CHECK IN: DAY 24

[igenlode]

It's Christmas Eve, and the retail trade has been going like the clappers all day.
How goes the creative work (if at all?)

Comments

[igenlode]

I sat down to try to draw up a complete parallel line-by line prose translation of the ballad I had been working on (with hindsight I find it psychologically interesting that I set out to do this *after* composing the poetic translation directly from the original, instead of adopting the procedure of writing myself a plaintext translation into English and then basing my own poem on that...)
And unfortunately I realised in the process, when actually double-checking meanings, that I had significantly mis-translated the beginning of one of the verses due to getting the wrong verb; I had read вскрыл as the more-or-less homonym вскрил (which doesn't exist, but if it did would come from the word meaning 'to cry out' rather than 'to open').

So instead of crying out and then standing frozen in shock, the narrator should actually have opened the letter and stood frozen in shock at what he read there -- which explains the rather abrupt narrative jump at that point. I think I had assumed the opening of the letter, once found, must have been taken for granted!

As a result, instead of doing the various overdue Christmas preparations with which I should have been occupied, or even watching Christmas TV, I have been trying to patch up my poetry :-p
One should always have a proper sense of what is *really* important in the world...

[winterfirelight]

This sounds super interesting! Can I ask what ballad you're working with? Originally Russian, it seems?

Enjoy the work! I, for one, think it's entirely reasonable to celebrate the holiday by way of translation and poetry. Whatever brings joy to the season :)

[igenlode]

It's a song called (for reasons that escape me, which is why I have simply renamed it to what I think it *would* have been called if it had been an English nautical ballad!) Рассказ подвыпившего бомбардира, which translates, as far as I can make it out, as "The Lay of the Tipsy Gunner". And the lyric was apparently written by someone who was a sailor himself rather than a professional song-writer, and who died young; so far as I can make out from what is said in a concert where Boyarsky introduces his performance, Mikhail Boyarsky came across the song on a cassette, liked it, and recorded it himself for one of his albums with minimal changes to the original.

YouTube suggested it to me as something I might like -- as it happened, I did (which is more than I can say for the Boyarsky song from 1979 that it just recommended to me :-p), not least because I liked the Howard Pyle-style pirate images that had been used to illustrate that particular fanvid! The pictures and those scraps of the lyrics that I could make out intrigued me enough to get me to locate a transcript of the song on the Internet, and since there were not any English translations I had to sit down and work out the story for myself. (Words like "sword" and "fight", "ship" and "sailor" were already in my vocabulary; words like "rigging" and "cabin boy" not so much...)

And for some reason that I no longer recall, I took it into my head to write a full verse translation. I think it was so that I could share the song with a friend from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" fandom to whom I hope it might appeal ;-)

So here it now is, complete with opening instead of outcry -- and at the waste of about four hours on Christmas Eve that are now going to be repaid with yet another chronically brief sleep period :-P

https://igenlode.dreamwidth.org/431991.html

[winterfirelight]

I'm off work for a bit, and dedicating a not insignificant portion of my time towards trying to finish off the longfic I've been working on for far too long. I'm so close! And yet so far... I have about 9 and a half chapters left according to my outline, though I suspect some of those will end up getting split into multiple chapters and it'll end up closer to 15 or so.

A nice way to spend Christmas, regardless. I'll probably fall a little short of my goal to finish the work before the new year, but it'll be close enough that I think I can manage to be satisfied with myself even so. I'm grateful that the holidays can actually be a period of rest and recuperation for me, and once this work is done, it'll free up a good amount of time for other endeavors, creative or otherwise.

[igenlode]

I'm so close!

Hurrah!

And yet so far... I have about 9 and a half
chapters left according to my outline

If that's for the hundred-and-nine-chapter fic on AO3, then it really is close :-)

(Also deeply impressive; my idea of 'long' is anything over 60,000 words, or to be honest anything over 20,000 words...)