Check In: Day 28

[fleetsparrow]

Hello!  Sorry for missing yesterday's check in.  For a grand total of four (4) people (plus one dog), Thanksgiving gathering ran much longer than anticipated.

Poll #33889

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 3

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What are your weekend writing plans?

View Answers

Writing!
2 (66.7%)

Reading!
1 (33.3%)

Revising!
1 (33.3%)

Outlining!
2 (66.7%)

Taking a break!
0 (0.0%)

I, uh, also did not come prepared with a new word for the day.

BUT I do have news that the 12th Edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has been published!  So many new words!

Comments

[igenlode]

I'd forgotten about that American Thanksgiving business :-P

But thanks to lot of cycling (which left me physically exhausted, but stimulated my poetry muscles) I managed to get a new verse done, *and*, to my surprise, I've pretty much cracked my first chorus in the course of this morning, despite the fact that it requires the lines to rhyme internally (which means I need six rhymes instead of four). It helps that the scansion of the original appears to be distinctly irregular, so I don't have to be quite so scrupulous in my stress placement... it doesn't help that the original uses a completely untranslatable metaphor ('his song softens the seams of our hearts like the seams of the ship' -- do that in English and your ship will fall apart!)

But Nature will out, as it happens, one way or another--
Our cabin-boy jumped ship and ran, for he'd fallen in love.
So scarcely an hour before leaving we took on another,
Then sailed off on duty: "Fair winds and God with us above!"

(Chorus)
He was slender as a reed -- though not tall, his voice indeed
Could tug your heart with song, the way we hauled the braces,
Though he might not know the ropes, he had a sailor's dreams and hopes,
So we helped him learn the ropes, their names and places.

Not sure about that last line; the original likewise repeats 'takkelazh' (tackle, rigging), but it does it in the oblique case and at the other end of the line, so the effect is different :-(

[fleetsparrow]

Awesome progress!

Oh gosh, the eternal struggle with "I've used this word 4 times in the same paragraph" hits much harder in poetry/lyrics, for sure! And yet, sometimes, it just has to be. v__v

[igenlode]

And so the CREW/ helped him to MASter /ropes and SPAces -- that's actually a better fit with the way the (highly irregular) melody is phrased at that point, and a closer translation (original: "and the crew/helped him/with the rigging"). What is left out altogether is the "he had the soul of a sailor and that made him one of us" at the end of the previous line, which was why I was inserting a 'we' in the place of 'crew', but it's a better translation of the last line on its own.