the surface. I also chose “tsu blaybn vitish”, which is “to stay vitish”, as opposed to something like “to make it vitish” to keep the slight ambiguity of time that “keep it real” has – keeping it real does< I think, imply that there is a pre-existing “real” to which one can adhere, so I wanted to imply the same.
The rest is straight-forward. “Shtup” is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for “fuck”, and I think it has a nice sound.
Ok, now Russian
женой твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками
чтоб не блудить с пути, ебемся на полу
zhenoy tvoy dom napolnin fintiflyushkami.
shtob ne bludit’ s puti’, yebyomsya na polu
In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here – since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, it’s harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:
“Your house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, we’re fucking on the floor”
So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for “chintz” and “keep it real”. To preserve the iamb, I changed “his” to “your”. 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 don’t think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because it’s unlikely you’d be on formal you with someone you’re fucking (unless it’s, like, a kink thing). I honestly didn’t 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 “realness” of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth – that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that he’s betraying – 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 – an encounter without deeper significance?
Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history – i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only “his house” and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also don’t know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you.
Ok moving on, I originally translated it as “твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками жены”. 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 – perhaps even the dominant one – but it could also read more like “we are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they share” – the action of filling is no longer what’s being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because it’s almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. “Zhenoy tvoy dom napolnen” is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means “Your house is filled by your wife” – as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps that’s even good – 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 “финтифлюшки” (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. “Stray off the path” implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz – 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. “Bludit’“ can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can “stray”). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch – they want to do the latter but not the former.
As for register – “shtob” 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 “mat” 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; it’s not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if we’re already thinking that deeply about it. But while we’re 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 i think that’s all the comments i have!
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, it’s complicated and annoying. This took me hours and I’m sure it would’ve been better/easier if I didn’t live my life in English 75% of the time.
I kept the number of syllables of the original. Apparently French is an unstressed language! Cool.
I chose to use “envahit”, meaning invaded, because “filled his house” really struck me. The speaker emphasizes the (in his eyes) overbearing nature of the wife. I couldn’t 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 “sa” ans “son”, or his, and “chez-lui”, meaning his place.
Keep it real was a pain in the ass. I went with “je le mets à l'aise”, or to put at ease. I like the idea that the speaker makes the husband comfortable and reveals his true self. Se mettre à 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. It’s vulgar and implies casual and/or rough, quick sex. And it’s only one syllable and every other synonym was like, a whole phrase.
I loooved giving translation a try and I don’t 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, “His wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floor”
It’s actually quite tricky to translate. Because it’s so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. “Chintz” 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 chintz’s eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldn’t compete.
Keep it real” is tremendously difficult to translate – it’s a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to one’s roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:
“[K]eeping it real meant performing an individual’s experience of being Black in the United States. As such, it became a form of resistance. Insisting on a different reality, one that wasn’t recognized by the dominant culture, empowered Black people to ‘forge a parallel system of meaning,’ according to cultural critic Mich Nyawalo…The phrase’s roots in racialized resistance, however, were erased when it was adopted by the mostly-White film world of the 1970s and ’80s….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 wasn’t about testifying to personal experience; it was about inventing it.”
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 – the hero of our poem, the unnamed “him”, 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 don’t necessarily exist in other languages – a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these – 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 don’t evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that there’s more than just what you see, whether that’s the details of the story – what’s happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? – or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.
Yiddish first:
זייַן ווייַב האָט אָנגעפֿילט זייַן הויז מיט הבלים
צו בלייַבן וויטיש, איך שטוף אים אופֿן דיל. zayn vayb hot ongefilt zayn hoyz mit havolim.
tsu blaybn vitish, ikh shtup im afn dil
This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish – tsits – but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means “vanity, nothingness, nonsense, trifles”. 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 – 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.
Vitish – Okay, this is a good one. Keep in mind, of course, that I’ve never heard or seen it used before today, so my understanding of its nuances is very limited, but I’ll explain to you exactly how I am sourcing its meaning. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CYED) gives this as “gone astray (esp. woman); slang correct, honest”. I used the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition software, which allows you to search for strings in their corpus, to confirm that both usages are, in fact, attested. It’s a pretty rare word in text, though, as the CYED implies, it might have been more common in spoken speech. It appears in a glossary in “Bay unds yuden” (Among Us Jews) as a thieves cant word, where it’s definted as נאַריש, שרעקעוודיק, אונבעהאלפ. אויך נישט גנביש. אין דער דייַטשער גאַונער-שפראַך – witsch – נאַריש, or “foolish, terrible, clumsy/pathetic. not of the thieves world. in the German thieves cant witsch means foolish”. A vitishe nekeyve (vitishe woman) is either a slacker or a prostitute. I can’t prove this for sure, but my sense is that it might come from the same root as vitz, joke (it’s used a couple of times in the corpus to mention laughing at a vitish remark – which makes it seem kind of similar to witty). I assume the German thieve’s cant that’s being referred to is Rotwelsch, which has its own fascinating history and, in fact, incorporates a lot of Yiddish. In fact, for this reason, some of the first Yiddish linguists were actually criminologists! What an excellent set of associations, no? It has the slangy sense of straightforward of honest; it has a sense of sexual non-normativity (we might use it to read into the relationship between the narrator and the husband) – and a feminized one at that; it was used by an underground subculture, and, again, the meaning there was quite different – like the “real” in “keeping it real” it was used to indicate whether or not someone was “in” on the life (tho “real” is used to mean that the person is in, while “vitish” is used to mean they’re not). It’s variety of meanings are more ambiguous than “keep it real”, which can pretty much only be read positively, and it also brings in a tinge of criminality. Though it doesn’t have the same exact connotations as “keep it real”, I think it’s about as ideal of a fit as we’ll get because it’s equally evocative of more below the surface. I also chose “tsu blaybn vitish”, which is “to stay vitish”, as opposed to something like “to make it vitish” to keep the slight ambiguity of time that “keep it real” has – keeping it real does< I think, imply that there is a pre-existing “real” to which one can adhere, so I wanted to imply the same.
The rest is straight-forward. “Shtup” is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for “fuck”, and I think it has a nice sound.
Ok, now Russian
женой твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками
чтоб не блудить с пути, ебемся на полу
zhenoy tvoy dom napolnin fintiflyushkami.
shtob ne bludit’ s puti’, yebyomsya na polu
In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here – since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, it’s harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:
“Your house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, we’re fucking on the floor”
So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for “chintz” and “keep it real”. To preserve the iamb, I changed “his” to “your”. 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 don’t think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because it’s unlikely you’d be on formal you with someone you’re fucking (unless it’s, like, a kink thing). I honestly didn’t 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 “realness” of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth – that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that he’s betraying – 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 – an encounter without deeper significance?
Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history – i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only “his house” and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also don’t know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you.
Ok moving on, I originally translated it as “твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками жены”. 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 – perhaps even the dominant one – but it could also read more like “we are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they share” – the action of filling is no longer what’s being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because it’s almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. “Zhenoy tvoy dom napolnen” is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means “Your house is filled by your wife” – as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps that’s even good – 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 “финтифлюшки” (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. “Stray off the path” implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz – 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. “Bludit’“ can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can “stray”). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch – they want to do the latter but not the former.
As for register – “shtob” 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 “mat” 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; it’s not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if we’re already thinking that deeply about it. But while we’re 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 i think that’s all the comments i have!
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, it’s complicated and annoying. This took me hours and I’m sure it would’ve been better/easier if I didn’t live my life in English 75% of the time.
I kept the number of syllables of the original. Apparently French is an unstressed language! Cool.
I chose to use “envahit”, meaning invaded, because “filled his house” really struck me. The speaker emphasizes the (in his eyes) overbearing nature of the wife. I couldn’t 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 “sa” ans “son”, or his, and “chez-lui”, meaning his place.
Keep it real was a pain in the ass. I went with “je le mets à l'aise”, or to put at ease. I like the idea that the speaker makes the husband comfortable and reveals his true self. Se mettre à 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. It’s vulgar and implies casual and/or rough, quick sex. And it’s only one syllable and every other synonym was like, a whole phrase.
I loooved giving translation a try and I don’t know how people can translate whole books.
yessss, the chintz poem and translation, two things that I love!!! I’ve already seen a couple of german translations in the notes, but I wanted to give this a try myself
Das Frauchen füllt 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:
The rest of the the line (“fick ich ihn am Boden”) is basically just a word for word translation of “I fuck him on the floor” - english “fucking” and german “ficken” stem from the same roots etymologically and are similarly crass words for sex. I used the contracted “fick ich ihn” instead of the proper “ficke ich ihn” both for a more colloquial, vulgar tone and for the syllable count, and “on the floor” is maybe more properly rendered as “auf dem Boden”, but again, “am Boden” fits better vis-a-vis syllables.
Lastly: meter! The original is of course an almost perfect, even iambic pentameter. My version isn’t, 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 don’t think I was quite able to translate the extreme tonal shift between the two lines as it exists in English, and the consonantal alliterations didn’t entirely carry over either, but now thanks to the shift in length AND meter, it’s still JARRING to read this and try to jump from one line to the next.
Finally, I’d like to give shout outs specifically to @sympathischeufos for the “am Boden”, 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!
HELLO HI.. my goodness… is it my time… i think it may actually be my time. here’s another Yiddish and Russian i hope you like it
Ok Russian first ok..
(his woman’s stuffed his house with glitzy rubbish.
in better taste, we fuck on the floor.)
I do love and respect that everyone’s 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 someone’s husband (whose wife he clearly disrespects) – 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 don’t think it’s 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? There’s 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: мишура isn’t exactly kitsch or chintz, it wasn’t Once In Style and then stopped being for arbitrary reasons of taste – it means “tinsel” but it’s 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 дождик (rain).
Мишурная дрянь then is “glitzy rubbish”, but, obviously, much stronger (дрянь is a quite strong derisive) and much more suggestive of the wife’s womanhood being a cause of the chintz (I’m not sure how else to phrase this, but I think in a spiritually faithful Russian rendering of the poem it should be implied).
Баба is sometimes just a dialect word for “woman”, not particularly derisive, but in urban contexts it’s 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 can’t 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 lover’s wife – it’s a one-way possessive relation, the wife here is reduced to an annoying possession of the lover, so deeply a non-threat that it’s even doing the lover a completely non-objectionable taste-developing favour to introduce some “good taste” into the equation.
Of course you can’t 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 wife’s contribution to the house. Misogyny, ladies and gentlemen! Can’t translate gay poetry about gay adultery into Russian without it.
Or well you can, probably you should, certainly it’s 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 – to better convey that this person doesn’t think anything is wrong with this.
And now we swerve into Yiddish, where I am so sorry my loves I don’t 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 don’t think the original is either :)
Well like, I think you probably can’t achieve as strong and clear an image of that type of thing in Yiddish that we wrote about above. I’m 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) it’s 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 it’s about gay adultery.
What kind of gay adultery? Well let’s see:
(his wife has filled his house with her lack of taste )
We don’t have a directly translating expression for chintz that sounds good here and i didn’t feel quite at home with @mashkaroom ’s “havolim” (which does fuck conceptually i’ve just never heard it either) because it’s not in my idiom. but tamlozkeyt! that in the right rickety old woman’s 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 doesn’t specify that it’s cheap or anything.
It could be here that the wife fills the house with tacky objects, or it could be that she “fills the house…” as the saying goes of women creating living space by their presence… except she doesn’t 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 doesn’t know is personal and universalizes)
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 original’s thing of the metre being jarring
“to be decent [modest, fitting, i’m 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 floor”
basheydn means modest but also has a connotation of decency in the social sense, and then of course there’s whatever you want to read into “sheyd” (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 wife’s life with the lover, so here rather than “to keep it..” 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 “went to mikdash melech to have repressed gay sex and think about his old chavrusa” type of longing into the speaker here, like babyboy it is cosmically right and totally not even a bit a sin if it’s us)
trenen is a more current Yiddish slang for fucking, shtup is like… People still use it but for its own particular effect you understand, it has a yikhes a history a patina of age … nowadays many people use it for “to stuff” (deep American Yiddish) or “to sew/fix/do halfassedly” (otherwise), it’s 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 people’s 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!
INSANELY POWERFUL ADDITIONS FROM OP
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 I’M JUST THRILLED THIS LOCALIZATION WORKED IN TWO LINES here’s a cut
in 2007, a lady named Kristin Sue Lucas filed to legally change her name from “Kristin Sue Lucas” to “Kristin Sue Lucas”. She appeared in front of a judge in california to petition her case. this is the transcript of her court hearing
Commission pieceeee
Meeting Death at the crossroads
LOL whos tye saultry little binch on the bottom lsft????
this post is less than 1% away from being completely incomprehensible
do you have any recommendations for adaptations of Les Mis? I vaguely remember watching the 2012 adaptation a while back and liking it but I have heard it's a bad adaptation of the original work
I'm far from having watched every tv and film adaptation of the book, especially when it comes to older adaptations pre-50s, but for what it's worth I really enjoy is the 1982 movie. Lino Ventura is one of my favourite Valjeans and that movie has a strong atmosphere, imo (and some rare sightings of lesser known characters)
the 1925 silent film is on archive.org here! it is one of the best looking and highest budget adaptations, and it films on location for many scenes, including in locations that no longer exist, such as the bagne in Toulon. excellent Valjean, magnetic Enjolras, deeply text-based Javert. also the cutest and best-acted young Cosette of all time.
but the actual best adaptation is the 1964 Italian miniseries directed by Sandro Bolchi. best Waterloo, best Orion, an exceptional Javert, keen attention to the symbolism and drama, and it's just plain fun. unfortunately only available in Italian and quite difficult to find.
what a beautiful day to not be in high school
hey reblog this with a piece of your favorite poem, please
When we sleep for good, I would like a tree. I would like Ann to have a tree, too. We can be side by side, on one of the hills that we used to explore. My tree will be bigger. I loved him more. Ann is the one he picked first. But he came back for me.
(Rick Bass, from The Odyssey)
Missing someone is like hearing a name sung quietly from somewhere behind you. Even after you know no one is there, you keep looking back until on a silver afternoon like this you find yourself breathing just enough to make a small dent in the air.
--from “Slow Dance” by Tim Seibles
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled: They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. What matter to me if their star is a world? Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.
-- from "My Star" by Robert Browning
And nearer fast and nearer Doth the red whirlwind come; And louder still and still more loud, From underneath that rolling cloud Is heard the trumpet’s war-note proud, The trampling, and the hum. And plainly and more plainly Now through the gloom appears, Far to left and far to right, In broken gleams of dark-blue light, The long array of helmets bright, The long array of spears.
- Horatius at the Bridge by Thomas Babington Macaulay
Yes, we’d like to clap the camels, to smell the spice, admire her hairy legs and bonny wicked smile, we want to take PhDs in Persian, be vice to her president: we want to help her ask some Difficult Questions she’s shouting for our wisest man to test her mettle: Scour Scotland for a Solomon! Sure enough: from the back of the crowd someone growls: whae do you think y'ur? and a thousand laughing girls and she draw our hot breath and shout
THE QUEEN OF SHEBA!
Kathleen Jamie’s The Queen of Sheba
Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
—The Old Astronomer to His Pupil, Sarah Williams
But that was long ago, and Saints Have died since then -- and Ogres bled And purple tigers flopped down dead Among the pictures and the paints. -- "An Old and Crumbling Parapet", Mervyn Peake
LES MIS LETTERS IN ADAPTATION - Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse, LM 3.7.3 (Shoujo Cosette)
A lugubrious being was Montparnasse. Montparnasse was a child; less than twenty years of age, with a handsome face, lips like cherries, charming black hair, the brilliant light of springtime in his eyes; he had all vices and aspired to all crimes. The digestion of evil aroused in him an appetite for worse. It was the street boy turned pickpocket, and a pickpocket turned garroter. He was genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, sluggish, ferocious. The rim of his hat was curled up on the left side, in order to make room for a tuft of hair, after the style of 1829. He lived by robbery with violence. His coat was of the best cut, but threadbare. Montparnasse was a fashion-plate in misery and given to the commission of murders. The cause of all this youth’s crimes was the desire to be well-dressed. The first grisette who had said to him: “You are handsome!” had cast the stain of darkness into his heart, and had made a Cain of this Abel. Finding that he was handsome, he desired to be elegant: now, the height of elegance is idleness; idleness in a poor man means crime. Few prowlers were so dreaded as Montparnasse. At eighteen, he had already numerous corpses in his past. More than one passer-by lay with outstretched arms in the presence of this wretch, with his face in a pool of blood. Curled, pomaded, with laced waist, the hips of a woman, the bust of a Prussian officer, the murmur of admiration from the boulevard wenches surrounding him, his cravat knowingly tied, a bludgeon in his pocket, a flower in his buttonhole; such was this dandy of the sepulchre.
every year around christmas me and my grandma play this fun family game called “maybe you want to put jesus in your room instead, sweetie? :)”. now, it’s important to note that the jesus referred to in our game is not actually the real jesus christ, but instead a wooden figure i made in 2011 that has an uncanny resemblance to the lord and savior himself
so what happens is that i place jesus in our living room, and my grandma smiles and asks me if i don’t want to decorate my room with him instead. i ask her in return if she thinks my jesus figure is ugly (which he is), but she reassures me that this is not the case. however, a couple of days later jesus mysteriously disappears from our living room, and appear in my room instead
now, the real jesus christ might have been able to perform a miracle like this, but please remember that the jesus in our story is only a figure made out of wood. he can not move on his own, so i think we can safely say that my grandma is the prime suspect here
the first year i would often confront my grandma about this, but she would always make up an excuse and never straight up tell me she moved him because he’s so ugly it’s an embarrassment to the family
eventually i grew tired of her lies, so now we only move jesus around in silence. one second he’s in the living room, the next he’s back in my room. in a way i think this adds an extra element of excitement to the holiday season, because you never know for sure when jesus is going to be moved again
and so it begins..
i was not fucking ready for this photograph
I’m NEVER ready for the fucking photograph, holy shit.
For those who might happen across this, I'm an administrator for the forum 'Sufficient Velocity', a large old-school forum oriented around Creative Writing. I originally posted this on there (and any reference to 'here' will mean the forum), but I felt I might as well throw it up here, as well, even if I don't actually have any followers.
This week, I've been reading fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3), a site run by the Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit. This isn't particularly exceptional, in and of itself — like many others on the site, I read a lot of fanfiction, both on Sufficient Velocity (SV) and elsewhere — however what was bizarre to me was encountering a new prefix on certain works, that of 'End OTW Racism'. While I'm sure a number of people were already familiar with this, I was not, so I looked into it.
What I found... wasn't great. And I don't think anyone involved realises that.
To summarise the details, the #EndOTWRacism campaign, of which you may find their manifesto here, is a campaign oriented towards seeing hateful or discriminatory works removed from AO3 — and believe me, there is a lot of it. To whit, they want the OTW to moderate them. A laudable goal, on the face of it — certainly, we do something similar on Sufficient Velocity with Rule 2 and, to be clear, nothing I say here is a critique of Rule 2 (or, indeed, Rule 6) on SV.
But it's not that simple, not when you're the size of Archive of Our Own. So, let's talk about the vagaries and little-known pitfalls of content moderation, particularly as it applies to digital fiction and at scale. Let's dig into some of the details — as far as credentials go, I have, unfortunately, been in moderation and/or administration on SV for about six years and this is something we have to grapple with regularly, so I would like to say I can speak with some degree of expertise on the subject.
So, what are the problems with moderating bad works from a site? Let's start with discovery— that is to say, how you find rule-breaching works in the first place. There are more-or-less two different ways to approach manual content moderation of open submissions on a digital platform: review-based and report-based (you could also call them curation-based and flag-based), with various combinations of the two. Automated content moderation isn't something I'm going to cover here — I feel I can safely assume I'm preaching to the choir when I say it's a bad idea, and if I'm not, I'll just note that the least absurd outcome we had when simulating AI moderation (mostly for the sake of an academic exercise) on SV was banning all the staff.
In a review-based system, you check someone's work and approve it to the site upon verifying that it doesn't breach your content rules. Generally pretty simple, we used to do something like it on request. Unfortunately, if you do that, it can void your safe harbour protections in the US per Myeress vs. Buzzfeed Inc. This case, if you weren't aware, is why we stopped offering content review on SV. Suffice to say, it's not really a realistic option for anyone large enough for the courts to notice, and extremely clunky and unpleasant for the users, to boot.
Report-based systems, on the other hand, are something we use today — users find works they think are in breach and alert the moderation team to their presence with a report. On SV, this works pretty well — a user or users flag a work as potentially troublesome, moderation investigate it and either action it or reject the report. Unfortunately, AO3 is not SV. I'll get into the details of that dreadful beast known as scaling later, but thankfully we do have a much better comparison point — fanfiction.net (FFN).
FFN has had two great purges over the years, with a... mixed amount of content moderation applied in between: one in 2002 when the NC-17 rating was removed, and one in 2012. Both, ostensibly, were targeted at adult content. In practice, many fics that wouldn't raise an eye on Spacebattles today or Sufficient Velocity prior to 2018 were also removed; a number of reports suggest that something as simple as having a swearword in your title or summary was enough to get you hit, even if you were a 'T' rated work. Most disturbingly of all, there are a number of — impossible to substantiate — accounts of groups such as the infamous Critics United 'mass reporting' works to trigger a strike to get them removed. I would suggest reading further on places like Fanlore if you are unfamiliar and want to know more.
Despite its flaws however, report-based moderation is more-or-less the only option, and this segues neatly into the next piece of the puzzle that is content moderation, that is to say, the rubric. How do you decide what is, and what isn't against the rules of your site?
Anyone who's complained to the staff about how vague the rules are on SV may have had this explained to them, but as that is likely not many of you, I'll summarise: the more precise and clear-cut your chosen rubric is, the more it will inevitably need to resemble a legal document — and the less readable it is to the layman. We'll return to SV for an example here: many newer users will not be aware of this, but SV used to have a much more 'line by line, clearly delineated' set of rules and... people kind of hated it! An infraction would reference 'Community Compact III.15.5' rather than Rule 3, because it was more or less written in the same manner as the Terms of Service (sans the legal terms of art). While it was a more legible rubric from a certain perspective, from the perspective of communicating expectations to the users it was inferior to our current set of rules — even less of them read it, and we don't have great uptake right now.
And it still wasn't really an improvement over our current set-up when it comes to 'moderation consistency'. Even without getting into the nuts and bolts of "how do you define a racist work in a way that does not, at any point, say words to the effect of 'I know it when I see it'" — which is itself very, very difficult don't get me wrong I'm not dismissing this — you are stuck with finding an appropriate footing between a spectrum of 'the US penal code' and 'don't be a dick' as your rubric. Going for the penal code side doesn't help nearly as much as you might expect with moderation consistency, either — no matter what, you will never have a 100% correct call rate. You have the impossible task of writing a rubric that is easy for users to comprehend, extremely clear for moderation and capable of cleanly defining what is and what isn't racist without relying on moderator judgement, something which you cannot trust when operating at scale.
Speaking of scale, it's time to move on to the third prong — and the last covered in this ramble, which is more of a brief overview than anything truly in-depth — which is resources. Moderation is not a magic wand, you can't conjure it out of nowhere: you need to spend an enormous amount of time, effort and money on building, training and equipping a moderation staff, even a volunteer one, and it is far, far from an instant process. Our most recent tranche of moderators spent several months in training and it will likely be some months more before they're fully comfortable in the role — and that's with a relatively robust bureaucracy and a number of highly experienced mentors supporting them, something that is not going to be available to a new moderation branch with little to no experience. Beyond that, there's the matter of sheer numbers.
Combining both moderation and arbitration — because for volunteer staff, pure moderation is in actuality less efficient in my eyes, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this post, but we'll treat it as if they're both just 'moderators' — SV presently has 34 dedicated moderation volunteers. SV hosts ~785 million words of creative writing.
AO3 hosts ~32 billion.
These are some very rough and simplified figures, but if you completely ignore all the usual problems of scaling manpower in a business (or pseudo-business), such as (but not limited to) geometrically increasing bureaucratic complexity and administrative burden, along with all the particular issues of volunteer moderation... AO3 would still need well over one thousand volunteer moderators to be able to match SV's moderator-to-creative-wordcount ratio.
Paid moderation, of course, you can get away with less — my estimate is that you could fully moderate SV with, at best, ~8 full-time moderators, still ignoring administrative burden above the level of team leader. This leaves AO3 only needing a much more modest ~350 moderators. At the US minimum wage of ~$15k p.a. — which is, in my eyes, deeply unethical to pay moderators as full-time moderation is an intensely gruelling role with extremely high rates of PTSD and other stress-related conditions — that is approximately ~$5.25m p.a. costs on moderator wages. Their average annual budget is a bit over $500k.
So, that's obviously not on the table, and we return to volunteer staffing. Which... let's examine that scenario and the questions it leaves us with, as our conclusion.
Let's say, through some miracle, AO3 succeeds in finding those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of volunteer moderators. We'll even say none of them are malicious actors or sufficiently incompetent as to be indistinguishable, and that they manage to replicate something on the level of or superior to our moderation tooling near-instantly at no cost. We still have several questions to be answered:
I could go on for a fair bit here, but this has already stretched out to over two thousand words.
I think the people behind this movement have their hearts in the right place and the sentiment is laudable, but in practice it is simply 'won't someone think of the children' in a funny hat. It cannot be done.
Even if you could somehow meet the bare minimum thresholds, you are simply not going to manage a ruleset of sufficient clarity so as to prevent a much-worse repeat of the 2012 FF.net massacre, you are not going to be able to manage a moderation staff of that size and you are not going to be able to ensure a coherent understanding among all your users (we haven't managed that after nearly ten years and a much smaller and more engaged userbase). There's a serious number of other issues I haven't covered here as well, as this really is just an attempt at giving some insight into the sheer number of moving parts behind content moderation: the movement wants off-site content to be policed which isn't so much its own barrel of fish as it is its own barrel of Cthulhu; AO3 is far from English-only and would in actuality need moderators for almost every language it supports — and most damning of all, if Section 230 is wiped out by the Supreme Court it is not unlikely that engaging in content moderation at all could simply see AO3 shut down.
As sucky as it seems, the current status quo really is the best situation possible. Sorry about that.
