The Point At Infinity

A marvellous piece of music journalism, even for someone like me who knows almost nothing about the blues: The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie, the story of seeking out the story of two brilliant African-American women blues musicians of 1930.

A must-read; the twists and turns of this history just keep building up.

Originally posted by tammypierce at Typhoon Haiyan

So after Monday evening Colin and I came out of "Pacific Rim" at the SilverCity Gloucester (where there were possibly a dozen people for the Monday night showing), I said, "Neon Genesis Evangelion this is not, but I enjoyed myself."

"This reached entirely new levels of bad," he said.

"Yes, but it was visually BEAUTIFUL," I insisted, with a rather giddy grin.

I think it was Madeleine L'Engle who said that the good thing about getting older is that you are still all the other ages you ever were. And one of the ages I have been was a girl of seven or eight, who did not yet understand English that well, but who adored watching "Batman: The Animated Series", and whose few glimpses of "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" and the animated "X-Men" set a fire inside her and a longing for more that has not quite died in twenty years.

I didn't _care_ that the dialogue may have been awful; I didn't have the English to care. Yes, there are people who say that this is why Hollywood blockbusters with dumb scripts do so well in overseas markets. I say, "And is that a bad thing?"

The more subtle the script, the more each line of dialogue sings and packs a punch, the more inaccessible it would be to people outside the culture. Even with a good translator. A great script relies on being more than the basic words on the page by picking up the audience's absorbed cultural knowledge; someone from outside the culture would just have the words on the page, and to her some of the ways the characters behave may simply be incomprehensible. I would adore to pieces a work that referenced Shakespeare, Auden and Yeats every third line; someone who had not read Shakespeare, Auden and Yeats would find it as bewildering as you would if you read some brilliant parody of something you’ve never heard of and went, "Why is this listed as a humorous work?"

A skilled translator can do a lot, but it takes a certain kind of genius in its own way to convey genius into another language. I've done enough of this kind of stuff that I know.

What does translate is beautifully-shot SF that does not depend on a particular cultural sphere. The other cultures make their own movies, hopefully, that have the delicately subtle scripts that reference their own poetry and political slogans and advertisers and pop songs and the truth of living there (and subtitled versions of which which people in the Western English-speaking world get dragged to by their arthouse-film-fanatic friends and go "I don't get this at all, and I was bored out of my skull”). What they go to Hollywood for is to do what Hollywood does best: throw a bunch of very beautiful CGI for an easily translatable concept.

You know what else is easily translatable, on a grand scale, with dazzling visuals and music, overblown emotions, and often criticized for dumb plots? Opera. Afterwards, reading about the film on Wikipedia, I encountered the quotation from Del Toro: "Del Toro conceived the film as an operatic work: "That was one of the first words I said to the entire team at ILM. I said, 'This movie needs to be theatrical, operatic, romantic.' We used a lot of words not usually associated with high-tech blockbusters …" This. This is totally it.
( Read more... )

Originally posted by kristincashore at Can you help with an issue of disability discrimination in Massachusetts?

Passing on the signal in the hope it reaches some effect.

I'm following this from Ms_danson's journal, as I think this is a very good and worthwhile meme:

1. Tell me one thing you love about me.

2. Tell me two things you love about yourself. Make it good. No self-deprecation allowed!

3. Look through the comments ~ when you see someone you know, tell them three things you love about them.

4. Do this in your journal so I can tell you what I love about YOU - and if you've already done it, tell me so, so that I can go back and give you some love. (Optional, of course.)

Since I haven't done a Vysotsky translation in a while, and since my procrastination efforts are tireless, here, a translation of one of my favourites.  It was fun to do the wordplay on car terms (yes, I tossed a few more car model names in to help the rhyme, and the original had "spark plugs" but I think that is too awkward to be easily singable in English) and I've always found the meaning quite poignant. 

Burning tires on the tar
Without tracks or laws or bans,
Out from city nightmares, cars
Rush beyond to autobahns,
Lumbering as tanks they go,
Lincolns, Fords and Maseratis,
Benzes, Citroens, Renaults,
Elegant Mustangs and Bugattis...

Like they know sparks are worth it, this game.
Like blood feud on the cities this will be declared.
Hurry, pray the ignition won't flame,
Carburetors, and whatever else they have there...

Limousines on limousines,
You can't see the road, even:
Like two inkspots, in between
Two exquisite cars are weaving;
Like a chain is their connector
(And the weakest link will tear) ---
Accelerators and injectors
Will find nothing to do there.

As if they know --- sparks are worth it, this game ---
They'll just make it out, settling every affair!
Or perhaps he will sing her her name
On the klaxon, or whatever else they have there...

All this jam of cold machines
Their hot anger at you hiding.
Hear me, pale gray limousine,
Do not lose her from your highbeams!
Up ahead the road will split ---
Now, more risk, more faith now, go!
Or you'll miss her --- that was it ---
Oh, pale gray, you were too slow!

They had known sparks are worth it, this game ---
And now what can the signals and billboards still blare?
Or --- a load off his back maybe came,
Off his hood, or off whatever else they have there...

No, it branched, a shutting door,
Lanes apart, and you're not here.
Could it be that never more
Could split highways bring us nearer?
This one's merging, one more way!
And in seventh, on the metal,
The great limo, pale and gray,
Forgot to hit the braking pedal...

So then meeting is just empty dreams?
Or is this the blood feud on the cities declared?
And the tires went bouncing, the beams,
And the hearts... or whatever thing else they have there...

- V. Vysotsky

1968

Video, as always: Additional notes:

In my dialect of Canadian English, "ban" does not actually exactly rhyme with "autobahn" --- at least, I learned enough German that this influences my pronunciation of the latter --- but the possibility was too tempting, so I ignored this.

Vysotsky mentioned a lot of foreign car makes that at the time, most of his listeners in the Soviet Union would have never seen: Ford, Lincoln, Selena (sp? which long browsing on Wikipedia made me totally unable to identify, unless he refers to the defunct Italian manufacturer Serenissima), Mustang, Mercedes and Citroen. Ironically enough, although I live in the West, the only time I have seen a Maserati, a make I added, was in a Moscow car dealership.

Yesterday I went and saw The Avengers alone, at last, in the World Exchange theatre. The screen is fairly small as screens go, and there were maybe twenty people in the theatre (half of whom either did not know or did not care about the post-credits scenes, as they walked out before them).

Observations:

- As IMDB observes, the Cyrillic sign seen just before Black Widow's interrogation scene with the Russian mobsters has random Cyrillic characters on it.
- Black Widow herself being Russian, well --- they credit Rosetta Stone in the end credits, and that movie should be an indicator that no, Rosetta Stone will not make you a native speaker. The Russian was grammatical, for the most part --- except for the line that is something like "just another pretty face", which is word-for-word correct, but infelicitous: you don't use that expression in Russian, you skip the "another" word. Black Widow's reply, "You think that I'm pretty" uses "krasiva", the short form of the predicative adjective, which sounds unnatural. And the repeated phrase "to move tanks" - "tolkat' tanki" actually means "to push tanks" and I automatically parsed it as meaning "sell on the black market" as in "push drugs" but I never quite figured whether they meant it as tank sales or tank transportation.
- The syntax may be mostly okay, but the phonology was atrocious. Somebody should have sat them down with the IPA, rather than using Rosetta Stone. In Soviet Russia, consonants palatalize you, and it was the consonant palatalization that Black Widow and the "mobster" kept missing on. Both their accents were horrible. My brother agreed with me, saying that he was snickering in the theatre when he saw it with a friend, and people were staring at him, because that moment in the scene is not at all funny.
- What bothered me was the actor playing the mobster. Sure, you want Scarlett Johansson for the female lead. But what was wrong with getting a Russian-speaking actor to play the mobster, instead of someone who spoke in some mix of a Polish and American accent? (Jerzy Skolimowski, apparently, who is a Pole and speaks like it.) The Tom Clancy movies hire Russian actors for the minor roles: the only reason I saw "Sum of All Fears" is for the thirty seconds in which a family friend of ours plays the Russian Minister of Defense (the Russian President's wife in that movie spoke way better Russian than the President, Ciaran Hinds, did). Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy had two well-known Russian actors in the Russian roles. Why pick a Pole for a Russian job?

It made me be deeply suspicious of whether the little girl speaking Hindi actually spoke it well, but M'laah Kaur Singh does apparently speak Hindi and Punjabi, although she was born in Illinois.

After the foreign-language scenes were over, I thoroughly enjoyed the film. I liked the pacing of the dialogue, that they give each other no chance to breathe before the next line. This is the kind of movie you sit back and soak in, rather than racing ahead of the plot. I want to own it on DVD, so I could watch it several times over.

It occurred to me as I watched the battle scene that the plot of Avengers 2 could be the wives and husbands and parents and children of the slain Chitauri coming back to, ironically, avenge their slain. Although apparently they're biorobots. Still. They may be ugly, but they had lives and feelings, and being slaughtered in another universe, with no chance for the ones who loved you to even see your body again, is a very lonely death.

A friend and I were discussing writing in the first person POV, and it motivated me to try this experiment:[Poll #1838997]
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If you are conscious of what cues you used to make your decision, I appreciate knowing, but if you just went by your gut, that is fine too.

Oh, and I'll appreciate it if some of you ask your friends to do this poll as well. The more the merrier, because I am really curious how people perceive narrative voice, and whether that varies with how they read books in general. Please don't give your reasoning for your precise answers in the comments at this time, just general statements and impressions. I will reveal the answers, and the source novels, in three or four days, or when I get twenty or more responses, whichever comes later, so if you want to know the answers, come try the questions!

Given that Rachmaninov has been showing up in my musical life from several different directions lately, I've been thinking of a scene I never forgot from Natalya Sats's memoirs, "Sketches of My Life".

Natalya Sats (1903-1993) was the director of the Moscow Musical Theatre for Children (and according to the Russian Wikipedia, the world's first female opera director). She helped Sergei Prokofiev produce the famous children's musical story "Peter and the Wolf" (and apparently when the famous radio play of "Alice in Wonderland" that involved Vysotsky's songs, was discussed, she accused the studio of "corrupting children with Vysotsky's mostrous songs --- see, I can like both of them despite this).

She was the daughter of the composer Ilya Sats, who was best known for composing the children's musical "The Blue Bird," and she herself received a musical education.

From the surrounding paragraphs, this scene must have happened when she was about eight years old (translation by me; apparently an official translation of that book exists, but I haven't been able to find it; the tense shifts are in the original, and I think capture the child's perception of the event):

Once I was home all alone. I sat readng. The doorbell rang and I opened the door. There stood a tall thin man in black, clean-shaven, severe-looking.

"Is Ilya Alexandrovich home?" he asked me in a grim voice.

"He'll be coming soon," I replied, feeling that this was someone special, and I grew a little frightened.

He came in, took off his hat, then his leather gloves --- each finger separately. He put his gloves in his hat. He wiped his feet, even though it was dry outside. He took off his coat and hung it up. His movements had some kind of stony formality, and his face, too, was of stone. No, he can't be one of the actors.

The dry man in the stiff collar didn't smile to me; his mouth was tightly locked, you can't talk to him. He was very cleanly shaven; he had little hair on his had, and a very high forehead. He seemed somehow completely separate, like an island. Tilting his head, he followed me to Papa's office --- he seemed to feel cramped under the low ceiling of our apartment. I offered him a chair, then shut Papa's door and stood pondering on the other side. What if Papa won't come for a long time? What will I do with this stranger?

Our Papa always has his tie and everything all askew; the "island" has everything very straight, with many buttons on his suit jacket which are all precisely buttoned.

I stood there, not knowing what to do. And then suddenly from Papa's office I heard an entire orchestra, a much bigger one than the one I had heard under the stage of the Theatre of the Arts. How astounding! Papa's old upright piano couldn't possibly sound like that!

The sounds insistently demanded some truth; they would unite in the most powerful chords I have ever heard. They raced apart and merged back together with unearthly speed. These sounds, like some unknown current, snatched me up and carried me away --- nothing of the mundane usual was left around me, just those sounds around me and in me... Was this tall man a wizard?! Did he have twenty fingers?

We were not allowed to open the door when there was music playing. Respect for the arts, for musicians, was instilled in us almost from birth. But on that forever unforgettable day, when I suddenly felt so wonderful and so frightened, I slightly opened the door and saw the stranger sitting at Papa's piano, playing. There he was, big, straight, stony-faced, only his fingers moving; his hands were huge, soft, strong, he orders them, and they...they sing in the sweetest voices, they light up the sun, they destroy foes... They could do anything, these wonder-working hands! It's interesting that he is somehow grayish-yellow, dry, all made of corners, and his hands are young, soft, completely different from the rest of him. Oh! He is going from middle C to the A of the second octave above it --- almost two octaves with one hand!

He is playing something like a polka. My feet start dancing despite me, and my mouth is smiling. How hard it is to stand by the crack of the door while this polka is playing! But it gets more amazing the further it goes: it is as if a hot wave floods everything inside you, and you feel like it's now a holiday, to everyone's joy.

Now he is playing something else: one huge someone and many little ones; a giant and some amazingly quick little elves! The Wolf and many Red Riding Hoods? They are so quick that one can't tell at all who will win.

How, how could ten simple fingers play like that! What a miracle, what marvellous luck that must be!

Perhaps he is just pretending to be so wooden, so that no one could tell from his face how good he is, but when he is playing, he can't hide that...

A bell rang in the front hall. It was Papa. Without saying a word, he quickly took off his coat, buttoned up all the buttons of his suit jacket, quickly fixed his tie, even smoothed his moustache, and went into his office. Ours was a one-story home, a "breeze-through", Mama called it; of course, Papa had heard that music even outside, and had understood who had come.

The amazing man greeted Papa, polite and friendly, and said, "I really like your polka from "A Man's Life," while the music to "The Blue Bird" is simply charming."

Such a man is saying that to my Papa? I am filled with pride.

But why did they shut the door? And the most important thing in the world right now was that the "amazing one" play again. No, he keeps on talking, and not playing. His voice is gray, only on one or two notes, even when he is saying nice things.

I was shocked how one could play at times so softly and tenderly, at times so forcefully, like great bells. My playing was always somehow in the middle: a little louder, a little softer, well, just ordinary. Now Papa's music is playing in Papa's office, and I...for the first time in my life I am mad at Papa! I so want the other one, the big one, to play again.

About twenty minutes later the stranger left --- he must have valued his time --- but what a completely new world had opened to me!

I had thought that my Papa plays the piano better than anyone --- because I hadn't heard anyone except him! But now...! How could I have possibly imagined that a musician's fingers could obey his will so well, could run about so, could sing like the sweetest of singers, could sound like a hurricane, a storm, a war... How did he make our little old upright piano say so much, say something so important that it couldn't even be said with words!...

I sat by Papa. He was in a good mood.

"Papa, you won't be angry? He plays the piano better, so much better, than you. Why is that, Papa?"

Papa answered warmly, without the slightest hint of being insulted, "Because he is Rachmaninov. Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninov. He is a wonderful composer, but he is also a great pianist, a genius at the piano. I play the piano to tell people what I have to tell them, to help them understand the play, the show. I play to feel my music better. But Sergei Vasilyevich has unlimited command of the piano. Why, did he play long without me?"

- Natalya Sats, Sketches of My Life, 1985.

I have gone reading about musical settings to Russian poetry, and found myself toying with how I would translate these two poems by Nikolai Gumilev (founder of the Russian Guild of Poets and the Acmeist movement in poetry, and one-time husband of Anna Akhmatova and father of her son).

The first one was called by the critic where I sourced it "key to all of Gumilev's poetry", advice from an experienced poet to a young one in the performing arts. And it casts a chilling irony when one knows that Gumilev was himself shot by the secret police in 1921 for alleged involvement with a conspiracy after an informant named him.

(I am not completely pleased with my translation, as it has too many consonant clusters to be easily singable, although Gumilev did not write it as a song lyric. It proved surprisingly difficult for so many easy rhymes --- but the Acmeist motto was "All the right words in the right order" so I've got to try to keep the right words as much as possible.)

THE MAGIC FIDDLE
(Link has music by V. Dashkevich, called 'the Mozart of Soviet cinematography', 
performed by Elena Kamburova)

My dear boy, you are so happy, ever merry, bright and smiling,
Do not ask for this sweet fortune that has poisoned worlds away.
You don't know, you don't know, you don't know what is this violin,
What dark horrors lie in store for one who dares begin to play!

If a player's hands commanding take the violin and bow,
Peaceful light is gone forever from the eyes that make that choice.
Rabid wolf packs wander, hungry, on the roads where fiddlers go.
Fiends and demons love to listen to the fiddle's regal voice. 

Ever, ever must these strings go on and sing and cry and wail,
And the maddened bow must leap and dance all through the nights and days,
Under sun and under snow, under blizzard, under gale,
Even when the west is burning, even when the east's ablaze.

You will tire, you will slow, you will stop for just one note,
And the power will be gone from you to breathe or make a sound,
And the wolves in rabid bloodlust will at once lunge at your throat,
And their claws will crush your ribcage as their teeth will drag you down. 

Then you'll know the cruel mockery of all that sang around,
And your eyes will see the over-late but overwhelming fear,
And the mournful cold will wind around your body like a shroud,
And your friends will bow their heads then, and your bride will burst in tears.

Go on, boy! You will not find either joy or treasure here! 
But I see that you are laughing, there are sunbeams from your eyes.
Here, take the magic fiddle, face the monsters others fear,
And go die a death of glory, the dread death that fiddlers die! 

Nikolai Gumilev (1886-1921), 1910

Gumilev was fascinated by Africa, and had visited it four times, but this poem, one of his most famous, is not about Africa, not really.

THE GIRAFFE
(Link has music written and performed by Elena Vaenga.)

Today I can tell that your gaze is especially sad
And your arms are especially thin as they clasp round your knee.
Listen, I'll tell you how far, far away, on the shores of Lake Chad,
An exquisite giraffe wanders free.

He has been created so languid and graceful and slim
With dapples in magical patterns adorning his hide,
So only the moon in her beauty compares with him
As she shimmers and breaks on the crystal lake's rippling tide.

He looks like the many-hued sails of a ship from afar.
He floats in his gallop as birds do in joy of their flight.
I know that the earth sees much wonder when at the first star
He hides in a cavern of marble to wait out the night.

I can tell of mysterious lands and of laughter and bliss,
Of the maid black but comely, of the passioned young chief on the plain...
But you, for too long you've inhaled the weight of the mist,
You do not believe there is anything other than rain. 

And how can I tell you of the scent of the grasses that play
Beneath slender palms, and how tropical gardens there lie...
You're crying? Just listen... on the shores of Lake Chad, far away,
An exquisite giraffe wanders by.

Nikolai Gumilev, 1908