mozaikmage: (Default)
2023-02-20 10:42 am
Entry tags:

After the red-yellow days winter will begin and end

Wow I have not posted here in an actual year! But Twitter is a sinking ship so. Here I am again.

I was driving home from work a few days ago (or rather I was driving to the grocery store to pick up bread after work on my mom’s request) and Red-Yellow Days by Kino came on ytmusic shuffle. As I was listening I remembered the phrase “горе ты моё от ума” always sounded like “горе ты моё туман ” to me, which made roughly as much sense in context as the actual phrase. And then I thought, well, what does горе от ума mean anyway?

Instinctively, I think of it as the inverse of “ignorance is bliss”. So, “the misery of knowledge”?

I was thinking about this and then when I pulled into the parking lot I googled it and learned the phrase was made up for the title of a very old play and then became a popular phrase and not the other way around. It’s usually translated to English as “woe from wit” or “wit’s end”.

So the Kino line as I misheard it would’ve been something like “misery of mine, dear fog”, and correctly, “my dearest woe from wit”?

The reason there’s a dozen English translations for every popular Kino song is because Tsoi’s lyrics are SO HARD to translate! Every word every line has multiple layers of meaning, complicated structures that seem simple on the surface but never have direct English equivalents and never sound good translated directly!
Like a few lines later in the same song: А мне приснилось миром правит мечта.

Contextually, the last word should be “a dream” because мечта is closer to that than the directed specificity of “a wish” BUT in English “dream” as in “what you have when you sleep” and “dream” as in “abstract desire” are THE SAME WORD so while the most accurate translation of this sentence would be “And I had a dream the world was ruled by a dream” THAT SOUNDS WEIRD AND CONFUSING!

So I had a dream the world was ruled by a wish.

Горе ты моё от ума is untranslatable because it combines two set phrases, горе ты моё and горе от ума, and English has direct equivalents for neither of them. The full effect is lost, no matter how you localize it.

This doesn’t make English inherently more limited than Russian, though. There’s plenty of stuff that’s hard to translate in the other direction as well, plenty of concepts and phrases that don’t have direct Russian equivalents as well. I was frustrated English didn’t have distinct words for the two senses of dreams, but writers in English can lean into that ambiguity to add layers of meaning and power to their own lyrics, like in the song Dreams by the Cranberries where it’s ambiguous what kind of dreams are never what they seem.

It’s interesting to me how much of a language is now is shaped by things people happened to think of centuries ago.



mozaikmage: (Default)
2022-01-13 08:26 pm

I translated some fanfics!

 I really enjoy translation because I like being able to share things I love with my friends, and it's a way to be fannish and creative without expending as much energy as writing a whole new fic from scratch. And it makes the original authors happy to see their work shared with a new, appreciative audience. Today I'm going to tell you about how I just finished translating two short (ok midlength) fics by Basket_of_Fake_Fruit from Russian to English!

A few years ago my Russian-speaking internet friend Neyan linked me to this Russian Daishou/Yaku fic in which they get scammed out of an apartment and live in the park for a month. This fic changed my life and consumed my waking days until I couldn't take it anymore and made an account on the extremely cursed Russian fanfiction site Ficbook to DM the original author asking for permission to translate the fic to English, because I loved it so much I had to share it with my friends.
After reading that fic I went through OP's account and found another fic they wrote that now lives in my head rent-free forever, about Kenma and Hinata dragging Kuroo and Kageyama around Japan while being annoyingly in love.
There was also a terudai lifeguard AU fic I enjoyed reading but did not remember with such clarity as Daishou and Yaku camping or Kuroo and Kageyama suffering.
The author's writing style is pretty different from my own, so I tried to stick as closely to the original as I could so I didn't color over the lines with my own writing style, you know?
Housing Problem was kind of difficult to translate in parts because there were a few idioms referenced I couldn't figure out how to localize, and also I generally have issues with grammar and phrasing I need my beloved beta reader to catch for me. The camping equipment terminology was actually really easy for me though, because my Russian-speaking family goes camping in the English-speaking country we live in often and uses both Russian and English to refer to the same camping items. There are two specific haiku quoted in the fic that I had to look up in 3 languages to make sure I was referencing the right poems, but I messaged the author about them and they gave me the full poems to help ease my search.
Flora and Fauna went over much more easily because it was shorter and had less idioms and specific cultural references (although I did hesitate about updating a reference to a girly advice magazine to r/relationships), but there were a few lines where I wasn't quite sure who or what was being referred to in a long and complicated sentence. I finished writing the actual text in just a few days though, and my friends went over it for spelling and grammar checks a few days later. I really wanted to make the thousand sakuras along the river into a senbonzakura featuring hatsune miku reference but I bravely resisted.
I really enjoyed reading these in the original and I hope you enjoy reading them in my translation as well.

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